tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Jul 03 00:49:56 1993
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Re: How many people know Klingon?
- From: Will Martin <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: How many people know Klingon?
- Date: Fri, 2 Jul 93 15:25:51 EDT
On Jul 1, 11:55am, [email protected] wrote:
> I'm curious... how many people do you think that there are,
> world wide, who are capable of:
>
> 1) Holding a five minute conversation in Klingon?
Very few. Probably less than 6. I am uncertain that even Marc Okrand can
do it. When I saw him at StellarCon 17, he used the dictionary to come up
with his Klingon "speech" which was comically "translated" by an assistant.
The speech consisted of random sentences from the examples in TKD and the
translation had nothing to do with what he was saying. I know that because
after the speech, I asked him what he was saying because what I DID recognize
didn't match the translation. He told me that he just grabbed some examples
from the book and wrote them on a napkin.
> 2) Writing (or saying) a single gramatically correct sentence
> without consulting a book?
At least dozens. Perhaps hundreds. There are a couple hundred people in
the directory for HolQeD and you can figure many if not most of them have a
few useful sentences under their belt just waiting for the right setting...
I count myself in this group, but definitely not in the first group.
> 3) Recognizing a sentence as being in Klingon?
Definitely hundreds. The mIxeD caSe IS a DeaD gIvaway. {{:)
Also figure that publishers won't put out a book like TKD if it doesn't sell
thousands of copies. While it is a safe bet that MOST people with TKD won't
learn how to use it, less than a majority of thousands is still a rather
large number for a topic as esoteric as the fictional language of a fictional
people based upon a television show and half a dozen movies.
-- charghwI'