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Marc Okrand
Posted by conlangnewbie on June 9, 2021 at 5:20 pmDoes Marc Okrand have creative control over Klingon? Is he the only one who can make changes to the grammar & create new words? I wonder if anyone can change the Klingon grammar or create new words.
I’ve been fooling around with grammar & syntax ideas for a conlang. I have documents that I’ve created about syntax & grammar. I probably can’t copyright thoughts on paper. I believe that, legally, the documents aren’t intellectual property & can’t be copyrighted like a novel or a piece of music.
conlangnewbie replied 1 year, 10 months ago 2 Members · 7 Replies- 7 Replies
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Well, I guess that guest members don’t get answers to their questions on the forum.
I guess that I have to be a paying member in order to get replies to my questions.
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Yep, I’d say that guest members don’t get their questions answered since it has been a month since I originally posted my question.
I’ll have to get my question answered elsewhere.
I wonder how I can cancel my membership.
po'wI'
Greetings. The reason you didn’t get a reply is that this system is still being rolled out and most people are still using the previous Q&A system. We’re still investigating a way to migrate the current questions and answers over to this one.
To answer your question, yes, Okrand holds creative control over the Klingon language currently (at least from the KLI’s point of view). Technically CBS can make anything they like and say it’s Klingon, but the KLI only accepts stuff from Okrand.
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Sorry for being impatient.
I chose “Discussions”. What should have I chosen? What is the Q&A system?
So I was mistaken. I guess that guest forum members CAN have their questions answered.
I hope that I will be more patient!
How can an individual such as myself create a conlang & retain creative control over it?
po'wI'
This is the right place. There just aren’t a lot of people subscribed to this forum yet (and my emails were going to the wrong address!)
I believe there are books out there that describe how to create a language. Keeping creative control of it would be no different that keeping creative control over anything, I’d assume. The control Okrand has exists because we, as a community and organization, have decided not to infringe on his control. There’s no laws or rules that compel us to do so.
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I’m no lawyer, but I’d think that creating words for a conlang would be copyright protected. One has to create phonotactic rules for combining vowels & consonants. One has to decide how the vowels & consonants sound individually. I would think that a conlanger that creates an alphabet that doesn’t already exist could copyright the alphabet. That sounds like intellectual property to me.
I don’t know about grammar & syntax. I don’t see how one can be creative regarding grammar because there are already grammar & syntax rules for natural languages. Unless one can create grammar & syntax that doesn’t already exist, I guess that grammar & syntax isn’t copyrightable.