tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Jul 24 23:13:32 2008

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Re: Atlantean language

Lawrence John Rogers ([email protected])



Thanks everyone for their help and ideas.  Some of you guys are really good 
at staying in the Klingon character! 

I hope the qepmey goes well.  I look forward to getting my membership number 
and dictionary in the mail.  I hope it's enough to start the language.  Does 
anyone have any constructive suggestions for a learner? 

I don't actually call my developments the same thing as the language he made 
up.  My first combination of his work and my additions is "New Atlantean".  
It's mostly sort-of compound words.  That's the one I've made the biggest so 
far. 

The other is "Historical Atlantean" which attempts to figure out his method 
and then reproduce it in the creation of new words.  Very time-consuming and 
since I'm not an Indo-Europeanist like David Solo (are any of you guys on 
Elfling?), I'd rather not devote large portions of my life to the endeavour. 
Plus, it just results in a language that's harder to learn and less 
canon-based (=less reference to the movie). 

ghunchu'wI' 'utlh writes: 

> 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. 
> 
>  
> 
> 
 


Canidate for Linguistics B.A. at
Michigan State University 

404 E. Owen Hall
East Lansing, MI 48825
Cell:1-906-370-3624 








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