tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Feb 09 06:31:57 1994

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Re: *Dum*

>charghwI'vo'
>
>                    wa'Hu' ram De'wI' Quj vIreH
>
>                          *Dum* pong Quj
>
>         *Dum* ghun *qaSel wolvenSayen* ghunbogh ghunwI'pu''e'
>
>                         qaSDI' ram Quj jItagh
>
>           po'vam ghumwIj vIQoypu'mo' jIreHtaH 'e' jImevnIS
>
>                     qaStaHvIS ram Hoch jIQongbe'
>
>                         jIDoy' 'ach munuQbe'
>
>  yabwIjDaq muHIvtaH Ha'DIbaHmey nuvpu' je 'ej vIHoHqa'qu' 'ej vIHoHqa'qu'
>
>... (elipsis, not continuation)
>
>                           'ej jIqejHa'choH
>
>                               jIQuchchoH
>
>                            *Dum* vIparHa'qu'
>
>                    juppu'wI'vaD Qujvam vIchupqu'
>
>                      bISuvjaj 'ej bIcharghjaj
>
>charghwI'

Ok, this has officially gotten out of hand.  I should like to take
this opportunity to remind everyone of the list policy concerning
transliteration.  The policy is to eschew transliteration and the
reason is that, while transliteration let's you feel very clever, it
tends to leave readers in the dust.  We have looked the other way on
this in so far as we get posts of work on the two big translation
projects, whose policy is to transliterate proper nouns (and not
without good reason, I might add. Particularly in the bible project,
the English names are already mangled transliterations of the
original Hebrew or Greek or whatever, so there is little reason to
preserve them).  However, the needs of preparing a large translation
are different than the needs of informally talking to a large list
of people, where clarity needs to be paramount.

Which brings us to the absurdity of this post.  chargwI' gives a
glowing endorsement of this game, and it sounds terrific!  So
suppose I wanna take him up on his recommendation and go out and buy
it?  What the hell is the game called?  I'm gonna have a REAL tough
time going into a store and trying to find it armed with only the
Klingon transliteration.  What am I supposed to do, go up and down
the rows until I find something that looks like a match?  I'm sure
it will be a piece of cake once I tell the salesman "it's by the
same guys who wrote *qaSel wolvenSayen*."  For all I know, the game
really is spelled D-u-m, but there's no way to tell with the
transliteration paradigm in place.

Can we *please* get back to the original guidelines, which were to
just use English spelling for proper nouns and earth-specific nouns
that have no Klingon equivalent (like "fox"), so that people can
have a fighting chance to understand?  The original guidelines
called for using double quotes (") around such things if there might
be ambiguity of language (lest people try to look up English words
in Klingon), but some people found that hard to read and opted for
alternate syntaxes (angle brackets, if I remember correctly), which
is also fine.  We will continue to use the * syntax to indicate
transliteration, on those occasions when it is warrented.
Transliteration is fine for posts of formal translations, in
accordance with the guidelines of those projects, but outside of
that, let's try to communicate, ok?

                            --Krankor

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