tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Nov 22 10:32:00 1994

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KLBC

For beginners only:

(The rest of us are tired of hearing me say this.)

We have a special little thing we do for beginners. Sometimes
the list is overwhelmed by beginners and the people who want to
speak lots of Klingon get bored and complain. Sometimes the
list is overwhelmed by experienced Klingon speakers and the
beginners get intimidated and they complain.

Since we can't always make everybody, what we decided to do was
to ask that beginners who want to focus on beginning issues
include the acronym "KLBC:" in the subject of their posts. This
does four good things:

1. Experienced Klingon speakers who happen to be going through
a time in their lives when they are burned out on reading
beginners can skip these messages to decrease their Email
backlog. That way, they have no excuse to complain about there
being too much beginner traffic for them to get to the messages
they REALLY want to read.

2. Other beginners who are feeling intimidated by all the
advanced linguistic jargon and massive quantities of stuff they
can't read yet written in Klingon can skip the messages that
DON'T have "KLBC:" on it. Then they can stop whining because
those who want to speak Klingon don't always want to write
everything twice so the beginners won't get frustrated.

3. An appointed person (currently me) plays the role of
Beginner's Grammarian. This is an experienced Klingon speaker
who has promised to dedicate the time to pay attention to
beginners' concerns and to promote their growth as Klingon
speakers. Post something with the SUBJECT: as "KLBC:" followed
by whatever kind of stuff one USUALLY puts in the SUBJECT, and
I'll read it and answer you, offering corrections, suggestions,
encouragement and whatever else I can to help out.

4. When experienced Klingon speakers are NOT burned out on
beginners, and when beginners want to stretch their minds a
little and check out what the more experienced writers are
saying, they can do so whenever they like without having to
administer two separate lists.

To qualify the term "experienced Klingon speaker", the three
BGs who have served in this role have been what would more
accurately be called intermediate Klingon speakers. The REAL
grammarians are Krankor (the longest serving in that role, who
happens to have dissappeared for a lot of weeks now), and
~mark, who is one of the most linguistically talented humans
I've ever met. At qep'a', the rest of us got to sit around,
watching these two talk to each other, while we wore out our
dictionaries trying to buy a clue to whatever the hell they
were talking about. They are waay good. The rest of us try hard.

trI'Qal and Holtej (former BGs) and I have learned a lot once
we took on the role of BG. Simply, taking on the role requires
you to read a lot of Klingon text carefully enough to pick out
the errors, and it requires that we know or learn enough to
offer correct corrections. We do this while the real
grammarians and all the profoundly talented others folks on
this list (like Nick and Guido#1, who are currently translating
Hamlet) look over our shoulders. If we screw up and give bad
advice, well, not too much time passes before we hear about it.
Usually publicly.

So you can save yourself time typing in the cliche "I'm just a
beginner, but I wanted to know..." and just put KLBC: in your
header and get straight to what you want to ask or say.

What does KLBC stand for? We are not sure, actually. The first
three words are "Klingon Language Beginners'" and the last word
is either "Conference", "Conversation" or "Club". Different
people remember it different ways. It doesn't really matter.
KLBC has grown to have its own meaning without underlying words.

charghwI'

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