I'd be happier if they were explained as related words in different Klingon languages, like how "Earth" in English equals "Erde" in German, "Aarde" in Dutch, "Jorda" in Norwegian, etc. I am so sick of entire alien species being assumed to have spoken only one language throughout their entire history.
I largely agree, and think that in franchises with a large number of creators, there may sometimes be a bit too big a tendency towards fusioning rather than allowing for greater diversity (due to humans being compulsive pattern-seekers).
That being said, I do think one can make a decent case as to why compound words with great cultural importance might be preserved with higher fidelity than their constituent words.
I'm struggling to come up with a good example, but something along the lines of how the Old Norse
valkyrja has been preserved quite well in many languages (English
valkyrie, Swedish
valkyria, German
Walküre) even as the word
walr ("the fallen in battle") appears to have fallen out of use completely and the word
kjósa ("choose", of which
kyrja ("chooser") is apparently the nomen agentis) has morphed into the Swedish
tjusa ("charm, seduce") and has cognates in the English
choose and (old-fashioned) German
kiesen. Of course, there are probably equally many or more counterexamples.
That being said, there are certainly cases where a higher degree of separation seems more reasonable. For example,
Klingon for the Galactic Traveler also describes the opera scene in
Looking for Par'Mach In All the Wrong Places as being in an ancestral language (preserved because it's a
ghe'naQ nIt, or "pure opera", where the script remains [largely] unchanged even as the language changes).
It seems a common interpretation of this is that it's an ancestral form of 23rd/24th-century
ta' tlhIngan Hol, but given how completely different it is from said language (compare, for example, the line
mova' 'aqI' ruStaq with the more modern
Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam), it strikes me as more reasonable to assume that it's actually an archaic form of some completely different language.
(My own pet theory is that Kahless and Lukara came from different parts of Qo'noS, and so were speaking the lingua franca of Molor's empire. I like to imagine that young Klingons are sometimes shocked to learn that the two most legendary lovers in Klingon history used the language of the worst villain in Klingon history to communicate.)
The Klingon Language Institute maintains
a list of Klingon words used in licensed Trek works but which haven't been approved by Marc Okrand (and are thus not considered part of our canon). It can be fun to go through those to see which could be incorporated into tlhIngan Hol without many/any changes (such as DeCandido's
qorvIt and
Hun, which have been incorporated into the language), which look like they might be from a closely related language and which seem to be completely unrelated.
In particular, I quite enjoy speculating about possible cognates between tlhIngan Hol and John M. Ford's
klingonaase (probably the largest body of Klingon vocabulary outside of tlhIngan Hol). For example, the
rika in
k't'rika ("bringer of agony") seems like it could be related to
rIQ ("be injured") and the
agga in
k't'agga ("painbringer") might be related to
'oy' ("pain").
Both are quite basic words that likely have long histories, increasing the odds that they could have cognates across a wide range of languages, even if they diverged millennia ago.
Of course, they could very well be false cognates, like the English "name" and Japanese 名前 (namae), or the English "bone" and the Japanese 骨 (hone).
