tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Aug 02 20:39:54 2006

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Re: How do you say "pizza" in Klingon?

Stephen A. Carter ([email protected]) [KLI Member] 

On Wed, 2 Aug 2006 14:46:16 -0700 (PDT), Eric Zay wrote:
>And neither country will have much success with this.  You can't control the natural flow of a language.

That's the conventional wisdom, but it's not always true.

During World War II the nationalists running Japan banned the use of
many European loan words "polluting" Japanese, and the ban was
effective, at least while they remained in power.  When the ban ended
after the war, most of the new coinages were dropped, but a few
stuck: to this day the usual word for "baseball," for example, is
*yakyuu* ("field ball"), which had been coined to replace the earlier
*beesubooru*.

More recently, in the mid-1980s, a Turkish exchange student
complained about how the Japanese businesses euphemistically known as
"massage parlors" in English were called *toruko buro* ("Turkish
baths") in Japanese.  "How would you like it," he asked, reasonably
enough, "if all the brothels in Turkey were called 'Japanese baths'?"
 The Japanese sex industry agreed that that was a reasonable
complaint, and renamed all those businesses "soaplands."  The
Japanese public, in turn, agreed that the name change was reasonable,
and went along.  Within the space of a few days *toruko buro* became
a dead word.  I've heard that since then, "Turkish baths" have also
been renamed in Thai and Korean.

Another example is modern Israeli Hebrew -- a full-blown, fully
modern language spoken as a first language by millions, assembled in
just a few decades from an ancient language that had been moribund
for some 2,000 years.

Then there's Klingon, where for example Marc Orkrand has decreed that
the word for "pizza" is {chab}, and we all go along.  Which is
perfectly fine.

My point is that the natural flow of a language certainly can be
controlled, if its speakers agree to allow it.  If the speakers of
Farsi agree to follow Ahmadinejad's decree the same way we follow
Orkrand's decrees, then the language will change.

And of course there are plenty of counterexamples -- in over 800
years the English, for instance, never succeeded in stamping out the
Irish language, but in the two or three generations since
independence the Irish government itself has pretty much managed to
kill it off.


-- Stephen Carter
   [email protected]
   Nagoya, Japan

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