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Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Blockly in Klingon

De'vID ([email protected])



On 1 April 2014 at 18:21, De'vID <[email protected]> wrote:
> Google's contribution to today's announcements of Klingon-language products:
> http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2014/04/making-blockly-universally-accessible.html
>
> [...]
>
> A program like this already scans sort of as Klingon:
> teHchugh [So'wI' Dotlh]
>     [So'wI' Dotlh] choH; teHbe'moH
> teHtaHvIS ([peng] >= 1)
>     [peng] boq -1
> maq: {Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam}

Marc recently gave an interview (for qepHom'a' 2014) in which the
following exchange took place:

Q: When people say that "Okrand has vetted" some words, what does it mean?
A: That means these Klingon words either were made up by me, or if he
[Keith DeCandido] made them up himself, he sent them to me and I said
okay, or "add an apostrophe" or something like that.

A while ago, I posted about Google's April Fool's joke, which was
about making the Blockly programming language available in Klingon.
I'd actually asked Marc about some computer programming terminology
for that project, and he had "vetted" them, in the above sense. I'm
posting them for people who collect pseudo-canonical stuff like
DeCandido's material. I think this is somewhat in that category.
(Also, I gave a talk about this at the Saarbrucken qepHom'a' two weeks
ago, so it's only fair that I make the info available to people who
weren't there, even though it's not canon.)

This is the list of words I'd sent him. (I've edited the English
glosses. In the actual email to him, I went into a bit more detail.)

Product name:
Blockly - ghunmeH ngogh

Dialogue buttons:
Ok - ruch
Cancel - qIl

UI labels:
comment (small piece of text attached to a code block) - QInHom
loop - vIHtaHbogh gho
logic - meq [note: I wasn't very happy with this, since I think {meq}
means "reason" in the sense of "motive", but we had to go with
something... but perhaps Klingons think of logical instructions in a
computer as the computer's motives]
mathematics - mI'QeD
procedure (subroutine, piece of program which is used over and over) - mIw
variable - lIw

Variable types:
* list - tetlh
* string (text) - ghItlhHom

Logic and input/output:
if - teHchugh
while - teHtaHvIS
update (change the value of a variable) - choH
print (display a string) - maq
set boolean variable to true / false - teHmoH / teHbe'moH

This was Marc's response:
"I showed your email to Maltz, and he was surprised to see that you
already knew some of the terminology he hadn't yet told me about."

(That wasn't the entirely of the response, just the part directly
addressing the suggested vocabulary.)

The above quoted snippet of code was what I'd actually sent him,
though it wasn't exactly what made it into the final product.

Neil Fraser, who led the project, has posted about some of the math
terms he'd invented for the project:
https://neil.fraser.name/news/2014/04/01/

-- 
De'vID

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