Scotty question

Ah ha! See, Set Harth, see? Abrams usurpers! And Kripke would still say "Kwonos," as the amateur linguistic spelling of "Qo'nos" would suggest to any normal person (defined as one who would not hand in a letter of resignation using Klingon glyphs or have other such tendencies).

 

You sound like Rush Limbaugh. Emphasis mine.

 

After going to my first Star Trek convention in the 90's, I felt tha tI had to walk away with some kind of souvenir. Money was tight, and I'm not much for spending it on stuff just for the sake of it, I really wanted to get something from the convention. I wound up buying the audio tape for the Klingon language, narrated by Mark Okrand and Michael Dorn. Okrand put a lot of thought into this, in terms how the words are pronounced. He warned that learning how to speak the language would cause a lot of spit to fly, and the tongue would flap, and a lot of sounds would be very guttural in nature. Sounds primitive, but he was remarkable consistent of these types of sounds, and it was remarkably creative.

I love that strange spelling of "Klingon" for this reason. Trying to say a "tl" sound, by putting the tongue on the roof of the mouth, actually produces the tongue flutter and a bit of spit, and, oddly enough, sounds a bit like a "k" sound, but not exactly. It's extremely unique, and convincing as a new language, and that spelling is, in my opinion, really neat.

 

Not all, but some of the distinct sounds of the language can also be found in Hebrew - like the gutteral kh sound at the beginning of Qo'nos.

And I'm not sure why there is a "realism" issue with Scotty or humans in general calling difficult-to-pronounce with the clearly-borrowed-from-greek name Kronos, anymore than there is with English speakers calling Moskva "Moscow". You don't really think Vulcans named their world after one of our deities, do you? I'm sure the name in their tongue is something hard to pronounce for humans, too.

 

The media can't seem to agree on even the pronunciation of Moscow. It's changed as much as the spelling of Muammar Gaddafi over the past few decades. At least Cher has settled on one name and sticks with it. Prince, well, try to pronounce that symbol he used for a while. People are so fickle.

 

Kinda off-topic, but FYI: The reason Prince "changed his name to a symbol" was that when he left Warner Bros, they wouldn't let him perform under the name Prince - said they owned the rights to it, and apparently this held up, somehow, for a while. Even though his birth name is Prince Rogers, Jr. Couldn't use his own bloody name!

The point of the symbol was that people wouldn't know how to pronounce it, so he thought that people would just keep calling him Prince, and even the first track off of the first album he released after leaving WB was named "My Name Is Prince..." - because he *could* use the *word* in a song, you see.

What he didn't count on was radio stations enjoying mocking the whole thing and making up and using the TAFKAP ("The Artist Formerly Known As Prince") moniker, and I think it annoyed him, because a while after the change but before he could actually start calling himself Prince again, he was asked in an interview how to pronounce the symbol (he had been asked before with no direct answer), and he said it was "Christopher".

 

I prefer "the Stale Prince".

 

Kronos is linguistically correct as an English transliteration of Qo'noS. No coups needed!