tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jan 09 03:21:06 1995

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Re: TKD3 & other expansions w...


Guido writes:

>I'm not as read up on Esp history as perhaps I'd like to be, but if it was
>the case that Zamenhof let his creation loose to public domain, I'm wondering
>what central power maintained a unity of the language, ie, what kept it from
>diverging into numerous idiodialects. This would be likely to happen because
>one person may devise a word or construction for something, and another may
>devise another for the same thing. Such a process may be even more disastrous
>among Klingonists if there are those who want to devise new grammar.

The fact of the matter is that Esperanto is not 100% unified;  there is
some idiolectal variation, especially in neologisms.  Case in point:  my
friend Patrick Wynne was telling me the other day that the _Plena Ilustrita
Vortaro_ (the most comprehensive Esperanto dictionary) gives the word for
AIDS as "Aidoso", whereas the magazine _Monato_ uses "Aideso" (or maybe it
was the other way around).  Popular use will determine which of the two
will eventually survive, just as in natural languages.  If you look in
Esperanto books from around the turn of the century or before, the United
States of America was then called "Unuigitaj Sxtatoj Amerikaj" or some
variant of this.  A neologism "Usono" started being used around 1910, and
nowadays all Esperanto speakers call the U.S.A. "Usono", the more unwieldy
terms having died out long ago.    

Neologisms in Esperanto are of essentially two sorts:  (1) words formed
from existing Esperanto elements, and (2) loans from the national
languages, usually modified to fit the structure of Esperanto.  We see both
of these types in the Klingon neologisms in the posts on this list (words
of type 2 generally retaining their original orthography and set between
asterisks or slashes), and such messages can be understood if the reader's
(and the writer's) command of Klingon is good enough and if the reader can
ascertain the meanings of the loan words either from context or from a
knowledge of the language from which they were borrowed.   

Let's suppose that someone, say Anthony Appleyard, were to write a text
containing words or grammatical structures that were not "canonical"
Klingon but were instead made up out of whole cloth.  He might get his idea
across, but then again he might not.  As Guido wrote: "The point of
studying and using a language is to be mutually intelligible."  Let's
suppose, for the sake of argument, that people *did* understand what Mr.
Appleyard was trying to say and that some people even started to use some
of his newfangled, made-up Klingon. If we regard Klingon as a living
language (such as Esperanto has become) with ourselves as the speakers, and
if enough people start using these new words or constructions, then these
new inventions will become part of the language.  I think, however, that
there would be too much resistance from the Klingon-speaking community at
large for this to happen.

If, on the other hand, we regard tlhIngan Hol as the language of the
Klingon Empire, a *foreign* language that we are learning as outsiders,
relying on teaching materials written by someone who knows the language
(Marc Okrand), then any modifications made by one or more of us cannot be
regarded as a valid change to the language.  Let's say that someone wants
to say "sausage" in German but can't find the word for it in his/her
textbook (okay, it would have to be a really inadequate German textbook). 
The German word for "sausage" is "Wurst", but our student doesn't know
this, so s/he calls it "Schnitzengruben".  "Wurst" is still the German word
for "sausage" and "Schnitzengruben" is not, even if our student's entire
German class starts calling sausage "Schnitzengruben".


*****************************************************************
*       Arden R. Smith          [email protected]      *
*                                                               *
*  "welaga nu, waltant got [quad Hiltibrant],  wewurt skihit."  *
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