When the first edition of the paq'batlh came out, two points would often come up when something from it was cited as evidence for or against a particular opinion. The first was that it had questionable "canon" status because it wasn't "purely" from Dr. Okrand, due to lines having been changed on the advice of KLI members. The second was that it was poetry (being something like the text of an opera) and not prose, and it wasn't always clear whether a grammatical construct or particular phrasing was standard or poetic. I think neither has really changed with the 2ed. I know that the original edition of the paq'batlh was revised during two qep'a' based on comments from members of the KLI. I don't know whether the contribution was evenly distributed or heavily weighted towards one or a few people. (Maybe someone who took part can comment on this.) But for the 2nd edition, I have definitely had much more input into the Klingon text than anyone other than Dr. Okrand. Maybe in some people's minds that makes its "canon" status more questionable. What I would say in defense of the "canonicity" position is that Dr. Okrand certainly had editors for his other books and publications, and we don't know what inputs they had which resulted in changes to the Klingon text. For the movies, the editors even changed the meanings of lines he'd already written, forcing him to retroactively reinterpret them. In all of his previous projects, he was not composing his own Klingon sentences freely, but translating ideas first written by other people, to various degrees, and the paq'batlh is no exception. AFAIK, these writers and editors didn't know Klingon, and thus couldn't catch errors or point out things which might contradict (or at least raise questions about) things Dr. Okrand had previously written (which is how these issues survived until the paq'batlh). He'd worked with a Klingonist collaborator on Talk Now! Klingon, and some of his pronouncements in HolQeD or the qepHom'a' booklets are the results of interviews or exchanges with Klingonists. All of these things are normally considered "canon", and I think it's a fair argument that the paq'batlh 2ed is no less so canonical by the same criteria. It's also likely to be the longest Klingon text produced by him that we're ever going to get. But not everything in "canon" is necessarily an example of correct normal prose. There are, for example, "canon errors", like {nuqDaq So'taH yaS}. That brings us to the prose vs. poetry question. In-universe, as explained in the introduction, the paq'batlh was translated into modern Klingon from textual fragments in various stages of the Klingon language, and it is related to the libretto of the Klingon opera {'u'}. So it largely follows the rules of standard Klingon in the sense of Dr. Okrand's description of {ta' Hol} in his various works, but the fact that it is an opera also means that some rules are broken. For example, {jach} would normally be used with {jatlh}, like {jach veqlargh jatlh <blah>}. But there are three places where the Master of the Scream (MOS) narrates that someone shouts to Kortar to alert him that someone is bound for the Underworld, and the shouted words by that someone immediately follow (without {jatlh}). In addition, there's a chapter that ends with {jach qeylIS}, and the next chapter is just the words shouted by Kahless at Molor, followed by Molor's shouted reply. {jatlh} was deemed unnecessary in these cases because it's just the format of this particular operatic text. I hope it's mostly obvious when something is standard Klingon and when the rules are bent due to poetry, but it may sometimes be ambiguous. I think there's a mistake that many people often make when looking at "canon", and that is to consider every sentence written by Dr. Okrand (excepting known errors) as if it were an example of grammatical, normal, standard prose that one would find in a textbook, for the purpose of illustrating some point of grammar. What working with Dr. Okrand to edit the paq'batlh has clarified for me is that he plays two very different roles. Obviously, the first is that he's the creator of the Klingon language. But equally, he's also a user of the Klingon language, and it's important to keep that distinction in mind when evaluating his Klingon translations. Quite often, Dr. Okrand would agree that there are multiple ways of expressing something, but that he preferred one option over the others. Frequently, that preference was constrained by a very specific context, such as the number of syllables, or having to roughly match up with the English text, or alluding to another passage in the text. I don't think he intends that everyone should have the same preferences he does, and in particular I don't think he intends to imply that his preference in this one context would carry over to other contexts. But when people read the paq'batlh and they see how he's translated something, they might make the mistake of thinking that that's the "one true way" of expressing that idea. But in translating the paq'batlh, he isn't acting in the role of creator but of user. He may be a particularly privileged user in the sense that he can create new grammar and declare apparent errors to be actually correct, but he's still a user of the language, and in translating the paq'batlh he was subject to (almost) the same constraints as anyone else would be in that position. So I think that one has to be very careful in treating the paq'batlh as canon in that being a canonical text doesn't mean that everything in it is the only way to express something, or even the right way to do so in another context. I realise that viewing the paq'batlh in this way makes it less useful in settling debates or deriving grammatical rules, but the text is meant to be read and enjoyed as an epic story, and not as a guide to grammar. But I understand the motivation to treat it as one, given our paucity of Klingon sentences composed by Dr. Okrand. p.s. I know a lot of people will want to ask him for clarifications. While working with him, he acknowledged that he's sometimes contradicted himself and doesn't remember everything that he's ever written about a subject. In the job of editor, I basically researched and presented him with all of the relevant material I could find on a topic before asking him for clarifications, and that really allowed him to clarify and reconcile different things he's said written at different time (as I hope was evident in my previous posts about verbs of speech, {meQ}, {tuQmoH}, {Hoch}/{ngIq}, {-lu'}, and so on). If anyone wants him to clarify anything, it would be really helpful if you do the background research for him first. -- De'vID