What would you do if you were in charge of STD?

[MissKittyFantastico]

Oh right, not watching. (How do you not get pranked all the time? Like when they foreshadowed the Exodus Engine in the midseason cliffhanger?)

Long story short, they made a big deal of Klingons actually speaking Klingonese in season one - even when it was just Klingons in a scene, everyone speaking the same language, it was all subtitled, instead of just having then speak English. I suspect, given that Star Trek already had the language, somebody wanted to ride the Game of Thrones train and make a big deal of it, although it didn't work out so well - whereas actors like Khaleesi are lifers on GoT who have time to presumably work with a coach to get the hang of convincingly speaking an unfamiliar language like they mean it, the poor guys playing T'Kuvma and Voq in the premiere clearly hadn't had that prep time (T'Kuvma can only have been on set a few days before they shanked him anyway), and just ended up Bar! King! Ev! Ery! Syl! La! Ble!, through their ultra-thick makeup that dampened facial emoting and made the impression even worse. (Credit where it's due, by the later episodes of the season Mary Chieffo was getting pretty good at voicing Klingonese like she meant it.)

But anyway - this is just my guesswork, bear in mind - I suspect some language consultant (who really needed to spend more time with the actors rather than being a smartass) had a look at the components of Klingonese and decided, based on similarities to some real language or other (or maybe they just though it'd sound more 'foreign'), that actually they'd pronounce '-s' as '-sh' at word endings, so now we have Klingons following the teachings of Kahlesh (or Kah! Lesh! as it tended to be), and their homeworld is Qo'nosh. Still spelled properly in the subtitles (Kahless, Qo'nos), just pronounced with the -sh, and it ticks me off because we've had Klingons saying those names for like thirty years now (including Kahless himself... his clone anyway, but still), and changing it is completely arbitrary and accomplishes nothing. Except presumably for that one consultant, who should've borne in mind that Klingons aren't human so their language doesn't need to behave like a human language would anyway (Matriarch Aethyta would like a word).

As with many things in season two, I suspect during the hiatus they had a quiet chat about what didn't work in season one and how they could fix it - during the episode set on Qo'nos they started with a couple of lines of Klingonese with English subtitles then segued into actually speaking English (simultaneously the subtitles morphed into Klingon script, before vanishing, which was a cute touch). But - presumably for consistency with season one - they're still pronouncing the -sh. Hence making fun of them with "Dishcovery". It doesn't ruin an episode for my by any means, but I'd be pleased if they'd do a little handwave to fix it, like how they explained the lack of hologram communications in TOS by having Pike order the holo system removed from the Enterprise after it caused a systems failure at the start of the season (or at least, he blamed the holocomm - he outright said he doesn't like how they look, one suspects he was happy to have an excuse to get rid of it). Like I dunno, the decades of Klingon isolationism meant the universal translator's rusty, now they're at kinda-sorta peace with the Federation and talking to them somebody's finally updated the translator, and - without anyone specifically saying that's why - they can just go back to saying Kahless and Qo'nos like grown-ups.

[Makeshift Python]

I always took it that it was less GAME OF THRONES and more of DISCO emulating the Trek films which have all (except GENERATIONS) featured Klingons speaking their native language. It’s something all the television shows neglected mainly due to time restrictions of television production.

[Yukaphile]

I doubt if they'd had bigger budgets and less restrictions they'd be speaking Klingonese all the time. Refer to "The Way of the Warrior," btw.

[MissKittyFantastico]

Sure there's always been Klingonese (since 79, anyway) - and I do remember reading somewhere that on TNG and DS9 when they needed a few Klingon lines they'd just use the well-known words and make stuff up around them, rather than dig out the dictionary to get it precisely 'right' - and true, actually having complete Klingon dialogue is of a piece with Disco's generally movie-level production standards. The way that the language was 'repackaged', for want of a better word - compared to earlier uses it felt very much like somebody had tried to work out a specific set of vocalisations for Klingonese, including the -sh and all that - just immediately put me in mind of all the fantasy and sci-fi shows that jumped on the conlang bandwagon after GoT made a splash with it. Defiance comes notoriously to mind, where I think they claimed they'd devised five or six separate alien languages, of which only the Castis and Irathients ever got more than a couple of words out over the course of three seasons so one wonders why they bothered.

Overall I did feel there was a lot of 'do what the other popular tv shows are doing' behind some decisions in season one, so that's where my thoughts went with the language element. Certainly they had something in mind besides just imitating the movies, or they'd have noticed how perfectly David Warner enunciated "Qo'nos" (and how even in VI they segue into English for effect from time to time when they're clearly still in-universe speaking Klingonese). It's not so much the subtitled Klingon in and of itself - although I like that they're now being more judicious with it - it's specifically some idiot deciding he knew better than Worf how to pronounce Kahless's actual name.