tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Feb 28 10:22:14 1997

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Re: Holna' wIlo'bejtaH

ghItlh Qunchuy:
>chaq vay'vaD Quj 'oH tlhIngan Hol'e' 'ach pabnIStaH Quj

Qoch'a' vay'?  HochvaD potlhqu'law' qechvam.

I think this concept is important enough for everyone to be aware of
that I'm going to expand on it in English.

Even if the Klingon language is "just a game" to some, games still 
have rules.  When someone breaks the rules, adds his own, or simply
interprets them in such a different way from most other people that 
they might as well not be the same rules, everyone playing the game 
suffers (with the possible exception of the "cheater").

The rules of a language are spelled out in its grammar.  While there 
is obviously room for discussion on some points, I don't think that
adding grammar or "relaxing the rules" in order to make it easier to
translate sentences from English to Klingon is a defensible position. 
Anything that makes it easier to translate the words while making it 
harder to understand the resulting sentences seems counterproductive 
at best.  When *I* use language, my goal is to communicate ideas, not
to produce piles of translated text.

(In the extreme example, one could declare the translation of every
English word to be the Klingon word "chIm" and make writing in Klingon
trivial at the cost of making reading in Klingon impossible.)

-- ghunchu'wI'

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