On Jul 23, 2019, at 06:16, De'vID <de.vid.jonpin@gmail.com> wrote:
--- begin quote --- The Big Bang -- meaning the start of the universe -- is, as you once hypothesized, {qa'vam}, the word used by Klingons for the Genesis device. {qa'vam} is perhaps best defined as "origin of everything" or "start of it all" or the like. Maltz said you could say {qa'vam nger} "Big Bang Theory," but he thought that was weird -- the start of it all isn't a theory, he said -- it's just the start of it all. If one thinks the start of it all was a big explosion and that's a theory, then {qa'vam nger} could mean "the theory of how everything began," but the Klingon phrase doesn't contain the notion of explosion. For the TV Show -- whether to translate it or use the English -- that's up to you. --- end quote ---
Thanks, that’s a more detailed version of that quote than I think I have seen previously. I’ve seen a quote along the lines of Maltz thinking the phrase sounded weird because “it’s not a theory”, which without further context might seem to support {nger} fitting with the colloquial usage of “theory” if one fills in the blanks with “[the big bang] isn’t a theory[; it’s accepted as a fact]”, but with the full quote it seems more like this was a commentary on {qa'vam} than it was on {nger}; i.e., {qa'vam} refers to the origin of everything regardless of the specifics of how it happened, while the Big Bang Theory is a theory (in the scientific sense of the word) regarding those specifics.