Unavoidable Trap

On the first-season ENT episode, “Fallen Hero,” Vulcan ambassador V’Lar and Hoshi have a brief conversation which ends with the salutation, “Pash Tah,” (or something like that).
So, what does Pash Tah mean? Well, according to the VLD, it means “unavoidable trap.” 

Huh?

That can’t be right. But all the televised shows are canon: The rule book for everything Star Trek. So this little exchange must mean something. And the desire to understand, or just to figure out a rational explanation (other than that the script writer thought it sounded cool), sent me back to the VLD to see if there is any way I could reconcile what they said with what we know about the Vulcan language.

Hmm, hmm, hmm…

Well, obviously, it doesn’t mean, “good night,” which would be “rom mu-yor.” 

(And, I suspect that Vulcans don’t say things like good night, or good morning, either: The night and the day will be what they are, unaffected by what we may wish. Assigning phrases like that to the Vulcan  language is a case of us shoe-horning our Terran cultural memes and prejudices into the alien culture of Vulcan. So, moving on.)

What existing word sounds like Pash? How about Pa’shi-, which means ‘clear?’ That could work with a subvocalized ‘i’ at the end (something we know Vulcans do). Great. What about ‘Tah?’ Well, the Vulcan salute is called a Ta’al, and the VLD suggest that Ta’a is a synonym. But what if we assume there are shades of meaning here? Ta’al is definitely a formal salute made with the hand. What if Ta’a is a way of “saying" a formal salute? (Hoshi  would not use an  informal farewell when speaking to the ambassador.)

Thus, rather than saying “Unavoidable trap,” we might presume they said, “Clear formal salutation.”

But that’s just the basic, literal translation, and languages are seldom that cut and dried. Now, we might stop there and just assume that the words mean, “My salutation is clear.” But that’s a bit abstruse, isn’t it? What salutation? It’s rather elliptic.

So, what might ‘Clear’ mean in the context? (We can hope that Vulcans are not practitioners of Dianetcs, so we can get that out of the way right off the bat...)

Ahh, but they do seek Kohlinar all their lives, even after they have “attained” it. And what is Kohlinar but a manner of clear thought and action, stripped of the lack of clarity associated with irrational emotion? 

A-ha! So what Pa’shi-ta’a would translate to is, “May you continue to find your thoughts and actions clear.” 

Not a bad way to say good night.

Pa’shi-ta’a.

-- T'Lara