tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Oct 24 10:59:55 2006
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Re: what is canon?
At 12:02 PM Tuesday 10/24/2006, you wrote:
>You often comment on a KWOTD that such and such a word has never been used in
>canon, even though the word itself is a part of canon; i.e., it occurs in one
>of Okrand's works. What is this narrower definition of canon you are using?
In the KWOTD posts I use "canon" to mean full sentences or utterances with
context (such as the titles of SkyBox cards, the entries on the BOP poster,
sentence fragments in dialogue, etc.) - IOW something to show the word
actually being used.
I don't consider the mere listing of a word in a glossary to be
"canon". That only proves is that the word is attested in "modern"
Klingon, or rather, the tiny subset of words listed in the TKD and KGT
glossaries. It's also pointless for the KWOTD: If the word didn't appear
somewhere in Okrand's published writings, it wouldn't be the subject of
Holtej's KWOTD posts.
An intermediate case are those occasions where Okrand discusses or mentions
a word in an English-language discussion, but without providing an example
sentence. Where such discussions are of course useful and interesting,
they frequently don't answer questions of grammar (such as transitivity),
of use (e.g. does the word refer to people, things, events, etc.), of
register, or style, and so on. I generally label these quotations as
"Discussed by Okrand..." in my KWOTD responses.
>Is there a list of Klingon words having no canon usage?
Not that I know of but Lawrence, Holtej, or charghwI' might know of
one. My own notes are organized by individual word. I don't make lists of
subsets of the vocabulary. I do, however, make use of various tags and
abbreviations to mark various categories I might want to search for using
my word processor's Search function (e.g. inherent plurals, PN [personal
names], SN [shi names], GN [geographical name], etc.). I also mark
unofficial coinings with asterisks (e.g. *{jabI'IDghom}) so I can keep
track of which words are Okrand's and which aren't.
--
Voragh
Ca'Non Master of the Klingons