tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu May 20 21:41:07 1999

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Re: Puns as beginners' words (KLBC)



ja' Voragh:
>Some of us - me for one - annotate our own on-line glossary files with the
>puns for I agree with you: they make excellent mnemonic aides.

I've never really understood the usefulness of such mnemonics for learning
a language.  The eventual goal is to be able to turn thought into words and
speech, and vice versa, at a speed approaching instantaneous, right?  For a
task like that, I find that pun-based mnemonics actively get in the way.

>On the
>other hand - and on this list there's always another hand! - some people
>actually find the puns annoying as they claim to be unable to forget the
>joke whenever they read "serious" Klingon.

Exactly.  :-)

>  For them the puns spoil the
>illusion of a natural, albeit alien, language.  Go figure.

It's not quite that bad.  The puns themselves I can ignore, unless I've
somehow managed to get a mnemonic connection in my brain.  I have the
same trouble with English; every time I type the word "separate", I am
consciously aware of the mnemonic phrase "there is A RAT in separate."
For some reason, a kettle of money appears in my brain whenever I write
the word {qaSpa'}.  It's a "cash pot", but I don't know why it's there.
The once-useful association has been lost to wherever such things go,
but the image remains to annoy me.

>Those people
>don't have to read any of the threads with "pun" or "joke" in the Subject
>line.

Oh, I appreciate the jokes tremendously, and in fact I collect them for
personal reasons.  I find them all the more striking because usually I
have known and used the word for a while without any clue that there's
a pun or in-joke involved.

-- ghunchu'wI'




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