tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Jul 22 10:35:50 2008
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Re: Atlantean language
On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 6:23 PM, Fiat Knox <[email protected]> wrote:
> But for the lack of support from White Wolf, there'd likely
> be an Uremehir mailing list today, and a whole lot of
> furries.
You're apparently making a common mistake here. The connection between the
language and the dress-up aspects of a fictional race is much smaller than
many people assume. I doubt that the absence of a published
English-Uremehjir dictionary has had any effect on the size of the "furry"
population.
> As it is, a language - like an Empire - must either be
> expanding and growing, or dead.
>
> Outside of KGT, how many new canon words or grammatical
> rules have been revealed since December 2005 again?
According to my notes, about 175 words and about a half dozen pieces of
grammatical information. Why do you consider the question important? An
"expanding and growing" language doesn't need to be one where the lexicon is
being added to whenever someone wants an easy way to name an object like a
stapler. My preferred way to "expand and grow" Klingon is to use it to
describe novel concepts using the established vocabulary. Its speakers are
still too few and too widely scattered for neologisms to be generally
useful. As for grammar, I'm perfectly content without an explicit
subjunctive or a set of relative pronouns. Perhaps that's because I have
stopped trying to translate my thoughts into Klingon and instead compose
them in Klingon from the beginning. When your toolkit does not include
staples, you only notice it when you're trying to copy too closely something
originally built with another toolkit that has them.
That said, I know (and will use, in appropriate context) a handful of
unofficial "Klingon" words (and a verb suffix) that will likely never appear
in any dictionary.