tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Oct 21 09:37:24 1998

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RE: RE: More words

qatlho'qu'. jej mu'meylIj 'ach batlhlIj lu'agh.

One of the reasons for my original post was hopefully to get responses 
like the one that you gave. I have not had an opportunity to discuss 
such things with anyone until I joined this list. I thank you very much 
for enlightening me and appreciate the information you provided, 
particularly the perspective on Dr. Okrand. I agree that he is brilliant. 
Perhaps I could have initiated the discussion in a different way (and 
probably would have had we been talking face-to-face). I apologize if I 
actually offended you or anyone else.

~ Thornton

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	William H. Martin [SMTP:[email protected]]
> Sent:	Wednesday, October 21, 1998 11:36 AM
> To:	Multiple recipients of list
> Subject:	Re: RE: More words
> 
> While I respect your good intent with this, I honestly believe 
> that you are approaching this from a position of ignorance of 
> much of the reality surrounding the Klingon language, Okrand's 
> position toward it and our relationship to it. I also doubt your 
> fundamental assumptions, though I perhaps understand why you 
> make them.
> 
> On Wed, 21 Oct 1998 06:12:43 -0700 (PDT) "Rose, Thornton 
> (Atlanta)" <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> > By "more extensive set" I mean more new words. I think more
> > people would take an interest in Klingon if there were more
> > words for the things that they would want to say, and the Star 
> > Trek writers might just do a better job, too. 
> 
> The Star Trek writers have never shown any interest in 
> understanding the language. For the movies, the writers wrote 
> English sentences which became subtitles and sent them to Okrand 
> to translate. He then coached the actors on how to say the words 
> he came up with.
> 
> For the TV shows, usually, the writers just make stuff up. 
> Sometimes, they appear to have actually looked at the word list 
> in the back of the dictionary, but they have certainly never 
> even scanned the sections on grammar. The TV shows are produced 
> in a different way than the movies and no one there ever 
> communicates with Okrand. Giving the Star Trek writers a larger 
> vocabulary would not prompt them to do a better job. They would 
> just have more words to mangle in English sentence structure 
> stuffed full of mispronounced Klingon words.
> 
> I also VERY much doubt that having a larger vocabulary would 
> increase interest in the language. Face it. By the time you've 
> figured out whether or not Klingon has all the words you want, 
> you are already hooked. Either that, or you gave up before you 
> got that far.
> 
> French doesn't have all the words in it that people wanted to 
> use. That's why they have "le weekend". Do you think that there 
> needs to be a committee of people who are not French to get 
> together and decide what new words the French vocabulary needs?
> 
> Okrand gives us new words. He doesn't do so at an amazing pace, 
> but he does do so. To be honest, it is a shock to the Klingon 
> speaking community when we get a bundle of new words because 
> having a few hundred new words to memorize isn't that simple 
> when we don't have daily conversations with friends using the 
> language in our everyday lives.
> 
> > You say that there is not a "language committee", but I think
> > it's actually a great idea. The KLI could be the sponsor, and 
> > Dr. Okrand could be the chair, with final say on additions and 
> > changes to tlhIngan Hol, of course. I know tlhIngan Hol is his 
> > intellectual property, but I would think that he would like to 
> > see it grow (but he might not, either). Has anyone ever talked 
> > to him about it? Has he ever said either about further 
> > development of tlhIngan Hol?
> 
> There are a couple ideas I'd like to introduce you to:
> 
> 1. Okrand is brilliant. If he wasn't, he could not have come up 
> with a language as interesting as this, especially under the 
> time pressure he had as the third Star Trek movie was being 
> produced. While the vocabulary has been expanded quite a bit, 
> I'm repeatedly impressed with how much of the vocabulary was 
> created in that initial burst. We now have, by my rough count, 
> excluding names and derivative words (I count {ghoj} but I don't 
> count {ghojmoH}) just under 2,200 words. Of those about 1,500 
> were from the original word list and the number hits around 
> 1,800 when you add the Addendum. That was before he got any 
> feedback about the vocabulary, and before the other books and 
> tapes he's published. He did a very good job of creating a basic 
> vocabulary useful for general speech with added words for the 
> Star Trek fictional universe.
> 
> 2. Okrand is busy. The few of us who commonly have access to him 
> (and I don't count myself in that group) don't get to 
> communicate with him very often. I've personally met him three 
> times (once at StellarCon and twice at qep'a'mey), talked to him 
> on the phone once (also at a qep'a') and I've gotten two Emails 
> from him (as part of a group he was invited to participate in, 
> but never he never took to it), and I think he answered one 
> NEWS group message I left on MSN. That has occurred over the 
> past six years, and I can tell you, that's more contact than 
> most people have had in the KLI, and if we are lucky, it will 
> stay that way.
> 
> He guards his private life. Just because he created a language 
> we like a lot doesn't mean we get to jerk him around and 
> schedule him for monthly meetings so we can tell him what we 
> want him to do with his language and he can then do our bidding.
> 
> 3. Okrand makes money from his publications. His publishers 
> don't want him telling people about works he is currently 
> developing. Part of his publication contract is a non-disclosure 
> agreement. This is business in the real world. We never know if 
> he is working on a book or tape until very near release. He also 
> has a delightfully twisted sense of humor and darkly enjoys 
> failing to answer direct questions. He should be a diplomat, or 
> at least a politician. By those who have met him, he is famous 
> for his mischevious smiles while he gives answers like, "That's 
> a very interesting question..." and then never actually answers 
> it.
> 
> Meanwhile, Okrand does, in time, actually respond to things. I 
> wrote a short story (actually the first chapter of an 
> unpublished novel) and translated it into Klingon. I sent it to 
> Okrand via his publisher and never got a response back. It was 
> about a tree falling. I had a really hard time with the 
> vocabulary since there really weren't very many "tree" related 
> words. I struggled to come up with terms for the trunk ("body"), 
> the limbs ("arms"), the branches ("fingers") and the leaves. I 
> referred to the wood as the tree's substance and the leaves were 
> "little flags". That was certainly the weakest term I came up 
> with.
> 
> Years later, in KGT, we have a word for "leaf", and not a lot of 
> reasons to have it. Also, the word for "wood" is {Sor Hap). I 
> have a strong sense that Okrand is telling me that he actually 
> read the short story, but he is doing so in a way that cannot be 
> confirmed. The short story was later published (with the new 
> word for "leaf") in jatmey, a copublication with HolQeD.
> 
> Then again, if he actually confirmed it, he might get swamped 
> with people sending him stuff they write in Klingon. He protects 
> himself by refusing to reward that which he does not want in 
> excess. His experience so far has apparently been that a small 
> remark casually mentioned in one context can have large 
> repercussions later, so he doesn't make many casual remarks 
> about the language.
> 
> 4. Creativity is meaningless without limits against which one 
> struggles. If an environment is too restrictive, creativity is 
> crushed. If an environment is not restrictive enough, creativity 
> wanders aimlessly. Rodin did amazing things with stone. If stone 
> had been easier to work with, his statues would be a lot less 
> impressive. People who complain that stone is too difficult to 
> work with should not complain about it to sculptors.
> 
> The Klingon language does have a restrictive vocabulary, yet for 
> an artificial language created in the time span it was and in 
> the environment it was, it is nothing short of amazing. The 
> expressive capabilities of the language can't be appreciated by 
> anyone who has not learned it, and I hear a LOT more complaints 
> about its restrictions by those who can't speak it than I do by 
> those who do.
> 
> So far as I can tell, people who want it to be easy to encode 
> any English sentence into a Klingon packet want Klingon to, like 
> English, have a huge vocabulary. People who want to be able to 
> express things using the language and who actually DO express 
> things with the language complain about this far less often.
> 
> I say this while I, myself, have pet words I'd like to add to 
> the vocabulary. {'arlogh and wejvI'} come to mind... But I 
> don't. The language belongs to Okrand. Deal with it.
> 
> Or don't deal with it. Just don't expect a lot of support for an 
> idea that is not new and will not be implemented.
>  
> > ~ Thornton
> 
> charghwI' 'utlh

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