From: tlhIngan-Hol <tlhingan-hol-bounces@lists.kli.org> on behalf of nIqolay Q <niqolay0@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, July 19, 2017 11:39 AM
To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Subject: Re: [tlhIngan Hol] With regards to invectives
 


On Wed, Jul 19, 2017 at 12:17 PM, Steven Boozer <sboozer@uchicago.edu> wrote:

And finally in the TNG episode "The Mind's Eye" when Picard failed to convince Governor Vagh that the Federation wasn't supplying weapons to Kriosian rebels, Vagh shouted: "You speak the lies of a *tah-keck*!"  Picard calmly leaned forward and replied, "*Qu'vatlh guy'cha b'aka!*"  Vagh complimented him: "You swear well, Picard. You must have Klingon blood in your veins."  (Spellings from the closed captions).

 

Obviously the writers just strung some words together, but Vagh accepted it.   


From: nIqolay Q <niqolay0@gmail.com>
> Did the TV show lines come before or after their appearance in TKD? I thought a
> lot of Klingon curses started out as TV-Hol that got retconned into being real words.

First of all, I felt that Vagh was patronizing him.  Entertained by his knowledge and his attempt, but silently laughing at the failure of the attempt.  He decided it was enough to count as a pass on his little test and so played along rather than keep it going by pointing out how bad it actually was.

Second, the episode aired in May 1991 (meaning it may have actually been filmed in 1990) and the Addendum of TKD came out in January 1992.  They definitely did not look the words up in the dictionary and it is possible that they made up the words and Okrand would then have taken the words from the episode.  However, I have a suspicion that they asked Okrand for some curse words, he wrote up a whole list for them, and then he added them into the addendum he was already working on.

Jeremy