tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Oct 21 13:15:12 1994
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
Re: Complete Klingon
- From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: Complete Klingon
- Date: Fri, 21 Oct 94 14:50:39 EDT
- In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>; from "Thornton Rose" at Oct 21, 94 9:09 am
According to Thornton Rose:
>
>
> Even though tlhIngan Hol is a very interesting language, I sometimes get very
> frustrated with it. Is Dr. Okrand or anyone else working toward completing it,
> or will it just get periodic adjustments as they are needed by Paramount? Also,
> why is the vocabulary so small? Since tlhIngan Hol is somewhat regular, a
> rule-base program to generate a large vocabulary (20,000+ words) would not have
> been hard to build.
>
> (Yeah, I know. Go ahead. Flame me.)
Thanks for the invitation, but your point is valid enough to
deserve a reply. tlhIngan Hol was invented for the movies. As
such it was enormously overbuilt with a vast vocabulary and an
unnecessarily comprehensive grammar. Okrand decided to take the
task of making a language for the Klingons seriously enough to
make it a viable language, all while remaining humorous enough
to suit the character of the culture. The puns in the
vocabulary prove that.
So he was asked to write a few lines for a movie and he created
one of the more extensive fictional languages ever created for
a fictional people. It lacks the development that a real
language would have after thousands of years of use, but it
really does give you the tools to say a surprising range of
thoughts. As you learn the tools better, your expressive
abilities with the language will grow.
I, for one, enjoy the limits. When a threshold is crossed,
something wonderful happens. Often the Klingon expression winds
up conveying the meaning better than the English.
Trust me. {{:)>
> Qapla'
> Thornton
>
charghwI'