Spoilers Star Trek: Prey Trilogy - general discussion thread
- Thread starter Kertrats47
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And once again I am annoyed by at English speakers inventing Klingon names which don't perfectly match actual Klingon phonetics. There is no "f" in tlhIngan Hol, only "v".
So, Klingons have a devil after all?
Nah... it's just the Helvans making their triumphant return to TrekLit!
(Hopefully the only Marshak & Culbreath detail that ever gets referenced in the LitVerse...
)That's always bugged me about Klingon... a completely made-up language, that doesn't use our full set of upper and lower case letters... and they specifically used two letters (upper case 'I' and lower case 'L') that you pretty much require a font with serifs in order to distinguish! And it's the *only* lower-case/upper-case combination of those two that even has that problem!
But I do like the cover, and it's nice to see the original Klingon battlecruiser designed for "Unexpected" get its novel cover debut!
(Assuming I'm not forgetting an earlier appearance. I know it's been featured in the Ships of the Line calendar before, but I don't recall seeing it on a novel cover before.)
"Actual?"
Let's not forget that there's no "K" in "actual" Klingonese either. Marc Okrand took his own liberties with previously established Klingon phonetics, so there's no exact phonetic correspondence for any of the previously established Klingon proper names.
Besides, how does it make sense to assume that an entire species has only one language, or has only ever had one language with perpetually unchanging spelling and pronunciation? The obvious explanation is that the name Fek'lhr comes from an ancient Klingon language with different phonetics from the modern lingua franca of the Empire.
This is an excellent point -- letters vanish from languages all the time for all sorts of reasons, while the sounds may or may not remain. The Soviets banished a letter from Russian entirely, making the first post-Revolution War and Peace many pages shorter.
(In Fek'lhr's specific case, it's also possible that character's name also predated the language in our own universe, since the story he was in came from Phase II!)
I think our Klingon in Prey is as good as we can get it: I consulted with Felix Malmenbeck, active on these boards, on specific questions and new constructions. It was not possible to run the entire series by him, but I can say we made the best efforts that the publishing calendar would allow.
(In Fek'lhr's specific case, it's also possible that character's name also predated the language in our own universe, since the story he was in came from Phase II!)
I think our Klingon in Prey is as good as we can get it: I consulted with Felix Malmenbeck, active on these boards, on specific questions and new constructions. It was not possible to run the entire series by him, but I can say we made the best efforts that the publishing calendar would allow.
Nah... it's just the Helvans making their triumphant return to TrekLit!
Oh, there's a bevy of little (and big) devils out there. A friend of mine brought this to mind:
http://www.comics.org/issue/44675/cover/4/
KIRK: Sulu, I warned you not to play with that ouija board! Now look what you've done!!
Sounds like an Irish expletive.
Also, love that the Klingon battlecruiser is the unused D'ama/D4 class for ENT S1 "Unexpected".
Probably not, since the script was rewritten for the TNG characters. Ardra projected the illusion of Fek'lhr for Worf's benefit, and there was no Klingon character in the original Phase II version.
Still, tons of Klingon names and words coined by the shows and films post-Okrand have failed to conform to his phonetics. Even "Worf" doesn't fit -- the Okrandized version is worIv. (I never understood why the creators thought "Worf" was a suitable Klingon name. Okay, so it sounds like the first part of "warfare," but aside from that, it's always seemed more like the name of a cute, funny dwarven sidekick in a kids' cartoon than a fearsome alien warrior.)
Then there's the strange case of bat'leth. It's presumably derived from the Okrand-Klingon words batlh, "sword," and 'etlh, "honor." But they simplified the pronunciation for the actors' benefit. Initially, though, the first few years of tie-ins consistently spelled it "bat'telh," before it finally got changed to fit the pronunciation. And Okrand himself apparently didn't recognize the intended etymology, because he Okrandized it as betleH in his revised Klingon Dictionary.
I don't know how "bat'telh" happened -- maybe somebody saw "bat'leth" and transposed a couple of consonants by confusion with "battle," and that somehow got entered into the style guide Paramount used at the time.
Actually, it looks like the shooting script for "Reunion" uses bat'telh, and it gives the pronunciation "BAT-telth". "Night Terrors" also calls it a bat'telh (it's only mentioned in stage directions, so no pronunciation is given). So those early tie-ins were simply following the scripts they were given.
It seems to have evolved over time. "Redemption" calls it a bat'telth (no pronunciation given), it's back to bat'telh for "New Ground" and "The Quality of Life" (no pronunciation given in either), and then by "Rightful Heir," it's bat'leth pronounced "BAT-leth." Every later script I checked used that pronunciation/spelling.
Wow. Seems like a typo to me. Even a double typo -- someone misreading the tlh in batlh'etlh as lth and producing "bat'telth," and then accidentally leaving out the final t altogether. And it was probably the actors mispronouncing it that led to "bat-leth" becoming the accepted pronunciation. (Which has happened before. I'm pretty sure Terok Nor was originally Terek Nor, but they changed it to match how Marc Alaimo pronounced it.)
It was -- I can't find an image-link to it at the moment, but back in the early '90s, I owned an officially-licensed DS9 station cross-section poster that had "Terek Nor" printed on it (and it might've showed up in other official sources from the era too, such as Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens' Making of DS9 book, though I'd have to dig that one out to verify).
And I could swear I once read a printout of a Usenet post, or something, where someone involved with DS9 asserted that the Ferengi currency was originally supposed to be Gold Press latinum, with Gold Press being basically a copyrighted name for the process that made it or something, but all the actors said "gold-pressed latinum" and so that's what it ended up being. But I've never been able to find any verification that that was the case.
Not according to the shooting script for "Cardassians" (the first episode to mention "Terok Nor")
The scripts for "Past Prologue", "Q-Less", "The Nagus", and "Vortex", do say "gold-press latinum," however. (It's never capitalized, though, so I'm a little unconvinced by the idea you cite.) "Progress" is the first episode to use the term "gold-pressed". "The Homecoming" and "The Siege" each use both! After that the term seems to stabilize as "gold-pressed," bar one errant usage in "Prophet Motive".
Research!
EDIT: Oh, and here is maybe the Usenet post you reference?
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I can't be absolutely certain, but it does look like it. Impressive job tracking it down.
I like the pronounciation guide on the Cardassians script, especially:
COUP DIETAT - COO
Obviously dietat is silent.
This is my favorite post of the day.
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