To be or not to be
The phrase
To be or not to be is a famous quote from
Hamlet. The Klingon translation is
taH pagh taHbe'. It was first heard
1991 in
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, spoken by General
Chang.
Creating the phrase
Marc Okrand tells us that during the making of the movie, the directors suddenly thought of the idea of having Chang say his bit about
Shakespeare and Klingon, and so turned to him, Okrand, and demanded, "OK, what's the Klingon for 'To be or not to be'?" Okrand was caught quite flatfooted, since Klingon doesn't have infinitives of the type required, and also had no verb "
to be" - and he didn't want to give it one. So he came up with
yIn pagh yInbe', literally
"it lives, or else it doesn't live..." Christopher Plummer, the actor playing Chang, repeated the line thoughtfully, shaking his head. "No...
yIn... just doesn't sound right." So Okrand then created the verb
taH "continue, endure", basically promoting it from the
aspect verb suffix -taH continuous.
Grammar