Worf's Original Name Was...
- Thread starter Kamdan
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Link for those who can't find it:
https://www.facebook.com/roddenberr...1484310369./10154177739493144/?type=3&theater
Will have to give this some thought, but spontaneously:
It certainly would have fit into the established Klingon naming aesthetic better.
...not to mention tlhIngan Hol phonology, which lacks a proper f sound and abhors consonant clusters.
However, at the same time, giving a name that doesn't meet with one's expectations adds some spice to the culture. It would certainly have been boring if the human crewmembers all had English-sounding names, and we had to replace Uhura, Sulu and Chekov with Nelly Freeman, Harry Sutherland and Paul Chandler.
https://www.facebook.com/roddenberr...1484310369./10154177739493144/?type=3&theater
Will have to give this some thought, but spontaneously:
It certainly would have fit into the established Klingon naming aesthetic better.
...not to mention tlhIngan Hol phonology, which lacks a proper f sound and abhors consonant clusters.
However, at the same time, giving a name that doesn't meet with one's expectations adds some spice to the culture. It would certainly have been boring if the human crewmembers all had English-sounding names, and we had to replace Uhura, Sulu and Chekov with Nelly Freeman, Harry Sutherland and Paul Chandler.
It's odd to see a Klingon crewmember mentioned in the same document that also mentions "Ryker" and "Macha," because the season-1 writers' bible that I have calls them Riker and Tasha Yar, but doesn't have a word about Worf. So maybe this Kohrbek was meant to be a guest character, or maybe they went back and forth about whether to include a Klingon.
I don't mind diverging from the expected pattern, but I never understood how anyone thought "Worf" sounded like the name of a Klingon instead of some cute little dwarflike cartoon character or something. Granted, it does sound like part of "warfare," but it's not a particularly strong or tough-sounding name.
Although it would've been nice if they'd given those characters more authentic non-Western names. "Uhura" is a bastardized version of the Swahili name Uhuru with a Romance-language feminine suffix incongruously tacked onto it. "Sulu" is a place name from the Philippines and Malaysia rather than a personal surname. And "Chekov" is a variant transliteration of "Chekhov" which was consistently mispronounced. So they were trying to give the characters multicultural names, but either they didn't do their research well enough to get them right, or they deliberately Westernized them so they'd be easier for English-speaking actors and audiences to pronounce.
I don't mind diverging from the expected pattern, but I never understood how anyone thought "Worf" sounded like the name of a Klingon instead of some cute little dwarflike cartoon character or something. Granted, it does sound like part of "warfare," but it's not a particularly strong or tough-sounding name.
Although it would've been nice if they'd given those characters more authentic non-Western names. "Uhura" is a bastardized version of the Swahili name Uhuru with a Romance-language feminine suffix incongruously tacked onto it. "Sulu" is a place name from the Philippines and Malaysia rather than a personal surname. And "Chekov" is a variant transliteration of "Chekhov" which was consistently mispronounced. So they were trying to give the characters multicultural names, but either they didn't do their research well enough to get them right, or they deliberately Westernized them so they'd be easier for English-speaking actors and audiences to pronounce.
I think the name might have worked with the mroe passive season one Worf that had that different head mold and upright hair, but later Worf with the different molds and hair that kept getting further and further down, "Worf" just looks right.
Let's face it, naming a character works. If it had not been James Kirk and instead Al Newman, it might have been a different story.
Let's face it, naming a character works. If it had not been James Kirk and instead Al Newman, it might have been a different story.
I think we got the better name.
Them going back and forth up till pretty much filming (Dorn isn't in the initial "Planet Hell" cast pictures) on whether to have a Klingon and how big his role in the series would be is my understanding. I would guess Kohrbek was an early attempt by Bob Justman (who IIRC was the highest up advocate of the idea) to slip the idea in. As the sample scene it mentions looks to be just a representative moment than from a script they were working on (it's a bit Qish but I don't they'd have added that plot at this stage? I wonder if it even inspired Rodenberry when he was asked to pad out the hour version of Farpoint?) I wonder if the character was placed in there just to show how it might work and it took them longer to fully commit?
On the name not really working in the Klingon language, early TNG doesn't seem very bothered by Klingonese anyway. Obviously Heart of Glory is the only real time it comes up, but IIRC (from what I've read!) it's just random grunts in that episode rather than the Official Language, which the series only started using later on.
So saying it was "Worf's original name" might be overstating it a bit. To me, that implies that the specifics of the character were more established and only the name was changed, rather than just being the first vague antecedent of the idea that became Worf. Then again, Worf initially didn't have much more personality than "a Klingon Starfleet officer" anyway, not until "Heart of Glory" gave him a backstory.
I agree, it's probably a scene written specifically for auditioning actors. The heading says "WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE SCENE(S) YOU WILL READ," so it must be from the casting sides. It looks like this scene was written to emphasize the characters' emotional reactions.
TNG and the later shows were never consistent about using Okrand Klingonese. Sometimes they used it, sometimes they just made stuff up. Sometimes they mangled it so badly that even Okrand didn't recognize it -- for instance, turning batlh 'etlh, "honor sword," into bat'leth, which Okrand didn't recognize the etymology of and entered into the revised Klingon Dictionary as betleH.
Marc Okrand has stated that he believes that the House of Mogh may have adopted (or flat out appropriated) the name "Worf" from an alien culture.
In my own (highly speculative) head canon, for reasons described here, wo'rIv is actually tlhIngan Hol (modern, archaic or future) for "champion/emissary of the empire".
I also think perhaps Worf's name may well have come about through a combination of these two etymologies:
At some point in their history, somebody in the House of Mogh named a child using the alien name "Worf". Perhaps they named him after an (honorably) vanquished jeghpu'wI', or after a comrade in arms, or after the hero of some legend that they liked.
However, they also wanted to give him a name that fit in with a normal tlhIngan Hol syllable structure, and they also wanted the name to mean something nice, so that he wouldn't have to spend all his time fighting people to the death for teasing him. So, they racked their brains for a bit and came up with wo'rIv, which meant something good and also was about as close as they could get to transcribing "Worf", anyway.
This would be somewhat similar to the way that many Chinese people pick out a Western name that they like and sounds similar to their real name. So, for example, somebody named 陸毅 (lùyì) might call themselves "Louis" or "Louie".
For many years, I used to say that my Chinese name was 马啡昤 (mǎ fēilīng), because mǎ sounds like part of my last name and fēilīng sounds a bit like my first name, Felix. Furthermore, 啡 (fēi) is the second half of 咖啡 (kāfēi), or coffee, which is something I like, and 昤 (līng) means "sunshine", so it's like I'm called "coffee sunshine", which is nice.
I've since come to reconsider this name, upon realizing that the first two syllables of my full name, mǎfēi, are homophonous with 嗎啡 or 吗啡, both of which mean "morphine".
This word was then used in TNG: A Matter of Honor, but pronounced differently, and referred to as "serpent worms". Okrand resolved this by adding qagh to the second edition of The Klingon Dictionary, with the gloss "serpent worm (as food)". He then went on to expand on this distinction in Klingon for the Galactic Traveler.
Basically, about 95%* of the Klingon you hear in TNG, DS9 and VOY is either gibberish (which I personally don't really mind; it's a big empire with a long history and no doubt a lot of linguistic diversity) or horribly ungrammatical attempts at tlhIngan Hol (which, although I know I should commend the effort, mostly serves to drive my continuity-obsessed mind insane).
Enterprise mostly did gibberish, although The Augments and Affliction both have excellent tlhIngan Hol. It's confirmed that Okrand wrote the tlhIngan Hol dialogue in the latter, but it's unknown who did translations for The Augments.
*These are rhetorical percentage points. I haven't done the math, but it lines up with my experience and gets the point across.
In my own (highly speculative) head canon, for reasons described here, wo'rIv is actually tlhIngan Hol (modern, archaic or future) for "champion/emissary of the empire".
I also think perhaps Worf's name may well have come about through a combination of these two etymologies:
At some point in their history, somebody in the House of Mogh named a child using the alien name "Worf". Perhaps they named him after an (honorably) vanquished jeghpu'wI', or after a comrade in arms, or after the hero of some legend that they liked.
However, they also wanted to give him a name that fit in with a normal tlhIngan Hol syllable structure, and they also wanted the name to mean something nice, so that he wouldn't have to spend all his time fighting people to the death for teasing him. So, they racked their brains for a bit and came up with wo'rIv, which meant something good and also was about as close as they could get to transcribing "Worf", anyway.
This would be somewhat similar to the way that many Chinese people pick out a Western name that they like and sounds similar to their real name. So, for example, somebody named 陸毅 (lùyì) might call themselves "Louis" or "Louie".
For many years, I used to say that my Chinese name was 马啡昤 (mǎ fēilīng), because mǎ sounds like part of my last name and fēilīng sounds a bit like my first name, Felix. Furthermore, 啡 (fēi) is the second half of 咖啡 (kāfēi), or coffee, which is something I like, and 昤 (līng) means "sunshine", so it's like I'm called "coffee sunshine", which is nice.
I've since come to reconsider this name, upon realizing that the first two syllables of my full name, mǎfēi, are homophonous with 嗎啡 or 吗啡, both of which mean "morphine".
Indeed. Another such instance is the origin of the word gagh. In Star Trek III, Kruge describes the Genesis worms as ghargh. In the first edition of The Klingon Dictionary, this word was glossed as "serpent, worm", with the comma separating two possible translations.
This word was then used in TNG: A Matter of Honor, but pronounced differently, and referred to as "serpent worms". Okrand resolved this by adding qagh to the second edition of The Klingon Dictionary, with the gloss "serpent worm (as food)". He then went on to expand on this distinction in Klingon for the Galactic Traveler.
Basically, about 95%* of the Klingon you hear in TNG, DS9 and VOY is either gibberish (which I personally don't really mind; it's a big empire with a long history and no doubt a lot of linguistic diversity) or horribly ungrammatical attempts at tlhIngan Hol (which, although I know I should commend the effort, mostly serves to drive my continuity-obsessed mind insane).
Enterprise mostly did gibberish, although The Augments and Affliction both have excellent tlhIngan Hol. It's confirmed that Okrand wrote the tlhIngan Hol dialogue in the latter, but it's unknown who did translations for The Augments.
*These are rhetorical percentage points. I haven't done the math, but it lines up with my experience and gets the point across.
Probably the latter, but we could also No-Prize this as languages drifting/adopting/changing over a couple of hundred years.
Yeah, it's not like Earth linguistics will be stagnant for several hundred years.
We need more people with "Æthel" names
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