tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Nov 28 06:22:31 1995
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Re: qeylIS betleH and stuff
>Date: Mon, 27 Nov 1995 07:36:03 -0800
>From: "d'Armond Speers" <[email protected]>
>On Mon, 27 Nov 1995, Elizabeth C. Hoyt wrote:
>> I thought canon was just what MO writes.
>Well, we'd all like to believe this, and I think it's the unspoken rule
>on this list. He is the final authority, the one true source. But canon
>will be whatever comes from Paramount, whether they got Okrand to do it
>or not.
>The difference is, if Paramount did it, we're likely to say it's some
>unknown dialect, and forget about it. If Okrand says it, then we
>incorporate it into our knowledge of the language.
There isn't, in my mind, all that much difference between saying this and
simply saying that only Okrand can generate canon. One way or another, we
are going to do our best to ignore vigorously non-Okrand manglings of the
language.
The "official" KLI position be damned, so far as I care only Okrand can
generate canon. I will not contort my mental faculties to come up with
excuses and reasons for every benighted creation of some mealy-mouthed
Paramount writer with no concept of any language but English, an inhuman
deadline to meet, and photocopies of the Klingon lexicon. Something
claiming to be Klingon shows up on Star Trek, but is obviously wrong and
made up by some dork who had to put some words in there? Fine. That
doesn't make it any sort of canon to *me*. If a James Bond film had
Russians speaking incorrect Russian, that wouldn't mean that they had
discovered a new dialect or anything. It would mean that the scriptwriters
had simply not done a sterling job of research. (I've heard that the
Cyrillic writing at the beginning of the movie _The Hunt for Red October_
[not a Bond film] misspelled the words. I don't think anyone believes that
we've discovered something new and unsuspected about the Russian
language).
~mark