tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Jan 09 01:41:47 2015

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Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Klingon Word of the Day: pegh

De'vID ([email protected]) 

lojmIt tI'wI' nuv:
> I wish that Okrand and a publisher would provide The Compleat Klingon Dictionary, perhaps electronically so that we could have updates. Annotations. Examples of useage. Explicit commitment in the definition to allow or exclude direct objects.
> It would place more of a burden on the author of the book than any centralized entity has taken on so far, but the truth is, this burden must be born somewhere, and in this case spreading the burden among more shoulders doesn’t make the burden born by each shoulder any lighter.

I'm not Marc Okrand, but I do maintain {boQwI'}, which is basically
exactly what you've just described.

1. It's electronic (though it's available only on Android, and with
some effort on Windows, OS X, and Chrome OS).
2. It's open source and updatable by anyone (although in practice only
Lieven and I have made updates to the database).
3. It has annotations for part of speech and things like slang, body
parts, etc., as well as links to other entries, related words, notes,
and so on.
4. It has examples of usage.
5. It distinguishes between verb transitivity classes. Here are the
verb transitivity annotations from the header file:
    part_of_speech = v (verb):
                       ambi (ambitransitive): may be either i or t
                       i (intransitive): must not take an object
                        \ i_c: intransitive and confirmed
                       is (int. and stative): of the form "to be (something)",
                                              can be used as an adjective
                       t (transitive): may take an object
                        \ t_c: transitive and confirmed
                       pref: a verb prefix
                       suff: a verb suffix

I actually went through and annotated every single verb and looking
for confirmation of its transitivity. See the history of that process
here:
https://code.google.com/p/klingon-assistant/issues/detail?id=32

Here's the entry for {meQ}, as an example:
https://code.google.com/p/klingon-assistant/source/browse/KlingonAssistant/data/mem-08-m.xml

    <table name="mem">
      <column name="_id">20740</column>
      <column name="entry_name">meQ</column>
      <column name="part_of_speech">v:ambi</column>
      <column name="definition">burn</column>
      <column name="definition_de">brennen, verbrennen</column>
      <column name="synonyms"></column>
      <column name="antonyms"></column>
      <column name="see_also">{mIQ:v}</column>
      <column name="notes">If there is no object, then the subject is
the thing burning, e.g., {meQtaHbogh qachDaq Suv qoH neH.:sen}[2]  If
there is an object, then the subject is burning the object, e.g.,
{to'waQ meQ vutwI'.}[3]  {meQ:v:nolink} can also be used adjectivally,
e.g., {Ha'DIbaHmey meQ Sop 'e' tIv tera'nganpu'@@Ha'DIbaH:n:1, -mey:n,
meQ:v, Sop:v, 'e':n, tIv:v, tera'ngan:n, -pu':n}.[4]</column>
      <column name="hidden_notes">In the sentence from {CK:src},
{tIv:sen:nolink} should have been {lutIv:sen:nolink} since
{tera'nganpu':n:nolink} is plural.</column>
      <column name="components"></column>
      <column name="examples"></column>
      <column name="search_tags"></column>
      <column name="source">[1] {TKD:src}, [2] {TKW p.111:src}, [3]
{KGT p.191:src}, [4] {CK:src}</column>
    </table>

You can also see the entries for {pegh} here:
https://code.google.com/p/klingon-assistant/source/browse/KlingonAssistant/data/mem-11-p.xml

I don't consider it a burden in any way to maintain, but I do wish
that more people would contribute. I think this is the sort of thing
that the KLI ought to be maintaining. The role of being its maintainer
fell upon me by accident: I originally wrote a relatively simple
dictionary/grammar analyser app for myself. I showed it to some people
at the Germany qepHom, and they asked me to share it with them, so I
open-sourced it and put it on what was then the Android Market (now
known as the Google Play Store). The next thing you know, people
started sending me bug reports and feature requests, pointing out
errors and typos, and so on. Now it's a pretty complete database of
all canon Klingon words, and quite a few extended canon ones too.

The only major limitation is that it isn't available on iOS or
accessible through the web. Someone has actually volunteered to port
it to be a web app, and I'm investigating porting to iOS.

Anthony Appleyard:
> Ditto. We need a publicly-accessible source of ALL information about Klingon, all together in one place. With any major Earth language that would be done. Currently, some of it is in this book, some is in that book, some is revealed here and there at qepmey, bits all over the place.

One issue with gathering all information about Klingon into a
publicly-accessible source is that most of those sources are
copyrighted. I have been asked to include a lot more grammar help in
{boQwI'}, or to include what would effectively be the grammar sections
of TKD, but I've refrained from doing so. People have also asked me to
put the explanations of the sentences from KGT and TKW into the
entries for those sentences, but what the entries say right now is
that the sentence is slang, or an idiom, or archaic, or whatever, with
a pointer to look to page so-and-so of KGT or TKW for more
information. A number of people have remarked to me that {boQwI'}
would be a lot more useful as a learning tool (rather than just a
reference tool) if it was more "complete", but the decision to leave
out certain things is deliberate, since I don't want to do anything
which might be seen as potentially negatively affecting Marc Okrand's
income (I assume he earns royalties for his books/tapes/CDs) or
CBS/Paramount's profits. For {boQwI'} to be truly useful, you need to
own most of the official Klingon-language products (and thus have paid
Okrand and CBS/Paramount), and that's deliberate.

OTOH, nothing stops any volunteers from filling out the entries in the
database the way that {meQ} has been done as shown above. There are
plenty of entries for which there exist canon examples, or
explanations of their usage in HolQeD or elsewhere, which are just
missing from those entries.

-- 
De'vID

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