tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu May 16 13:14:55 1996
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Re: Re[2]: Beginner's questions
Disclaimer: I'm not speaking for the Grammarians, the KLI, or anyone else; the
opinions below are mine, and while I may state what I *believe* to be the
position of the KLI or the list on some issues, that is still only my
perception.
Having said that:
[email protected] (Frank M Truelove) writes:
[notes about the language being static and therefore not a Real Language(TM)
deleted; see response below]
\ "no officially sanctioned mapping."
\ This no official piQaD pisses me off. You can't really learn a language if
\ you can't use its alphabet. I imagine it's very difficult to learn
\ Japanese without the benefit of katakana and kanji. Is Russian taught
\ without the Cyrillic alphabet?
The official alphabet of tlhIngan Hol is the Roman transcription used
in TKD. That *is* the language's alphabet. It Would Be Nice If the
Klingon writing system visible onscreen were understandable, but it is,
by definition, not so. (BTW, it's pIqaD, not piQaD).
[notes about obtaining KLI's pIqaD via _HolQeD_]
\ Again, unless you have access to someone's back issue collection . .
Well, if you have the ability to browse the World Wide Web, and your
browser can do graphics, you can see the KLI mapping on its web
page (http://www.kli.org). You can also order back issues of _HolQeD_
thence, if you're one of the folks willing/able to spend money on your
Klingon hobby (I believe the back issues are US$4 each); a 3.5" disk
with the KLI font for Windows or Macintosh is US$15 from the same
source. If you use the LaTeX typesetting program, there is a free
MetaFont version of the KLI font, written by ~mark, also available from
the KLI home page.
As far as the language being static: there are two schools of
thought.
1. We are the speakers of the Klingon language; we *are* the
language community, therefore whatever we do defines the
language.
2. We are students of a foreign language of which no native
speakers are directly available, but we have an observer in
the field (Okrand) who once in a while provides us with new source
material.
The latter position is the more widely accepted, and is, I do belive,
the official stance of the KLI. But even if we were all to adopt the
former position, one couldn't go around adding words to the language
willy-nilly. One could propose a word, people might start using it,
and when more people were using it than weren't, it could be considered part of
the language. (One also has to be careful with that "we, the language
community". Who's "we"? The subscribers to this email list? KLI
members? The union of the two sets? The intersection? What about
others who have picked up TKD and studied it but not yet heard of
either the list or the KLI?)
Esperanto is at the stage in its development where neologisms can be
incorporated into the formal lexicon if enough speakers adopt them;
tlhIngan Hol is not. We can hope that at some point in the future Okrand will
turn the task of creating Klingon words over to someone else, perhaps to the
KLI - but first we must show a sufficient understanding of the spirit of the
language as it is today.
-marqoS