tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Feb 26 15:29:06 1999
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Re: Dap naQ
ja' peHruS:
>Dap naQ
>
>Beginners, Beware! Do NOT attempt to learn Klingon from this article. The
>underlined words are used incorrectly. This intentional.
What do you mean by "underlined" words? I saw a handful with asterisks or
braces around them, but they weren't the ones that were incorrect.
>This is to show
>that pulling a word out of the dictionary and thinking you MIGHT know how to
>use it is dangerous.
Yeah, right. It looks more to me like you've shown that pulling a word out
of the dictionary and intentionally using it wrong is just stupid, unless
your goal is to write utter nonsense. I won't pass judgement on whether
that goal is stupid or not; I'll just point out that it runs counter to the
more challenging goal of communicating effectively.
You know something? When I tried to read this travesty, I was completely
unable to tease any meaning out of most of it. I decided to run it through
my translator/grammar-checker program just to see what came out -- and what
came out was surprisingly readable in English. That boggles my mind. The
simplistic word-for-word translator was able to decode it better than all
of the context-sensitive pattern-matching idea-comprehending neuron paths
in my brain. Obviously it was translated from English into something like
Klingon with at best complete disregard for context, or more likely with an
active goal to choose translations that went *against* the desired meaning.
While I do have to admire the quantity of perverse effort that must have
gone into making it, I must also wonder what that same effort might have
been capable of producing had it been used for good and not for evil.
-- ghunchu'wI'