tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun May 30 07:41:34 1999
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RE: nuq Qub latlhpu'? (KLBC)
> > mu'ghom vIgherbogh, citing MSN (whatever that is), claims that <magh>
can
> > also mean "to indicate, reveal". lI'qu' mu'ghomvam 'ach vIvoqHa'.
>
> The MSN thingee (whatever they called it) included a wordlist with
expanded
> definitions for quite a few words. Unfortunately, the definitions were all
> made up by the MSN staff, with no input from Okrand at all. As a result,
> anything obtained from there should be treated as, at best, a wild guess.
> It's often downright wrong. My favorite examples were the time words like
> <jaj> - "The time it takes for the *Earth* to rotate once on its axis", or
> something similar.
The MSN reference is from the Star Trek: Continuum (STC), which used to be
part of the premium content of the Microsoft Network (MSN). There's an area
called the Klingon Compendium, which includes a linguistic database.
Basically a word list of Klingon words.
I recently had the opportunity to communicate directly with one of the staff
members of that site about the definitions. They have words and short
definitions provided by Okrand, but re-typed by their staff (which
introduces all those spelling errors). Then they have an expanded
definition, which is where all the bad definitions have been coming from.
In the word list, you'll see a Klingon word followed by a short English
definition; these are directly from Okrand. If you click on a word you'll
see an expanded definition, which is not from Okrand.
We were given the opportunity to clean up the spellings and expanded
definitions, in the master database for that site. Over 25% of the words
had spelling errors, mostly of the I/l type. We also corrected all the
Earth/Klingon year/day/minute types of problems, and changed some obviously
wrong definitions (like {meH} is a bridge that spans a divide, instead of
the bridge of a ship). For instance, the STC entry for {rep} "hour" used to
be "A unit of time equal to 1/24th of an Earth day." It now reads "Noun,
unit of time, a Klingon hour." All of these corrections are posted to the
STC site now!
We tried to pursuade them not to use the goofy phonetic representations for
Klingon words, since the word as written is already a phonetic
representation. They would't go for it. So, Kevin (valwI'na') put together
a key using the 'Useful Expressions' as a guide, and re-wrote all the
phonetic representations using this key, so they'd be internally consistent
throughout the STC site, and consistent with that you'd see in TKD.
Having had an opportunity to work directly with the STC database, I can tell
you that there are no new words in there, that haven't since been revealed
in KGT and other sources. When the site first went live, Okrand suggested
that there may be some new words in there, which is why some of us (at
least, me) started monitoring this site. (We didn't know at the time that
the expanded definitions were NOT from Okrand.) But there's currently
nothing new in there.
-- Holtej 'utlh
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