tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Nov 20 04:37:29 2011
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Re: [Tlhingan-hol] A new canon fragment?
I've seen a few tweets (such as this one: https://twitter.com/seanhewitt/status/138227308522774528 ) now saying that Marc Okrand is in the album's credits, so it would appear to be canon.
So, I suppose this would refer to particularly snowy conditions that make the world white?
________________________________________
From: Rohan Fenwick - QeS 'utlh [[email protected]]
Sent: Tuesday, November 15, 2011 12:54
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Tlhingan-hol] A new canon fragment?
I was just reading Language Log (you should all too) and came across an
article about the album "50 Words For Snow", about to be released by
Kate Bush. The authors of Language Log have a special gripe about the
myth of the plethora of Eskimo words for snow, and they keep an eye out
for mentions of it. Geoff Pullum reviewed the title track of the album
to find out if it's another instance of the trope, and found that the
"50 words" are not Eskimo or Inuit or Yupik.
But in an interview with Bush by the Dutch music magazine Oor is the
following (I've translated into English):
"...At number 42 is the phrase {peDtaH 'ej chIS qo'}. What the hell is
that?
‘What do you think?’
I have no idea.
‘Then have a guess.’
Is it a computer language?
‘It's Klingon!’
Sorry?
‘Klingon. The language they speak in Star Trek.’
Stephen Fry has here - according to the credits - the pseudonym
Professor Joseph Yupik. Yupik is the name of an Eskimo culture, I have
found via Google. Has Stephen Fry come up with these fifty often super-
weird descriptions? Or did you?
‘No, I came up with them all, but Stephen happened to know the man who
had created the Klingon language.’" (Oor, Nov-Dec 2011, p. 39)
So we may have another small fragment of canon, albeit a tiny one, if
Fry did in fact ask Marc to write the phrase (and the perfect structure
and orthography make me think he probably did). Anyone else know more?
There's a scan of the relevant page of the interview (in Dutch) at
kate-bush-archives.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/oor3-724x1024.jpg
QeS 'utlh
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