Timeless (minor spoilers for season 2 finale)
(I’ll keep plot details as vague as possible but if you watch this show and don’t want to see a *very* minor spoiler regarding the season 2 finale, which I think aired a few weeks ago, don’t read further than this sentence.) In the episode “Chinatown” of the NBC time-travel series “Timeless”, one of the plot elements was that a character sent a message forward in time by writing a message “in Klingon” that ended up in a photograph in a history book. The message was a set of longitude/latitude coordinates and the warning “don’t come”. I paused the episode while the photograph was displayed to inspect the message more closely. I was hoping that it would say something like “HIghoSQo'”, but instead it said (in pIqaD) “*{Do not chome}”. The coordinates were also in pIqaD, a string of numbers that worked out to a location in the middle of the San Francisco Peninsula, which was consistent with the plot. Out of universe, the obvious explanation is that somebody on the production staff downloaded a non-Unicode pIqaD font and typed out the coordinates and “do not come” in xifan hol. But since I like making up in-universe explanations for things, I’m just going to say that the character who wrote the Klingon message knew pIqaD but was shaky on vocabulary, and without access to TKD, which wouldn’t be written for another 100+ years, did the next best thing and spelled out a message in English using pIqaD. Either that, or the message was supposed to be something like {Do not chom'e'} (“A bartender is never velocity”, though grammatically that should probably be {not Do ghaH chom'e'}, and even then it doesn’t make sense…) and the fact that it looked like “Do not come” was just a coincidence. Anyway, TL;DR: a nice little “Klingon” surprise; not perfect, but I appreciated the effort, and it was way better than “Kuntar pateeky maya. Al fook soo.”
Am 01.06.2018 um 01:59 schrieb Daniel Dadap:
In the episode “Chinatown” of the NBC time-travel series “Timeless”, one of the plot elements was that a character sent a message forward in time by writing a message “in Klingon” that ended up in a photograph in a history book. The message was a set of longitude/latitude coordinates and the warning “don’t come”.
Details and screenshots can be found on the page of the Klingon Language Wiki: http://www.klingonwiki.net/En/Timeless
Out of universe, the obvious explanation is
I have not seen that episode, so my question was: how do they explain it? Do they say "this IS klingon and means do not come" or do they say "It's written with klingon letters and says so" or what?
character who wrote the Klingon message knew pIqaD but was shaky on vocabulary, and without access to TKD, which wouldn’t be written for another 100+ years, did the next best thing and spelled out a message in English using pIqaD.
Well, in universe it would still make sense to do it that way. I've regulalry seen people using pIqaD as a "secret font" just writing in english using the letters.
it was way better than “Kuntar pateeky maya. Al fook soo.”
For anyone interested, this is from the movie "Garden State", spoken by Jim Parsons who at that time certainly did not know he would ever speak Klingon again. :-) See http://www.klingonwiki.net/En/GardenState -- Lieven L. Litaer aka the "Klingon Teacher from Germany" http://www.klingonisch.de http://www.klingonwiki.net/En/KlingonOnTV
Daniel Dadap:
it was way better than “Kuntar pateeky maya. Al fook soo.”
Lieven:
For anyone interested, this is from the movie "Garden State", spoken by Jim Parsons who at that time certainly did not know he would ever speak Klingon again. :-)
As Jim Parsons himself later said in The Big Bang Theory episode "The Creepy Candy Coating Corollary" (at Wil Wheaton!): {bortaS bIr jablu'DI' reH QaQqu' nay'}.
Searching the phrase on Google found an article (author unknown) from a conlang list: http://skerre.conlang.org/conlangs/klingongardenstate.html --Voragh
On Jun 1, 2018, at 00:54, Lieven L. Litaer <levinius@gmx.de> wrote:
Am 01.06.2018 um 01:59 schrieb Daniel Dadap: In the episode “Chinatown” of the NBC time-travel series “Timeless”, one of the plot elements was that a character sent a message forward in time by writing a message “in Klingon” that ended up in a photograph in a history book. The message was a set of longitude/latitude coordinates and the warning “don’t come”.
Details and screenshots can be found on the page of the Klingon Language Wiki: http://www.klingonwiki.net/En/Timeless
Ah, of course it is. Sorry for not checking first! I’m not on Twitter so I hadn’t known that Shatner commented on it. I hadn’t seen it discussed here so I figured I’d mention it in case anybody found it interesting.
Out of universe, the obvious explanation is
I have not seen that episode, so my question was: how do they explain it? Do they say "this IS klingon and means do not come" or do they say "It's written with klingon letters and says so" or what?
It’s vague enough that the distinction between Klingon letters and the Klingon language isn’t made, which seems appropriate for the casual level of the conversation that took place. They even only talk about “reading” Klingon and not “speaking” Klingon. Connor: Hey wait, is that… That’s not Chinese, is it? Lucy: No, that’s not Chinese. Rufus: It’s Klingon. She’s sending us a message in Klingon! Lucy: You read Klingon? [ Rufus stares at Lucy ] Lucy: Why am I asking that? Of course you read Klingon. Rufus: It’s a series of numbers. GPS coordinates. She must be trying to tell us where the Lifeboat is. Lucy: Do you think she left it somewhere for us to find 130 years later? Rufus: Wait, it also says something else. It says… “Don’t come”. Lucy: Well, the hell with that! Later in the episode, when Jiya admonishes Rufus for ignoring her warning, she also paraphrases what was actually written as “don’t come”. So I’m guessing out of universe that the intention was for the message to say “don’t come” rather than “do not come”, but maybe they liked the way “do not come” looked better graphically. *{Don't chome} (assuming the font maps “'” to {qaghwI'} instead of or in addition to “z”) is even less plausible Klingon than *{Do not chome}. (BTW, another amusing translation attempt for *{Do not chome} is to add another letter to make the last word {chomej}: “velocity, you never leave me”. Which, while not an imperative, is almost the opposite of “Do not come”.)
character who wrote the Klingon message knew pIqaD but was shaky on vocabulary, and without access to TKD, which wouldn’t be written for another 100+ years, did the next best thing and spelled out a message in English using pIqaD.
Well, in universe it would still make sense to do it that way. I've regulalry seen people using pIqaD as a "secret font" just writing in english using the letters.
Yeah, in universe it would make sense that Rufus and Jiya may have used pIqaD as a “secret font” in this way. Even in Star Trek contexts I’ve seen this. In the “Federation: The first 150 years” books there’s a number of documents in “Klingon” that are just English written in pIqaD. Which gives you fun artifacts like “jonatHan archHer”
it was way better than “Kuntar pateeky maya. Al fook soo.”
For anyone interested, this is from the movie "Garden State", spoken by Jim Parsons who at that time certainly did not know he would ever speak Klingon again. :-)
The word “again” implies that Klingon was spoken in that movie to begin with. }}}:-)
See http://www.klingonwiki.net/En/GardenState
-- Lieven L. Litaer aka the "Klingon Teacher from Germany" http://www.klingonisch.de http://www.klingonwiki.net/En/KlingonOnTV _______________________________________________ tlhIngan-Hol mailing list tlhIngan-Hol@lists.kli.org http://lists.kli.org/listinfo.cgi/tlhingan-hol-kli.org
Am 01.06.2018 um 16:03 schrieb Daniel Dadap:
I hadn’t known that Shatner commented on it. I hadn’t seen it discussed here so I figured I’d mention it in case anybody found it interesting.
That's true, and it's good you did. Over the past years, people have got used to share information on social networks, and forget to do it on the mailing list.
Connor: Hey wait, is that… That’s not Chinese, is it?
Thanks for the transcript, I'll add it to the page when I get time.
For anyone interested, this is from the movie "Garden State", spoken by Jim Parsons who at that time certainly did not know he would ever speak Klingon again. :-)
The word “again” implies that Klingon was spoken in that movie to begin with. }}}:-)
Well, WE know that it was fake Klingon, but it seems like the people in movie thought it was correct Klingon. So I should rephrase: "...spoken by Jim Parsons who at that time certainly did not know he would ever speak REAL Klingon." -- Lieven L. Litaer aka the "Klingon Teacher from Germany" http://www.klingonisch.de http://www.klingonwiki.net/En/StarTrekDiscovery
participants (3)
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Daniel Dadap -
Lieven L. Litaer -
Steven Boozer