Talk: Qul tuq

Spelling

The novel Star Trek: Klingon uses both the spelling Qul tuq (p.44, Kindle version) and qul tuq (p.130, Kindle version). Because the Klingon for this book (or rather the game on which it is based) was done by Marc Okrand, and because the proper spelling using Marc Okrand's system is qul tuq, and because capitalizing the initial letter is an easy mistake to make in editing, I feel that we should use the spelling qul tuq.

I don't have the Excelsior novel handy, so I won't comment on that spelling. --Tesseraktik 00:26, December 27, 2011 (UTC)

Yes, any student of The Klingon Dictionary recognizes that "qul" and "Qul" are different words in Klingon. It would take some effort to cross reference all Klingonese "q"s from novels and regularize them to the orthography of "q" and "Q" established in TKD. Additionally, the wiki has a long-established technical restriction of capitalizing every first letter of every article.

I recently ran into this difficulty when creating an article about system p Eridani. (in real-life astronomy, "P Eridani" and "p Eridani" are different systems)... to truly be accurate, we'd have to finalize a system of using some other way, some part of an extended character set, fixing "q" characters when wikifying and category-sorting these terms in tlhIngan Hol (it would also help if unicode included a ligature of some sort for the Klingon character "tlh" which is technically all one letter, as is their "ch", the apostrophe glottal stop sign, and their "ng".

Authors often place proper capitalization to these alien terms and alter the case of the Q, muddying the burden of the source to contradict the defined, correct language. We'd have to establish that was the wiki's preference. We could try to consensus up some ways of doing this, but since the propensity both for speculation exists, we'd have some gray area to deal with. You would have to establish an inference that was agreeable to the community -- in this case, are we putting forth the opinion that qul (fire) is in fact the word we are working with, and dismissing the possibility that Qul (research) is involved? there's this consideration to be made... -- Captain MKB 01:19, December 27, 2011 (UTC)

The definition isn't specified in the novel, but not to worry: In the game on which the novel is based, Marc Okrand (creator of the Klingon language, and Klingon language consultant for the game)specifies that it means "fire house". You can hear the recording by going to http://hol.kag.org/, searching for qul tuq, clicking on the phrase and then playing the notes. No speculation needed on our part :) --Tesseraktik 08:04, December 27, 2011 (UTC)

So this leaves us with the technical restriction of the wiki (trying to find a way to lowercase the 'q' at the beginning of the word, in the interest of clarifying the correct orthography.

This also leaves us with trying to denote a 'rule of thumb' that could be taken as policy by wiki editors. Do we have sufficient cause to ignore the valid source that uses "Q" instead of "q", in favor of the other valid source? Perhaps even simply acknowledging the typo of capitalizing the letter incorrectly, I'd say yes to ignoring it, but this should be a consensus that could be clarified so it can be communicated to other users for their use with other cases of this effect. -- Captain MKB 15:22, December 27, 2011 (UTC)

We can display the title as a small letter (as evidenced on the article now). Just FYI. -- sulfur 16:06, December 27, 2011 (UTC)

Oh, and Excelsior novel? "Qul Tuq". -- sulfur 16:07, December 27, 2011 (UTC)

Great job fixing that Sulfur!

Yes, Sulfur -- the Excelsior novel is the one that is incorrect. Tesseraktik and I have both expressed that the correct spelling should be used, since we have identified that the Excelsior novel is the source of the mistake misspelling "qul" as "Qul" -- Captain MKB 16:15, December 27, 2011 (UTC)

Klingon paper form novel (first printing), two "Qul" versions. Ebook versions have fixed the second of those to "qul". -- sulfur 01:01, December 28, 2011 (UTC)

I think the fact that it was corrected in the later edition certainly establishes that the publisher/author(s) have acknowledged the mistake and that if we note it, it should be as a background note, and not be perpetuated in the inPOV parts of the article... -- Captain MKB 05:33, December 28, 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for fixing the title, sulfur :)

Perhaps one should add an info box to the end? Something like

Note on orthography: Sometimes capital letters are used to spell the name of this opera. However, yada-yada-yada.

(I couldn't think of anything good to write, but you get the idea). --user:tesseraktik 08:40, December 28, 2011 (UTC)

Um, yes. This was the mistake the author made. It shouldn't have been capitalized. They capitalized it as an English proper noun, even though it is -not- English. Did anyone get that this is what I was trying to say above? - Captain MKB 13:04, December 28, 2011 (UTC)

I got ya; I just mean that maybe we should add some sort of note to the article explaining why the article uses q rather than Q, for readers less versed in Romanized Klingon. --Tesseraktik 02:31, December 29, 2011 (UTC)