Some questions for the writers around here: Are there any characters that you have a particularly difficult time getting a handle on? Are there any characters who are harder to write for in print than they are for the television programs? What I mean is, are there instances where you can write perfectly correct dialog for a character, but it rings "false" because there isn't the original actor their to interpret the dialog? Does some dialog only work if the reader is so familiar with the characters that they can imagine how the actors would perform the scene? Kind of a confusing set of questions there, I'm afraid. Hopefully, you guys can make sense of them.
In my early days, I struggled writing the captains. They were a challenge because, in theory, they should just be delegating all the action to other people. How did you get an interesting scene out of somebody sitting in a chair issuing orders? As a result, both Sisko and Janeway kinda got short shrift in my DS9 and VOYAGER books. It was easier and more fun to write Quark or O'Brian or Paris or B'Elanna, etc. I didn't have a handle on how to write authority figures, so I mostly wrote around them. Kirk was different, of course. Kirk will beam down into a swamp full of alligators without a second thought so it was never hard to get him into the thick of things.
Picard, for me, was hard to get a grip on. I always felt he was a bit too stiff, at least at the start. That's part of the reason I wanted to write The Stuff of Dreams, to see if I could find his voice.
I remember struggling with Jadza back when the TV show first debuted--but that's because she didn't really get a consistent personality until Season Two or so.
Not usually a fan of being pedantic on the internet,but it is O'Brien. Only doing so because he is a fellow Irishman, and has same surname as me.
No problem. I stand corrected. Thanks. I confess I still stumble over Lxwaxana and B'Elanna sometimes.
Not terribly surprising, given that at first, the official spelling was in flux. Much like the official spelling of bat'leth was originally completely different, bearing no resemblance to the way it ended up being pronounced. Oh, and Mr. Cox, I believe you left the "i" out of Jadzia.
Yep. It was derived from Marc Okrand's Klingonese words for "honor" and "blade," batlh 'etlh, but it was written down in the "Reunion" script as "bat'telh," which was probably a typo, because the pronunciation guide said "BAT-telth" -- itself apparently an erroneous transposition of "tlh" into "lth." And apparently Michael Dorn misread "BAT-telth" as "bat'leth," and his pronunciation eventually became standard. (In the same episode, Dorn also mispronounced "discommendation" as "discommodation," which carried through into a few tie-in books and comics for a while, but fortunately that one didn't become standardized.) And apparently Okrand didn't recognize the mangled etymology of the word when he added it to the revised Klingon Dictionary, because he rendered it as betleH.
I don't remember whether I used her in On The Spot (I know she wasn't in IFM), but every time I thought of trying Troi scenes.... no, can't get there.
Quite right you are. However, he retcons this in Klingon for the Galactic Traveler, by saying that betleH is an archaic form of batlh 'etlh that's been preserved even as its component words have mutated (or perhaps it's simply mutated differently, and is as such a cognate of batlh 'etlh).
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).
Between O'Brian and Jadza and also Lxwaxana above, I'm a little worried for the books you've been editing.
He's not on the clock when he posts here. Even editors need to rest their (virtual) red pencils occasionally.
Don't worry. I just edited a six-hundred-page manuscript set all over the country, and, trust me, I had my browser open so that I could easily check on the proper spelling of place names, brand names, obscure bands and song titles, slang terms, etc. And I worked hard to make sure all the characters' names stayed consistent, too, even though there was a cast of thousands. Same thing when I turn in a TREK novel for publication. I know I can't spell Lxwaxana the same way twice, so I'll do a search on it before delivering the ms. to Pocket. But, yeah, I'm little less assiduous when chatting on-line.
I was trying to do a quick joke, not tell Mr. Cox how to do his day job. I'm sorry if it was misconstrued or read wrong. It was supposed to be in good fun. And for what it's worth, Jadzia and Lwaxana are alien names from alien languages. The spelling is a loose transliteration for what may very well be unpronounceable sounds in English.