Kazh and Kahless
- Thread starter Falconer
- Start date
I prefer Qo'noS myself. It's so rare and refreshing to get Star Trek aliens whose planet name is completely different from their species name.
Especially given that those aliens refer to Humans as "Earthers."
Seems to me that Qo'noS and Klinzhai are not mutually exclusive, given that "Earth" has a number of synonyms in English alone.
That's why Marc Okrand retconned it to Qo'noS. That's their own name for it, and "Kronos" is just the approximation used by humans, like how English-speakers refer to al-Qāhirah as Cairo or Köln as Cologne.
Although as it turns out, "human" is from the same root as "humus," meaning soil, so "human" literally does mean "Earthling." So it can happen. I just prefer it not to always happen.
I know, except the analogy is imperfect. Cairo and Cologne are not pre-existing English names with other meanings.
For me personally (this being a heresy thread), the opposite is easier to imagine here, because Kronos already exists in human speech, and even now exists as a human name for a star (and in a binary star system no less—just as Star Trek Maps described it!). So I’d rather imagine Qo'noS as an approximation of the human name (kind of like how I’ve read that Al-Kahirah “Sometimes…is informally referred to as Kayro by people from Alexandria (IPA: [ˈkæjɾo]; Egyptian Arabic: كايرو).”) And that the natives themselves call it Kazh or Klinzhai.
The beauty of planet names is that they cannot overwrite each other. They can all exist. Just like Earth is Terra is Tellus is Gaia, not to mention hundreds of other languages, Qo'noS can be Kling, Klinzhai, Kazh, Klingonii. Given their penchant for civil war and infighting, and possible extracolonial conquests, it could be major factions are divided over the issue of their own planet's name ("the traitors of Kling!"). Perhaps that's why they settled on "Klingon Homeworld" for awhile, as a diplomatic solution to unite families that fought over Kling or Kazh or Qo'noS.
"Canton" is. It's the Anglicization of the Portuguese approximation of Guangzhou, and it's also a pre-existing word for a political subdivision in certain European countries. There's also "Acre," the Anglicized name for Akko, Israel (which is sometimes pronounced "ah-ker" but can be pronounced the same way as an acre of land). It can and does happen that an Anglicization coincidentally sounds like a pre-existing word. And it's perfectly believable that humans would deal with alien names by finding pre-existing human names that approximated them and were easier to pronounce. Particularly mythological names, in keeping with the naming conventions we've always used for astronomical objects.
That seems overcomplicated. Why would they favor using the human name instead of their own? It makes sense in Egypt because it was under British political and cultural dominion for the better part of two centuries, but the Klingons have never been under human rule (not in the Prime timeline, anyway).
I don’t think it’s overcomplicated. When in TUC we the audience hear “Kronos One” or “Kronos,” we are hearing it spoken in English, either via a universal translator or from the mouth of someone speaking English. The writer was obviously more interested in making literary allusions than in serious worldbuilding. These are the same writers who featured Klingons quoting Shakespeare (or is it canonically Shex’pir now?)!
Of course, because the Qo'noS retcon hadn't been invented yet. You can't take "translated" dialogue in these things too literally, because of course it wouldn't actually look and sound like the alien was speaking English; the only time it's been depicted the way it would actually work is in Star Trek Beyond, and I think in Discovery once when Burnham was letting her communicator translate her speech into Klingon. The rest of the time, it's figurative. Indeed, it's never been more figurative than in TUC, where they did that bit showing the Klingons speaking their own language at the trial and then did that Hunt for Red October thing where they pulled in on the speaker's lips and his dialogue suddenly modulated to English. So that wasn't the universal translator, that was a dramatic device in a scene where they were "actually" speaking Klingon.
Have you met Star Trek? This is the franchise that, in its first season alone, gave us planets named Talos, Thasus, Romulus & Remus, Tantalus, Cestus (named for a battle glove used in the Roman arena) and Janus. Not to mention names with obvious Earthly derivations like Gothos and Organia.
And if you object so much to allusions over worldbuilding, I think you'd be in favor of the retcon that it's actually Qo'noS and "Kronos" is just a rough approximation used by humans.
Uh, "Klingonii," so far as I know, was some writer's mishearing of a drunken Korax's slurred pronunciation of "Klingonese" (in David Gerrold's actual shooting script), which is itself (according to Ford) an Anglicization of Klingonaase, which (if memory serves) at least one novelist (maybe Ford, in How Much For Just the Planet?) has retconned as more properly transliterated as tlhInganaase.
And "Kling" was deprecated almost the second it left the mouth of Korris in "Heart of Glory," because everybody realized how silly it sounded.
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I don't recall Ford using any of Okrand's Klingon language in his books.
Klingonii, as the planet name, apparently comes from the 1977 Star Fleet Medical Reference Manual. If you squint you can imagine it says "Klingon II" instead.
Google tells me Peter Morwood used "Thlinganaase" in Rules of Engagement.
Yeah, but it never happened with Ford. Back then, there was no pressure for everything to fit together or agree on the worldbuilding. Pawns and Symbols came out after The Final Reflection but portrayed a completely contradictory version of Klingon culture. By the same token, Ford had his own version of Klingons and would've had no reason to adopt a different creator's version over his own.
Thanks on Rules of Engagement.
Also thanks on the Medical Reference (I have both the original fan-published edition and the subsequent Ballantine edition).
Also thanks on the Medical Reference (I have both the original fan-published edition and the subsequent Ballantine edition).
IIRC, those two works have Geoff Mandel in common, so that'd be my guess.
