tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Jan 09 07:23:39 2015
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Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Klingon Word of the Day: pegh
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lojmIt tI’wI’ nuv ‘utlh<div class="">Retired Door Repair Guy</div>
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<br class=""><div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Jan 9, 2015, at 4:41 AM, De'vID <<a href="mailto:[email protected]"; class="">[email protected]</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class="">lojmIt tI'wI' nuv:<br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class="">I wish that Okrand and a publisher would provide The Compleat Klingon Dictionary, perhaps electronically so that we could have updates. Annotations. Examples of useage. Explicit commitment in the definition to allow or exclude direct objects.<br class="">It would place more of a burden on the author of the book than any centralized entity has taken on so far, but the truth is, this burden must be born somewhere, and in this case spreading the burden among more shoulders doesn’t make the burden born by each shoulder any lighter.<br class=""></blockquote><br class="">I'm not Marc Okrand, but I do maintain {boQwI'}, which is basically<br class="">exactly what you've just described.<br class=""></div></blockquote><div><br class=""></div><div>Each of us maintains a dictionary that attempts to complete the materials provided to us by Paramount/ViaCom/whatever-the-current-corporate-structure-may-be. That you hand yours out doesn’t make it any more official or legitimate than the ones maintained by everyone else, since you are singularly the author, without the kind of feedback I got from the group when I maintained the New Words List.</div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">1. It's electronic (though it's available only on Android, and with<br class="">some effort on Windows, OS X, and Chrome OS).<br class=""></div></blockquote><div><br class=""></div><div>This restriction alone makes it a non-starter. At least Lieven’s list is Web-based so that it is not platform-specific. I don’t use Windows or Android or ChromeOS devices, and I’m not alone. Do I have to go out and buy hardware that I don’t have any other use for so that I can use your software, since you’d like it to become the only standard lexicon? That’s cheeky.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>I’ve kept my lexicon in MS Word, on Palm OS devices in a J-File database, in MS Access, in Bento, and now in TapForms. Each of these has been useful to me, and I could have shared them with those with the necessary hardware and software, but in all cases, it would have been a subset of the community. The New Words List was the compromise I made between Viacom’s legitimate copyright interests and truly sharable media. You’ve done good work with boQwI’, but you’ve begun to take yourself too seriously.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>If your offering is not platform independent, and it doesn’t deal with the issue of copyrighted material, then you really shouldn’t be sharing it. You are creating a privileged subset of the speaking community who can benefit from your research without effort on their part, and without the necessity of buying the published materials that provide royalties for Marc Okrand and legitimate income for the publishers of his work. This is not as noble a result as you seem to think it is.</div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">2. It's open source and updatable by anyone (although in practice only<br class="">Lieven and I have made updates to the database).<br class=""></div></blockquote><div><br class=""></div><div>If it’s updatable on independent platforms, then it’s not standardized.</div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">3. It has annotations for part of speech and things like slang, body<br class="">parts, etc., as well as links to other entries, related words, notes,<br class="">and so on.<br class=""></div></blockquote><div><br class=""></div><div>Good. Every lexicon should.</div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">4. It has examples of usage.<br class="">5. It distinguishes between verb transitivity classes. Here are the<br class="">verb transitivity annotations from the header file:<br class=""> part_of_speech = v (verb):<br class=""> ambi (ambitransitive): may be either i or t<br class=""> i (intransitive): must not take an object<br class=""> \ i_c: intransitive and confirmed<br class=""> is (int. and stative): of the form "to be (something)",<br class=""> can be used as an adjective<br class=""> t (transitive): may take an object<br class=""> \ t_c: transitive and confirmed<br class=""> pref: a verb prefix<br class=""> suff: a verb suffix<br class=""></div></blockquote><div><br class=""></div><div>The problem here is that we don’t always know whether a word is transitive or not. We find out piecemeal. The glosses are frequently ambiguous, and different people interpret them differently. Sometimes canon adds evidence one way or the other, but there are a lot of Klingon words that have never been used in canon, and when new canon appears, it often surprises us. This is my whole point of frustration. The best we can do is guess, while collecting evidence one way or the other.</div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">I actually went through and annotated every single verb and looking<br class="">for confirmation of its transitivity. See the history of that process<br class="">here:<br class=""><a href="https://code.google.com/p/klingon-assistant/issues/detail?id=32"; class="">https://code.google.com/p/klingon-assistant/issues/detail?id=32</a><br class=""></div></blockquote><div><br class=""></div><div>Great. Many of us have made this effort. Sort of an extended interview with Maltz going over the entire vocabulary and getting him to commit to a level of definition he’s never shown any interest in accepting, our resources are limited.</div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">Here's the entry for {meQ}, as an example:<br class=""><a href="https://code.google.com/p/klingon-assistant/source/browse/KlingonAssistant/data/mem-08-m.xml"; class="">https://code.google.com/p/klingon-assistant/source/browse/KlingonAssistant/data/mem-08-m.xml</a><br class=""><br class=""> <table name="mem"><br class=""> <column name="_id">20740</column><br class=""> <column name="entry_name">meQ</column><br class=""> <column name="part_of_speech">v:ambi</column><br class=""> <column name="definition">burn</column><br class=""> <column name="definition_de">brennen, verbrennen</column><br class=""> <column name="synonyms"></column><br class=""> <column name="antonyms"></column><br class=""> <column name="see_also">{mIQ:v}</column><br class=""> <column name="notes">If there is no object, then the subject is<br class="">the thing burning, e.g., {meQtaHbogh qachDaq Suv qoH neH.:sen}[2] If<br class="">there is an object, then the subject is burning the object, e.g.,<br class="">{to'waQ meQ vutwI'.}[3] {meQ:v:nolink} can also be used adjectivally,<br class="">e.g., {Ha'DIbaHmey meQ Sop 'e' tIv tera'nganpu'@@Ha'DIbaH:n:1, -mey:n,<br class="">meQ:v, Sop:v, 'e':n, tIv:v, tera'ngan:n, -pu':n}.[4]</column><br class=""> <column name="hidden_notes">In the sentence from {CK:src},<br class="">{tIv:sen:nolink} should have been {lutIv:sen:nolink} since<br class="">{tera'nganpu':n:nolink} is plural.</column><br class=""> <column name="components"></column><br class=""> <column name="examples"></column><br class=""> <column name="search_tags"></column><br class=""> <column name="source">[1] {TKD:src}, [2] {TKW p.111:src}, [3]<br class="">{KGT p.191:src}, [4] {CK:src}</column><br class=""> </table><br class=""><br class="">You can also see the entries for {pegh} here:<br class="">https://code.google.com/p/klingon-assistant/source/browse/KlingonAssistant/data/mem-11-p.xml<br class=""><br class="">I don't consider it a burden in any way to maintain, but I do wish<br class="">that more people would contribute. I think this is the sort of thing<br class="">that the KLI ought to be maintaining. The role of being its maintainer<br class="">fell upon me by accident: I originally wrote a relatively simple<br class="">dictionary/grammar analyser app for myself. I showed it to some people<br class="">at the Germany qepHom, and they asked me to share it with them, so I<br class="">open-sourced it and put it on what was then the Android Market (now<br class="">known as the Google Play Store). The next thing you know, people<br class="">started sending me bug reports and feature requests, pointing out<br class="">errors and typos, and so on. Now it's a pretty complete database of<br class="">all canon Klingon words, and quite a few extended canon ones too.<br class=""></div></blockquote><div><br class=""></div><div>I also accidentally found myself as maintainer of an official lexicon. At qep’a’ wa’DIch (or maybe cha’DIch), I brought booklet-like printouts of The Annotated Klingon Dictionary, the MS Word document I was using at the time to maintain my personal lexicon. Others on the mailing list had shown interest in it, so I printed some extra copies, for people that I knew had already purchased all the copyrighted material available at the time.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>Okrand saw it and was impressed. He said that he didn’t actually have a single word list, himself. He just had lots of notes on scraps of paper, and he used the published dictionary alongside these scraps of paper. He found it very useful to have one alphabetized list with sources noted, and exceptions marked (for differences between the English->Klingon and Klingon->English sides of the dictionary, as well as folding in the words from other sources than The Klingon Dictionary). He took one. To say I was surprised was an understatement.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>I made a mistake, which he apparently caught, giving one definition to an adjacent word, and in one of his later lexicons (Klingon for the Galactic Traveler, I think), he listed my erroneous entry as an official definition. Suddenly, the language had another synonym. I was simultaneously embarrassed and honored by the entry. These are not commonly combined emotions.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>So, from that, I was asked to create The New Words List, which I did with a lot of trepidation and forethought. I maintained it for a decade or so, until interpersonal politics within the group made it unrewarding for me to maintain my dedication to the task. I withdrew for a time and deleted the password to The New Words list from my encrypted lists of passwords. Time passed. I forgot the password as well.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>I announced that I was not going to maintain the list any longer on this list and asked for someone else to take over. No one did. The list became obsolete. Upon my return later, I asked for the password to be reset so that I could take it over again when I returned and got no response. While I’ve never considered myself to own the lexicon — I never used it myself because I created it out of the larger lexicon I maintained that had the copyrighted material in it that I did not feel that the KLI Website should contain. I maintained two separate lexicons: The one I used, and the one designed specifically for sharing.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>I was willing to go back to maintaining the list, or hand it off to anyone else willing to responsibly manage the task. When neither suggestion received any support from the group, the New Words List essentially died. I don’t think that boQwI’ is an effective replacement. My first preference would be for someone else to take over the New Words List. It should either be updated or removed from the Web site. Leaving it there, obsolete is a disservice to the community. If no one wishes to take it over, I’d be willing to take it back, though it will require a lot of time I don’t especially have, and it would be a long time before the list was accurately current, if this were the solution.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>The advantages of the New Words List:</div><div><br class=""></div><div>1. Web-based, centralized, accessible to all.</div><div>2. Geared to being a supplement to copyrighted material instead of replacing that material, allowing any new person to build their own lexicon with their own tools of choice.</div><div>3. Organized both alphabetically for direct use by those who choose to use it as a second Appendix to TKD, and also by date, so that people can update their own lexicons easily, whenever they choose.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>Since it lists sources and assumes that people are buying the source material, it does not pretend to carry more authority than it actually carries, and since the full mailing list has access to it, I got feedback on its maintenance and balanced the interests of those commenting with the interests in consistency across time. New entries in the list should not be of a different nature than old entries in the list.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>I respect the work you’ve done. I can certainly empathize with the effort you’ve put into it. I can’t support it becoming the new Complete Lexicon. It’s not freely accessible to all, and it seeks to replace everyone’s lexicon instead of providing people with the resources to create their own, supplementing copyrighted materials that all students of Klingon should own.</div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">The only major limitation is that it isn't available on iOS or<br class="">accessible through the web. Someone has actually volunteered to port<br class="">it to be a web app, and I'm investigating porting to iOS.<br class=""><br class="">Anthony Appleyard:<br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class="">Ditto. We need a publicly-accessible source of ALL information about Klingon, all together in one place. With any major Earth language that would be done. Currently, some of it is in this book, some is in that book, some is revealed here and there at qepmey, bits all over the place.<br class=""></blockquote><br class="">One issue with gathering all information about Klingon into a<br class="">publicly-accessible source is that most of those sources are<br class="">copyrighted. I have been asked to include a lot more grammar help in<br class="">{boQwI'}, or to include what would effectively be the grammar sections<br class="">of TKD, but I've refrained from doing so. People have also asked me to<br class="">put the explanations of the sentences from KGT and TKW into the<br class="">entries for those sentences, but what the entries say right now is<br class="">that the sentence is slang, or an idiom, or archaic, or whatever, with<br class="">a pointer to look to page so-and-so of KGT or TKW for more<br class="">information. A number of people have remarked to me that {boQwI'}<br class="">would be a lot more useful as a learning tool (rather than just a<br class="">reference tool) if it was more "complete", but the decision to leave<br class="">out certain things is deliberate, since I don't want to do anything<br class="">which might be seen as potentially negatively affecting Marc Okrand's<br class="">income (I assume he earns royalties for his books/tapes/CDs) or<br class="">CBS/Paramount's profits. For {boQwI'} to be truly useful, you need to<br class="">own most of the official Klingon-language products (and thus have paid<br class="">Okrand and CBS/Paramount), and that's deliberate.<br class=""></div></blockquote><div><br class=""></div><div>Good. This is well thought-out. Another issue that people seem blind to is that if you cross-reference EVERYTHING and put in lots of canon and commentary, then searches tend to pull up far too many false results. A dictionary should be a dictionary. A grammar book should be a grammar book. A tutorial should be a tutorial. We are not replacing TKD here. One size does not fit all. Each task is best done with a carefully limited scope.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>People would like to have a servant who simply translates everything for them. We should feel no responsibility for providing them with it. Klingon is not for sissies. Make your own lexicon. We should provide resources pointing back to copyrighted sources that makes the creation of that lexicon possible and effective. If Viacom wanted Klingon to be easy to learn and widely accepted, they wouldn’t push quite so hard at owning all things Klingon. So, we all compromise, and we all evolve, balanced in our compromises.</div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">OTOH, nothing stops any volunteers from filling out the entries in the<br class="">database the way that {meQ} has been done as shown above. There are<br class="">plenty of entries for which there exist canon examples, or<br class="">explanations of their usage in HolQeD or elsewhere, which are just<br class="">missing from those entries.<br class=""></div></blockquote><div><br class=""></div><div>And nothing stops volunteers from taking over The New Words List. Wishing volunteers existed doesn’t, however, bend the will of the masses.</div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">-- <br class="">De'vID<br class=""><br class="">_______________________________________________<br class="">Tlhingan-hol mailing list<br class=""><a href="mailto:[email protected]"; class="">[email protected]</a><br class="">http://mail.kli.org/mailman/listinfo/tlhingan-hol<br class=""></div></blockquote></div><br class=""></body></html>_______________________________________________
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