tlhIngan maH!

Star Trek Discovery’s latest casting – three Klingons – gives us the impression that there is a helluva story arc in development.DSC_Klingon.jpg

We welcome all the new additions to our Trekkie collective! The new cast must all be looking at there twitter notifications and it looks like this….

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In addition to Doug Jones, Anthony Rapp and Michelle Yeoh who were announced recently, yesterday Chris Obi, Shazad Latif and Mary Chieffo were also added to the lineup. For character info and bio’s see the Startrek.com article.

The bit that intrigues us is the Klingon wording on the image.

We took straight to deciphering it but it’s been more tricky than anticipated. Some bits are straight forward however the font looks new so there’s an element of interpretation.

Over the five hours we spent picking it apart (and searching the house/garage/loft for the Klingon dictionary) we have changed our minds on it a bit.

 

The first word is giving us the most difficulty. Is the first letter in the first word ‘r’ or ‘gh’ ? At first we thought it was ‘r’

This makes the word either ghetwI’ meaning pretender although this could mean ‘role play’ – not necessarily meaning deception.
Or it could be retwI’ which from a bing translate shows as ‘time period ago’. But we can’t find anything more official to back that up. What do you think?

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Thank you to @boleon74 for sending us this alphabet in different fonts for reference!

The second word appears to be luwIvlu’ta’

This is where I confess that I have attempted to learn Klingon many times!! (unsuccessfully, obviously). But words this long with apostrophes need to be broken down. I learnt that from trying to translate a Klingon drinking song!

lu is a pre-verb (is that the right term!?) so refers to who is doing the action, he/she/they

wIvlu’ is the verb in the middle of the word, this means to choose.

ta’ means done

Therefore I believe luwIvlu’ta’ can be translated as ‘they have chosen’ 

The next word qul is easier to translate as there are less symbols and it a well used word in the Klingon language ‘fire‘.

The last word we thought we had translated as ‘play’ but when we looked at other letters we think we got h and y mixed up. We think this says yIchu’ which can translate as engage. That’s a much more fitting word for the Trek universe!

Now it may be that this phrase was translated a day ago and is well reported already but we have been purposely ignoring because  we’re having lots of fun trying to work it out for ourselves!

That said, we work better as a collective so we’d love to hear your feedback. Are our translators working correctly? What do you think they are trying to tell us?

Our hunch is that it’s something like ‘some time ago, they chose to fire. Engage’ or ‘they chose to engage in fire’ or maybe even ‘the pretender chose to engage in fire.’? Depending on how we feel about that first letter?

It isn’t exactly leading us on a wild chase to Qo’noS and back but it could be a tag line to the show or a hint about the Klingons involvement. Either way, we want to know!!

PS. If you don’t follow Star Trek Discovery on Instagram, you should! They have been releasing announcements before their twitter and Facebook accounts. Not by much, but hey, we’ll take it! @startrekcbs