tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Mar 24 10:34:15 1999

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Re: bogh veng noy'Ighrov (fwd)



To add my comments to ghunchu'wI''s:

The typical problem with this approach (starting out by writing 
something huge) is that the goal of having written something 
huge can easily blind you to some holes you may have in some of 
the basic skills of using the language. The goal presses you to 
develop ways of wholesale encoding English into Klingon without 
a lot of care about what the resulting Klingon looks like. It 
may be impenetrable to anyone else, but once you've invested a 
lot into it, you don't want to hear that. You just want to 
accomplish your goal of writing something huge. You got it from 
English into something akin to Klingon, therefore, you are 
finished.

Do infants start off learning their first language by writing a 
novel? This is not the way to learn a language.

You start out conversationally. Write us about your day. Get 
feedback on how well you got your point across. Read what other 
people write. Build your skills. Maybe write a VERY short story 
and post it here. Get feedback on how well you are doing.

By the time you are really ready to write something huge, your 
confidence in the language will be great enough that you won't 
need anyone to proofread it as it goes along. Just publish it in 
jatmey with an editor helping you out. But if you want to write 
an epic within your first year of using the language, you are 
probably not taking the language very seriously.

charghwI' 'utlh

On Tue, 23 Mar 1999 21:41:18 -0800 (PST) Alan Anderson 
<[email protected]> wrote:

> ja' quljIb:
> >I've recently been inspired to write an original Klingon epic...
> 
> rInbe'chu'bogh lut'a'lIj vIlaDQo'.  tlhetlhtaHvIS vIbuSHa'.
> rInDI' vIlaDqang.
> 
> I'm not even going to look at it.  I don't really think the mailing
> list is the appropriate forum for a large project like this anyway.
> I'll read it when it's finished. :-)
> 
> You're probably setting yourself up for frustration by attempting
> something so ambitious before you have even seen the entirety of
> the vocabulary, and before you've spent some time "soaking" in the
> language.  But if it helps you learn, I won't discourage you from
> making the attempt.
> 
> -- ghunchu'wI'




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