Why are the words QuchHa' and HemQuch always written in italics?
- Thread starter Extrocomp
- Start date
Perhaps because they aren't personal or place names, but more like descriptive terms, and thus are italicized like untranslated words/dialogue? I dunno.
Read any book, most of the times any word included that's not one of the book's native language are always italicized. Or if you just want an example specific to this, every other word from the Klingon language that appears in a book is always in italics, and Trek's other languages for that matter.
At least in my head anon, most Klingon names are anglified for the reader's convenience, rather than transliterated from Klingon. For example, Worf's indigenous name* is wo'rIv, but Worf is more recognizable as a name, and less demanding to sound out in your head.
Similar to the way people often write Mao Tse-Tung or Mao Zedong, rather than a more faithful romanization such as máozédōng.
Familiarity is probably another factor. Qo'noS is an accurate transliteration from Klingon using the standard romanization, but it's rarely (never?) italicized. This is likely because it's such a commonly known location name that it can be treated like an English word.
*It should be noted that in the TV series, Worf's name is pronounced "Worf" even in Klingon dialogue. This is no doubt because that's his canonical name, whereas wo'rIv is apocryphal and only known to a particular breed of pedants (and I say that affectionately). However, my headcanon explanation is that either this is because his name is dialectal, or because his name mutated while he was living among humans.
Indeed. I have observed this convention in many publications I have read.
For some reason, the first thing that popped into my head after looking at that was the scene between Worf and Guinan in Yesterday's Enterprise where Worf laughs boisterously and says "impossible."
Or this.
Just did a Google Books search for "Chang" and "QuchHa".
Open Secrets says this about Chang:
Storming Heaven also calls Chang a QuchHa' and mentions his "suppressed cranial crest", but doesn't elaborate any further.
The Legacies trilogy will have Gorkon in it, so maybe we'll finally get a definitive answer. But even if Chang and Azetbur were half-QuchHa', shouldn't they have been cured in 2290?
Just did a Google Books search for "Chang" and "QuchHa".
Open Secrets says this about Chang:
Storming Heaven also calls Chang a QuchHa' and mentions his "suppressed cranial crest", but doesn't elaborate any further.
The Legacies trilogy will have Gorkon in it, so maybe we'll finally get a definitive answer. But even if Chang and Azetbur were half-QuchHa', shouldn't they have been cured in 2290?
Well, all the female Klingons in the movies (Valkris, Vixis, Azetbur) had much subtler ridges than the males. Those makeup designers assumed there was a sexual dimorphism in the ridge patterns, no doubt wanting the females to be more attractive than the males. (In fact, for years I didn't even realize Valkris was meant to be a Klingon.) Even Michael Westmore initially went a similar route with the conjured-up Klingon female in "Hide and Q," before deciding later on to give males and females equally pronounced ridges.
(Come to think of it, it might actually be more logical for the females to have smaller ridges, for the same reason that female deer have small or no antlers. An ornate, exaggerated anatomical feature like that probably exists for mating competition, and if it evolved as part of competition between males, there'd be no reason for females to have it too. But evidently Westmore didn't think of it in those terms.)
Although I suppose that in retrospect, given that Westmore Klingons outnumber all other depictions, that makes the movie female Klingons an anomaly, and retconning them as hybrids probably makes sense.
There shouldn't be any such thing as a medical treatment that works equally well on every individual. IDW's Klingons: Blood Will Tell, which is generally at least loosely accepted as part of the novel continuity, has a number of QuchHa' still around in 2293, so it's probably wisest to assume the "cure" was not 100% effective.
