Comment on Annotations for *Star Trek: Starfleet Academy* 1x09: “300th Night”
bgainor@thelemmy.club 1 day ago
“jiH batlh SoH” bothers me for a number of reasons. batlh refers to personal internal honor or integrity, while honor given to others is quv. Also, you wouldn’t normally use personal pronouns (jiH and SoH) in this case, but a prefix on the verb (like how in Spanish, the verb’s conjugation makes the subject obvious without explicitly having to say yo or tú), and finally, if you do have explicit subjects and objects, Klingon is an OVS language, so this order would mean “you honor me”. I think it should actually be “SoS, qawuvmoH.” Now, all that said, if the original comes from “The Bonding”, then mostly I’m just impressed that a TNG episode bothered to use real Klingon at all. Usually 90s Trek just used gibberish in Klingon dialogue.
bgainor@thelemmy.club 1 day ago
(Apologies for being a huge nerd)
khaosworks@startrek.website 1 day ago
Not at all. It also struck me that they simply imported the line from TNG: “The Bonding” without understanding the cultural context behind it or running it by actual Klingon speakers.
I’m not fluent by any means, but I know enough to know that using SoS in that context was off.