tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Jan 02 23:34:34 2004
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Re: MOST terminology
On Friday 02 January 2004 13:04, Lieven Litaer wrote:
snip...
> SuStel is right to get angry. We don't know what that word is in
> klingon, and we don't even know if there is any at all! So why
> bother?
>
> A general advice, which I repeat frequently:
> There are several thousand of words, hundreds of affixes,
> tons of proverbs, more than fifty idiomatic expressions plus the
> same amount of slang words -- Learn these first before you struggle
> with new words that do not exist (yet).
Well, yes, except that if Klingonists want to have their own office
suite to use to create spread sheets in Klingon, sophisticated word
documents in Klingon, graphs, computer generated drawings, etc, in
Klingon, then it will be helpful to generate translations for the
words on this list linked below. Microsoft Office, to my knowledge,
is not localized to Klingon, nor is any other mature office suite, to
my knowledge.
As I understand it, "localized" means that when you bring up the
program, rather than seeing the English words "File", "Edit", "View",
etc on your word processing tool bar, you instead see the romanized
Klingon equivalents. And rather than having your office suite mark
all of your Klingon words as spelling and grammar errors, your office
suite would actually spell check those romanized Klingon words, and
underline only those words which were misspelled in Klingon! In other
words, we are talking about an office suite which has the look and
feel of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but would be unintelligible to
anyone who did not speak tlhIngan Hol.
If I'm not mistaken, most mastery of language occurs through necessity.
Read Klingon, or you can't open a file. Read Klingon, or you can't
initialize your spell checker. Read Klingon, or you can't tell the
difference between "copy", "cut", "paste" or "delete". Is a friend of
yours making snide little remarks occasionally about Klingon not being
a full language? Next time they are looking over your shoulder, open
your word processor in Klingon, and let them puzzle over just what the
hell it is that you are doing. "What application is THAT? It LOOKS
like Microsoft Word, but what are all those strange words on the tool
bar? Is that Microsoft Word in Russian? I didn't know you could
speak Russian!"
qoloS