tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Jun 03 22:44:37 2004

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Re: mu' lo' QaQ 'oSbogh mu'tlheghmey

De'vID jonwI' ([email protected]) 

SuStel:
>Native speakers may be experts, but experts are not necessarily native 
>speakers.  I'm an expert, and I can tell you there's more about Klingon 
>that I don't know than I that which I do.  Klingon is not just any second 
>language.  In most second languages learned, there's a native speaker
>available who can tell you when you get something wrong, even if it's 
>obscure or subtle.  We have no such resource in Klingon.  Learning Klingon 
>is not the same as learning another secondary language, unless you are 
>learning that secondary language in complete isolation from any native
>speakers (in which case you are sure to get a lot of it wrong).

(Or unless that secondary language is another fictional
language like Tolkien's Elvish, in which case things are
probably worse.  I don't know any Elvish myself, but I imagine
that it can't be all that complete, and its inventor is also
not around to answer questions about it.)

I'm not skilled enough (yet!) to be an expert, but for what
it's worth, I'm in agreement with the experts who have spoken
so far on this one.  The mere act of having a list of examples
drawn up by "experts" will confer a kind of authority on such
a list that it doesn't have (or deserve).  For those words for
which we have only simple glosses and no canonical examples, a
beginner's guess about its usage is just about as good as an
expert's.

On the other hand, a complete collection of canonical usages
would be nice.  There are some of us who don't have the
resources (time or money) to track down all the sundry Star
Trek cards and magazines where (Okrandian) Klingon is used,
though HolQeD does a pretty good job of getting most of them.
If lay'tel SIvten wants to compile such a list, then all
power to him.  But if he wants to make up new examples for
words whose proper usages we don't know (like <num> before
its usage was revealed), then I think that's a bad idea.

--
De'vID

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