So what *did* the Klingon say to Captain Archer? Any translators here?
Darrell
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
At the end of "Broken Bow", Archer asks his translator what the Klingon said
and she says "you don't want to know"---well, I would like to know! (unless
they just had the actor speak gibberish, but since Klingon is an invented
language that's pretty well established, I doubt it. Anyone here speak
Klingon? What did he say?
Thanks.
David B.
Most Klingon you see on the screen nowadays is made up.
David B.
I mean here, not see. Doh!
Kavking
Or maybe hear, not see ;-)
K
.........we have plenty of youth, what we need is a fountain of
smart..............
(remove Q's, before replying)
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity;
and I'm not even sure about the universe."
--Albert Einstein
Alan Anderson
> ...(unless
> they just had the actor speak gibberish, but since Klingon is an invented
> language that's pretty well established, I doubt it.
Sorry to disappoint you, but the Powers that Be at Star Trek these
days treat linguistics with the same disregard they treat biology and
physics. With rare exceptions, which might easily be attributed to
random chance, it seems that the actors were indeed speaking
gibberish. Accounting for the fact that nobody had a clue how to
pronounce things, there were recognizable words and even phrases.
They just didn't fit together to make sense, either in or out of
context. The Klingon language they were speaking just isn't the
Klingon language which is presented in The Klingon Dictionary.
> Anyone here speak Klingon? What did he say?
The best I can make out, it was either "Thrusters death shoulder, darn
it!" or "If he dies, someone falls unconscious."
--
Alan Anderson, professional programmer and amateur Klingonist
proud member of the Klingon Language Institute since 1995
qo'mey poSmoH Hol -- language opens worlds -- http://www.kli.org/
Gul Ranko Cop
I copied this from a trekbbs.com discussion: "return were you are from or
die".
It came from this:
Chugh DaH hegh volcha vay
if now die shoulder one
If you change chugh to chegh (very similar sounding)you get:
return now die shoulder one
This is the part that many will disagree with me :) I felt that shoulder was
completely out of place so looked at the english word and took reduced
shoulder to should and got:
return now die should one/someone/somebody
Thus, my translation is:
Somebody (Archer and crew) should return to where they came from or they
will die.
--
I see the ghosts of navigators but they are lost
As they sail into the sunset they'll count the cost
As their skeletons accusing emerge from the sea
The sirens of the rocks, they beckon me
Derek Stevenson
news:3BB7C86F...@hotmail.com...
So which bits *aren't* made up?
Danny
Are you for real?
"Darrell" <darre...@home.com> wrote in message
news:EXJt7.138177$K6.64341144@news2...
The Inspector
>
>Are you for real?
Depends on how you define "real language." If you define it by having a
structure, vocabulary and syntax, then it is. If you define it by havcing
people use to communicate, then it is (there are small groups that do speak
Klingon quite fluently). If you define it by being taught in schools, Moorhead
College in Minnesota kindly obliged by having it as a language elective. If
you define it by the number of people speaking it then you must discount Latin
as a "real language."
For all intents and purposes even fictional languages and those "made up" by
people are indeed languages (Esperanto anyone?). ALL languages are made up,
they're human construction (memonics [sp?] not included, if you believe it
exists/existed at all).
So claiming it's not worth discussing in a serious way because it's "not real"
also precludes the discussion of thousands of languages depending on your
chosen criteria for a language. So far, Klingon has passed muster as a "real"
language by all definitions of a language. Point of fact, if you look up the
dictionary definition of "language" it passes that test too.
Now, if it a fictional language? Yes. But is it a language that could
function for communication? Yes. As stated before, because of it's ability to
function for the purposes of communication, small groups (such as KAG and the
KLG) have adopted it in conversation (including letters and e-mail). Are we
going to see the day when you can get government documents from the US
Government translated into Klingon as a matter of course, not likely (of
course, we won't see them purely in latin either.)
Cheers,
The Inspector
David B.
The stuff that comes from the Klingon Dictionary probably.
Derek Stevenson
> Derek Stevenson wrote:
> > "David B." <both...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> > news:3BB7C86F...@hotmail.com...
> > > Most Klingon you see on the screen nowadays is made up.
> >
> > So which bits *aren't* made up?
>
> The stuff that comes from the Klingon Dictionary probably.
Whoooosh!
WRH Bill
>and she says "you don't want to know"--
This particular bit bothered me. Archer and Sato aren't a couple of buddies
joking around; he's a military commander calling for a report from his
subordinate, and he damn well *does* want to know what the Klingons are saying,
whether he's going to like what he hears or not. Sato should have given Archer
an answer, or else he should have given her a royal chewing out as soon as they
were alone.
I don't know if the writers just thought this was cute, or if they did it
because they want to leave the audience in suspense as to what the Klingons
really did say, or both, but either way it was unrealistic.
"You can't kill the truth. Well, actually, you CAN kill it...but it'll come
back to haunt you later." (Capt. John Sheridan)
Mark Runyan
> > ...Anyone here speak Klingon? What did he say?
Not being an expert in Klingon, I don't wish to argue, but I thought I
detected an insulting term in the final two words, not vocabulary.
> It came from this:
> Chugh DaH hegh volcha vay
> if now die shoulder one
I 'interpreted' the Klingon as "You may live, <censored>". The
final two words sounded similar to a grave insult delivered by
Worf a time or two.
Didn't anyone have their Closed Captioning running? It must have
been spelled out.
Mark Runyan
Spooky Guy Next Door
(darre...@home.com) posted the following...
TBTB abandoned using Klingon as a real, actual language in DS9
--
Mark Gallagher
A thousand thousand slimy things lived on, and so did I
blog - http://www.cyberfuddle.com/infinitebabble/
cyberfuddle - http://www.cyberfuddle.com/
alt.startrek FAQ - http://www.altstartrek.f2s.com/
learn HTML - http://smiley.vh.mewl.net/markhtml/
Spooky Guy Next Door
(daniel...@lexisnexis.com) posted the following...
> Hey idiot Klingon is not a real language!
>
> Are you for real?
As a matter of fact, it *is* a real language.
Maybe not a 'natural' language, but it's definitely real.
However, it hasn't been used on Star Trek for many years.
Timo S Saloniemi
In practice meaning, TPTB only used Klingon as a real, actual language
in the movies, where they had the time and money and incentive. The
TV shows just used random snippets or single words, not long lines of
dialogue. Even in TNG.
One could of course say that the Klingon language itself has rapidly
deteriorated after the TOS times, and is now a grammarless collection
of old, new and borrowed words. Pretty much like English. :)
Timo Saloniemi
f-erenc szabo
>Hey idiot Klingon is not a real language!
It's real in every technical sense of the word:
1) It has a dictionary (plus grammar and syntax rules)
2) It's taught in some schools
3) Many people speak it (some very fluently). Maybe more
people speak it than speak Latin, Sanskrit or Esperanto?
The main thing differentiating Klingon from all other languages
is that it's nobody's FIRST language (same goes for Latin, Sanskrit
and Esperanto). But I can imagine some hardcore trekkie teaching
their baby to speak Klingon more than their native tongue.
Esperanto, like Klingon, is an invention. They did not
evolve over decades or centuries.
Are there any currently spoken languages that in fact are
documented as being originally invented in similar manner?
By the way, does Aramaic fall under the same category as
Latin and Sanskrit? By this I mean: nobody's FIRST language.
f-erenc szabo, smarty pants
Z+E+R+O+B+E+A+T
"NOW POWERED BY THE MIRACLE OF THE TRANSISTOR!"
Mark Hofer II
> is that it's nobody's FIRST language (same goes for Latin, Sanskrit
> and Esperanto). But I can imagine some hardcore trekkie teaching
> their baby to speak Klingon more than their native tongue.
>
> Esperanto, like Klingon, is an invention. They did not
> evolve over decades or centuries.
What's interesting, and a good example on why creating languages for
practical use doesn't work, is that more people speak Klingon fluently than
do Esperanto, by many expert estimates.
--
Mark Hofer
webm...@starbase16.com
www.starbase16.com
Alan Anderson
>
> TBTB abandoned using Klingon as a real, actual language in DS9
The TV shows never really had the luxury of taking the time to do it
right, but they at least tried for a while before giving up.
Reports are that Michael Dorn got rather upset when he heard about the
Klingon translation of the Bible. He insisted to the producers that
Klingon not be treated as a real language, because he didn't want to
contribute to what he saw as a stupid waste of time.
David Cornette
> Spooky Guy Next Door <mgall...@cyberfuddle.com> wrote
>>
>> TBTB abandoned using Klingon as a real, actual language in DS9
> The TV shows never really had the luxury of taking the time to do it
> right, but they at least tried for a while before giving up.
> Reports are that Michael Dorn got rather upset when he heard about the
> Klingon translation of the Bible. He insisted to the producers that
> Klingon not be treated as a real language, because he didn't want to
> contribute to what he saw as a stupid waste of time.
Is that why he made the "Conversational Klingon" tape?
--
David Cornette dcor...@isilzha.ne.mediaone.net
Free Dmitry Sklyarov http://www.freesklyarov.org/
Baseball Pythagorean Projections http://www.davidcornette.com/projection/
An Izzy Alcantara Fan Site http://www.davidcornette.com/izzy/
Nyrath the nearly wise
> Are there any currently spoken languages that in fact are
> documented as being originally invented in similar manner?
I'm not sure how many speakers there are, but
one such language is Lojban (a robust variant
of Loglan)
Alan Anderson
> What's interesting, and a good example on why creating languages for
practical use doesn't work, is that more people speak Klingon fluently
than
> do Esperanto, by many expert estimates.
No, the interesting thing is that this "fact" keeps getting spread by
people who never seem to be able to point to a definite source for
their information. :-/
I consider myself to be pretty well connected to the Klingon-speaking
community, and my best estimate of the number of people who speak
Klingon fluently is safely in the double digits. Esperanto certainly
enjoys hundreds of times more fluent speakers than Klingon, and
probably thousands or indeed tens of thousands.
Alan Anderson
> > ...Michael Dorn...didn't want to
> > contribute to what he saw as a stupid waste of time.
>
> Is that why he made the "Conversational Klingon" tape?
He made the audiotapes (including "The Klingon Way") long before he
understood that Klingon was a real language. He obviously never had
*any* idea how the language worked, or even how to pronounce it. From
his comments at conventions, I'm pretty sure that if he had known at
the time that people actually were learning it well enough to
communicate -- or indeed to write quite stirring poetry -- he'd have
balked at doing the Simon&Schuster audiotapes.
Alan Anderson
> The main thing differentiating Klingon from all other languages
> is that it's nobody's FIRST language (same goes for Latin, Sanskrit
> and Esperanto).
Esperanto *is* some people's first language. For a while during the
last century, there were a significant number Esperantists who married
and started families while having having only Esperanto as a common
language.
> But I can imagine some hardcore trekkie teaching
> their baby to speak Klingon more than their native tongue.
It's more likely to be a hardcore linguist than a hardcore trekkie.
And, in fact, it *was*. The fellow in question was actually raising
his son bilingual, without extra emphasis on the Klingon. But without
a handy group of Klingon-speaking friends around, the kid didn't
really enjoy it, and the experiment was quietly discontinued.
Seth Gordon
>
> By the way, does Aramaic fall under the same category as
> Latin and Sanskrit? By this I mean: nobody's FIRST language.
Well, about fifteen hundred to two thousand years ago, lots of people in
the Middle East spoke it as their first language.
I think there are some parts of Syria where Aramaic is still the local
native language.
--
"Any fool can write code that a computer can understand.
Good programmers write code that humans can understand."
--Martin Fowler
// seth gordon // wi/mit ctr for genome research //
// se...@genome.wi.mit.edu // standard disclaimer //
Raymond S. Wise
> inspe...@aol.commail writes:
> >Hey idiot Klingon is not a real language!
>
> It's real in every technical sense of the word:
>
> 1) It has a dictionary (plus grammar and syntax rules)
>
> 2) It's taught in some schools
>
> 3) Many people speak it (some very fluently). Maybe more
> people speak it than speak Latin, Sanskrit or Esperanto?
>
Unlikely in all three cases.
> The main thing differentiating Klingon from all other languages
> is that it's nobody's FIRST language (same goes for Latin, Sanskrit
> and Esperanto). But I can imagine some hardcore trekkie teaching
> their baby to speak Klingon more than their native tongue.
>
As another poster has pointed out, Esperanto is a first language for
some people. I am using "first language" here to mean a language one
is exposed to since birth and which one begins learning as soon one
can begin to speak. This is consistent, I believe, with the definition
of "first language" given in *The Oxford Companion to the English
Language,* at
http://www.xrefer.com/entry.jsp?xrefid=442100&secid=
Such Esperantists are called "denaskaj Esperantistoj," and there are
estimated to be about a thousand of them. See
http://www.esperanto.net/veb/faq.txt
As to the question of whether anyone has Sanskrit as a first language,
there appears to be some controversy. A few thousand people in India
list Sanskrit as their mother tongue on their census forms, and in
1998 the Madras High Court declared that Sanskrit was not a dead, but
a living language.
> Esperanto, like Klingon, is an invention. They did not
> evolve over decades or centuries.
>
> Are there any currently spoken languages that in fact are
> documented as being originally invented in similar manner?
>
> By the way, does Aramaic fall under the same category as
> Latin and Sanskrit? By this I mean: nobody's FIRST language.
>
There are still native speakers of Aramaic, but it is in danger of
extinction. See
http://www.atour.com/news/assyria/20010514a.html
I'm afraid that Klingon has the same problem as Latin: There is no
authority who can establish that a given item of new vocabulary is
"standard" for the language. There is no way, therefore, of
establishing the standard way of saying, for example, "videocassette
recorder" in Latin, or "mercy" in Klingon. This was the major
stumbling block in translating the Bible into Klingon, which is why
that project appears to be moribund.
As a result, Klingon must be considered not a real language, as
linguists would recognize the term, but a pidgin, and a particularly
limited pidgin at that.
--
Raymond S. Wise
Minneapolis, Minnesota USA
The Inspector
>>
>> It's real in every technical sense of the word:
>>
>> 1) It has a dictionary (plus grammar and syntax rules)
>>
>> 2) It's taught in some schools
>>
>> 3) Many people speak it (some very fluently). Maybe more
>> people speak it than speak Latin, Sanskrit or Esperanto?
>>
>
>
>Unlikely in all three cases.
Let's see...
1. The Klingon Dictionary by Marc Orklan.
2. (Being from Minnesota I'm ashamed you don't know this one.) Morehead
College taught it at a language elective.
3. Many KLG members speak it quite fluently, and two of my old college chums
condicted entire conversations in it.
Your point is now invalid.
>
>
>> The main thing differentiating Klingon from all other languages
>> is that it's nobody's FIRST language (same goes for Latin, Sanskrit
>> and Esperanto). But I can imagine some hardcore trekkie teaching
>> their baby to speak Klingon more than their native tongue.
As I recal, this one isn't mine. I think, it's been a while since I posted so
it very well could be.
>>
>
>
>As another poster has pointed out, Esperanto is a first language for
>some people. I am using "first language" here to mean a language one
>is exposed to since birth and which one begins learning as soon one
>can begin to speak. This is consistent, I believe, with the definition
>of "first language" given in *The Oxford Companion to the English
>Language,* at
>
>http://www.xrefer.com/entry.jsp?xrefid=442100&secid=
>
>Such Esperantists are called "denaskaj Esperantistoj," and there are
>estimated to be about a thousand of them. See
>
>http://www.esperanto.net/veb/faq.txt
>
>As to the question of whether anyone has Sanskrit as a first language,
>there appears to be some controversy. A few thousand people in India
>list Sanskrit as their mother tongue on their census forms, and in
>1998 the Madras High Court declared that Sanskrit was not a dead, but
>a living language.
>
I'll definately give you this one. Although the controversy over Sanskrit is
quite hot linguistically speaking. i imagien it will go on for a while yet
(most likely until it IS a dead language again, if there are any who speak it
as a first language now).
>
>> Esperanto, like Klingon, is an invention. They did not
>> evolve over decades or centuries.
>>
>> Are there any currently spoken languages that in fact are
>> documented as being originally invented in similar manner?
>>
>> By the way, does Aramaic fall under the same category as
>> Latin and Sanskrit? By this I mean: nobody's FIRST language.
>>
You know, I don't know if Aramaic is spoken by anyone as their first/primary
language. Never looked into it to be honest. If not, there's the possibility
of it going the same road as Sanskrit.
>
>
>There are still native speakers of Aramaic, but it is in danger of
>extinction. See
>
>http://www.atour.com/news/assyria/20010514a.html
>
>
>I'm afraid that Klingon has the same problem as Latin: There is no
>authority who can establish that a given item of new vocabulary is
>"standard" for the language. There is no way, therefore, of
>establishing the standard way of saying, for example, "videocassette
>recorder" in Latin, or "mercy" in Klingon. This was the major
>stumbling block in translating the Bible into Klingon, which is why
>that project appears to be moribund.
Actually, there is. Marc Orklan was called on to give the Klingon language the
verb "to be" for Star Trek 6 in order to translate the "To be or not to be"
from Hamlet. before that it did not have that verb, he says he left them out
just to be difficult.
>
>As a result, Klingon must be considered not a real language, as
>linguists would recognize the term, but a pidgin, and a particularly
>limited pidgin at that.
Here I give you some credit again. I agree it's a rather silly thing to
classify as a "real language". However, a case (a rather strong one) can be
made for it to be a "real language."
>
>
>--
>Raymond S. Wise
>Minneapolis, Minnesota USA
>
Just as a side point, the folks at Morehead College are Sci-fi nuts apparently,
this year they have a Critical Viewing of Doctor Who class (which filled nearly
immediatly) along with guest lecturers from the show, it's own text book, the
whole nine yards.
Alan Anderson
> > >Hey idiot Klingon is not a real language!
> >
> > It's real in every technical sense of the word:
> > 1) It has a dictionary (plus grammar and syntax rules)
> > 2) It's taught in some schools
> > 3) Many people speak it (some very fluently). Maybe more
> > people speak it than speak Latin, Sanskrit or Esperanto?
mpl...@my-deja.com (Raymond S. Wise) wrote:
> Unlikely in all three cases.
Unlikely? Perhaps, but true.
1) _The Klingon Dictionary_ by Marc Okrand, ISBN 0-671-74559-X
2) the college mentioned earlier, plus at least two "continuing
education" type short courses that I've seen advertised
3) See http://www.kli.org/tlhingan-Hol/ for the archives of a mailing
list where involved discussions in Klingon are common.
> I'm afraid that Klingon has the same problem as Latin: There is no
> authority who can establish that a given item of new vocabulary is
> "standard" for the language.
Not so. Among fluent Klingonists (and most people who aspire to
fluency), there's a general agreement that "we" do not create
vocabulary. We engage in the fantasy that this is a language about
which we have limited knowledge, and we are *learning* it, not
inventing it. There indeed is one authority: Marc Okrand, the
language's creator.
> There is no way, therefore, of
> establishing the standard way of saying, for example, "videocassette
> recorder" in Latin, or "mercy" in Klingon.
It's easy to establish the standard way of saying "mercy" in Klingon:
look it up in the dictionary. The word is {pung}.
> This was the major
> stumbling block in translating the Bible into Klingon, which is why
> that project appears to be moribund.
No, the major stumbling block was finding people who had both the
linguistic credentials and the time to do it. The Klingon Bible
Translation Project is a translation from the *original* texts, in
Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek.
> As a result, Klingon must be considered not a real language, as
> linguists would recognize the term, but a pidgin, and a particularly
> limited pidgin at that.
Again, not so. Please tell me what feature of Klingon you believe
invalidates it as a "real language, as linguists would recognize the
term," and what makes you call it a "pidgin".
Raymond S. Wise
> >> >Hey idiot Klingon is not a real language!
> >>
> >> It's real in every technical sense of the word:
> >>
> >> 1) It has a dictionary (plus grammar and syntax rules)
> >>
> >> 2) It's taught in some schools
> >>
> >> 3) Many people speak it (some very fluently). Maybe more
> >> people speak it than speak Latin, Sanskrit or Esperanto?
> >>
> >
> >
> >Unlikely in all three cases.
>
> Let's see...
>
> 1. The Klingon Dictionary by Marc Orklan.
>
> 2. (Being from Minnesota I'm ashamed you don't know this one.) Morehead
> College taught it at a language elective.
>
> 3. Many KLG members speak it quite fluently, and two of my old college chums
> condicted entire conversations in it.
>
> Your point is now invalid.
>
Sorry that I was insufficiently clear in what I wrote. When I said
"Unlikely in all three cases." I was referring not to the numbered
list above, but to the speculation that "Maybe more people speak
[Klingon] than speak Latin, Sanskrit or Esperanto?"
> >
> >
> >> The main thing differentiating Klingon from all other languages
> >> is that it's nobody's FIRST language (same goes for Latin, Sanskrit
> >> and Esperanto). But I can imagine some hardcore trekkie teaching
> >> their baby to speak Klingon more than their native tongue.
>
> As I recal, this one isn't mine. I think, it's been a while since I posted so
> it very well could be.
>
The main thing differentiating Klingon from all other languages is
that it violates many of Joseph H. Greenberg's "language universals."
Marc Okrand did this on purpose, of course.
No, that doesn't count. The authority has to be willing to continue to
be an authority, and I'm sure that Marc Okrand has no interest in
making all the new vocabulary that would be necessary to make Klingon
a truly useful human language. One of the things that Zamenhof, the
inventor of Esperanto, did which is part of the genius of the language
was to relinquish control over what was acceptable new vocabulary to
an academy: This was a definite improvement over the situation with
Volapük, the most popular constructed language before Esperanto, whose
inventor wanted to control all aspects of the language. As I said
previously, Latin does not have an authority (nor can it rely on
common usage as English does) to determine new vocabulary. Latin
speakers can't even agree on a common pronunciation! (There are are at
least a couple of world standards and many national varieties.)
>
> >
> >As a result, Klingon must be considered not a real language, as
> >linguists would recognize the term, but a pidgin, and a particularly
> >limited pidgin at that.
>
> Here I give you some credit again. I agree it's a rather silly thing to
> classify as a "real language". However, a case (a rather strong one) can be
> made for it to be a "real language."
>
Good grief! I take it you are using two meanings of "real language" in
the above sentence. I was interested only in the term as a linguist
might use it: In technical use, however, he or she would be more
likely to use the term "true language." For example, there are about a
hundred sign languages which linguists consider to be true languages,
but there are also several sign-language pidgins, such as one used in
Scandinavia, for use as a lingua franca among speakers of the national
sign languages used there.
>
> Just as a side point, the folks at Morehead College are Sci-fi nuts apparently,
> this year they have a Critical Viewing of Doctor Who class (which filled nearly
> immediatly) along with guest lecturers from the show, it's own text book, the
> whole nine yards.
I recently attended a meeting of an Esperanto group here in St. Paul,
in which I speculated that there were more Klingon speakers than
Esperanto speakers in Minnesota. My suggestion (which I based on the
fact that Minnesota seems to be a hotbed of Klingon-language learning)
was met with skepticism, and I am now skeptical of it myself. This
conversation was all in Esperanto, by the way. It was an odd
experience to be speaking Esperanto with other Esperantists after
having not done so for about twenty years.
Change of topic: I was going to write a post in which I blamed the
Vulcans for giving us humans the inaccurate transliteration "Klingon"
for "tlhingan" (as shown in the pilot episode of "Enterprise"). I
figured it would have been just as easy for us to say the Klingon
word. Then I read a description of how one must pronounce the phoneme
"tlh" (which is one letter in the original Klingon) and decided that
the Vulcans did us a favor!
Raymond S. Wise
> > > inspe...@aol.commail writes:
> > > >Hey idiot Klingon is not a real language!
> > >
> > > It's real in every technical sense of the word:
> > > 1) It has a dictionary (plus grammar and syntax rules)
> > > 2) It's taught in some schools
> > > 3) Many people speak it (some very fluently). Maybe more
> > > people speak it than speak Latin, Sanskrit or Esperanto?
>
> mpl...@my-deja.com (Raymond S. Wise) wrote:
>
> > Unlikely in all three cases.
>
> Unlikely? Perhaps, but true.
>
To repeat what I said in another post: "Sorry that I was
insufficiently clear in what I wrote. When I said 'Unlikely in all
three cases.' I was referring not to the numbered list [indicated],
but to the speculation that 'Maybe more people speak [Klingon] than
speak Latin, Sanskrit or Esperanto?'"
> 1) _The Klingon Dictionary_ by Marc Okrand, ISBN 0-671-74559-X
> 2) the college mentioned earlier, plus at least two "continuing
> education" type short courses that I've seen advertised
> 3) See http://www.kli.org/tlhingan-Hol/ for the archives of a mailing
> list where involved discussions in Klingon are common.
>
> > I'm afraid that Klingon has the same problem as Latin: There is no
> > authority who can establish that a given item of new vocabulary is
> > "standard" for the language.
>
> Not so. Among fluent Klingonists (and most people who aspire to
> fluency), there's a general agreement that "we" do not create
> vocabulary. We engage in the fantasy that this is a language about
> which we have limited knowledge, and we are *learning* it, not
> inventing it. There indeed is one authority: Marc Okrand, the
> language's creator.
>
Interesting. It is treated, then, in a very different way than
Esperanto or any other constructed language. However, this very fact
makes it questionable whether it is a true language. The reason is
that certain things are not permitted in true languages because they
are selected out, the language having been formed by an evolutionary
process. Thus, you could imagine a constructed language in which the
negative form of a sentence is formed by reversing the order of words
in the entire sentence: "I have three cookies" would mean you had
three cookies, and "cookies three have I" would mean that you did not
have three cookies. A computer might be able to handle such a language
(although even I have my doubts about that), but a person could not,
so that feature has been selected out of natural languages. In fact,
the constructed language Solresol had a similar feature which was used
to create certain vocabulary: the word for Devil was a reversed form
of the word for God. However, this feature conflicted with another
feature of Solresol where words were formed according to hierarchies.
The words formed by the reversal process did not fit the hierarchies
to which they should have belonged. In a natural language, such a
situation would very likely be selected against.
Marc Okrand deliberately constructed Klingon to be a language which
violated the "language universals" described by Joseph H. Greenberg.
How do we know at this point that one or more of those universals
violated by Klingon is not actually necessary for a human language?
Having a single man be the authority for a language sounds like
trouble to me: It sets you up for the possibility of schism when the
man dies. Better to set up a language academy, as Esperanto does. And
I still believe that Mr. Okrand has no interest in creating the
necessary vocabulary to make Klingon a fully functioning human
language.
> > There is no way, therefore, of
> > establishing the standard way of saying, for example, "videocassette
> > recorder" in Latin, or "mercy" in Klingon.
>
> It's easy to establish the standard way of saying "mercy" in Klingon:
> look it up in the dictionary. The word is {pung}.
>
My information came from material that was published at one time,
probably from *The Wall Street Journal* article "Translating the Bible
Into Suitable Klingon Stirs Cosmic Debate" by Came Dolan, which is
summarized on the following Web page:
http://ussgryphon.freewebsites.com/1994-10/23.htm
Note that it says on that page that "Problems arose over translating
words that have no corresponding Klingon words. The Klingons, vicious
warriors that they are, have no words, among the 2,000 or so of which
we know, for ideas like God, holy, mercy, compassion, atonement, and
forgiveness."
> > This was the major
> > stumbling block in translating the Bible into Klingon, which is why
> > that project appears to be moribund.
>
> No, the major stumbling block was finding people who had both the
> linguistic credentials and the time to do it. The Klingon Bible
> Translation Project is a translation from the *original* texts, in
> Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek.
>
That the project is moribund because of the problem of limited
vocabulary is another idea which is not mine, but which I read on a
Web page (for which I have no cite, unfortunately).
> > As a result, Klingon must be considered not a real language, as
> > linguists would recognize the term, but a pidgin, and a particularly
> > limited pidgin at that.
>
> Again, not so. Please tell me what feature of Klingon you believe
> invalidates it as a "real language, as linguists would recognize the
> term," and what makes you call it a "pidgin".
It is not what features Klingon has, but what features it does not
have. To begin with, I doubt that linguists will come to the
conclusion that Klingon is a real language until it has stood the test
of linguistic study, the results of which are printed in refereed
scientific journals and verified by other linguists. That is how
American Sign Language (ASL) was finally recognized as a language,
rather than being thought of as a primitive substitute for true
language.
However, just because linguists don't yet
recognize it as a true language does not mean it is not, in reality, a
true language. ASL must have been a true language, after all, before
it was recognized as such. So what makes a true language? Well, it has
to pass certain tests of adequacy. Take a look at what *The Oxford
Companion to the English Language* has to say about creoles:
From
http://www.xrefer.com/entry/441653
[quote]
The process of becoming a creole may occur at any stage as a makeshift
language develops from trade jargon to expanded pidgin, and can happen
under drastic conditions, such as where a population of slaves
speaking many languages has to develop a common language among slaves
and with overseers. In due course, children grow up speaking the
pidgin as their main language, and when this happens it must change to
meet their needs. Depending on the stage at which creolization occurs,
different types of structural expansion are necessary before the
language can become adequate.
[end quote]
The difference between a pidgin and a creole (and thus a true
language) is that a pidgin is suitable only for limited uses. A creole
and all other true languages are suitable for any use to which their
speakers put them. If new vocabulary is needed, it is made. The reason
that vocabulary remains limited in a pidgin is that no one sees the
point of going to all the trouble of learning a more complicated
vocabulary: Otherwise, why not just learn the other side's language?
There is also the question of the speaker's fluency with whatever
vocabulary and grammar the pidgin (or possible true language)does
possess. I mentioned in another post that there is a pidgin sign
language which is used as a lingua franca among the members of the
various national sign language groups of Scandinavia. If the people
who speak this language were to teach it to their children from birth,
we would expect that this language would eventually be recognized to
be a creole, especially after the children would have modified it to
meet their needs, as happened in the spoken pidgins-become-creoles
referred to above. I have talked to at least one person who believed
that Esperanto was a pidgin (although I would say it was at the very
least an "expanded pidgin" or "extended pidgin") because there is some
critical number of native speakers necessary for a pidgin to become a
creole. Perhaps he is right.
Alan Anderson
> Sorry that I was insufficiently clear in what I wrote. When I said
> "Unlikely in all three cases." I was referring not to the numbered
> list above, but to the speculation that "Maybe more people speak
> [Klingon] than speak Latin, Sanskrit or Esperanto?"
That was a parenthetical comment in the third point. If you didn't
actually mean the three numbered points when you said "all three
cases" I'll take your word for it, but I don't understand it.
> The main thing differentiating Klingon from all other languages is
> that it violates many of Joseph H. Greenberg's "language universals."
> Marc Okrand did this on purpose, of course.
Still, it's remarkable that nobody fluent in Klingon feels the need to
remark on those violations. It all seems perfectly...er, natural.
(The things that give *me* fits are homophones like {wej} "not
yet"/"three" and {neH} "want"/"only, merely", and even they feel like
natural features.)
> > >I'm afraid that Klingon has the same problem as Latin: There is no
> > >authority who can establish that a given item of new vocabulary is
> > >"standard" for the language...
> >
> > Actually, there is. Marc Orklan [sic]...
>
> No, that doesn't count. The authority has to be willing to continue to
> be an authority, and I'm sure that Marc Okrand has no interest in
> making all the new vocabulary that would be necessary to make Klingon
> a truly useful human language.
Your certainty is misplaced. :-) Marc Okrand indeed is willing to
continue in his role as the prime "researcher" of the Klingon
language, with assistance from his prime "informant" Maltz.
Klingon is already a truly useful language; it's just got blind spots
in the vocabulary that make it unsuited to things like cellular
biology and metallurgy. So do a lot of natural languages, such as
Italian, to some extent -- and in most cases, it's quite appropriate
to "borrow" words from another language which does have the requisite
vocabulary. For instance, le weekend (A.F. notwithstanding).
> One of the things that Zamenhof, the
> inventor of Esperanto, did which is part of the genius of the language
> was to relinquish control over what was acceptable new vocabulary to
> an academy...
If Okrand ever tires of the responsibility that comes with having
created a relatively popular conlang, the Klingon Language Institute
already exists. Not only does the KLI enjoy a friendly working
relationship with him, but it also possesses a license from Viacom
which gives it "official" permission to promote the Klingon language.
> (...Minnesota seems to be a hotbed of Klingon-language learning...)
It was certainly a hotbed of Klingon-language *publicity* for a while.
It used to be the base of operations for the Interstellar Language
School, the "other" group promoting the Klingon Language. I've never
met the guy who founded and ran it, but it's my impression that he was
in it for the money and never really took it seriously as a language.
Alan Anderson
> Marc Okrand deliberately constructed Klingon to be a language which
> violated the "language universals" described by Joseph H. Greenberg.
> How do we know at this point that one or more of those universals
> violated by Klingon is not actually necessary for a human language?
The test of usability tells us that Klingon is sufficient as a human
language. Klingon can be, and has been, used effectively for an
awesome variety of topics for which it has vocabulary, and more than a
few for which it does not.
> Having a single man be the authority for a language sounds like
> trouble to me: It sets you up for the possibility of schism when the
> man dies.
For what it's worth, such a schism is already evident. There are a
number of people who deny the distinction between "Klingon a la
Okrand" and Klingon as spoken in the Star Trek TV series and written
in various novels. For them, the words "rrotmey" and "minn'hor" are
just as valid as the vocabulary presented in The Klingon Dictionary,
even though they were devised by non-speakers of tlhIngan Hol, and
indeed violate observed phonological patterns of the language.
> Better to set up a language academy, as Esperanto does.
As I remarked in another response, the Klingon Language Institute
already exists. But that suggestion ignores a large part of the draw
of Klingon -- the fantasy that it's already "out there" and we're just
learning more about it as we study.
> And
> I still believe that Mr. Okrand has no interest in creating the
> necessary vocabulary to make Klingon a fully functioning human
> language.
Believe as you will, but I have direct knowledge to the contrary. He
is definitely open to answering calls for specific areas of
expression, if they are presented in an appropriate spirit. There are
a few people who have been officially recognized for their
contributions to the Klingon language community, and as part of that
recognition, they have the privilege of asking for a Klingon word for
a particular concept. Through the requests of these "True Friends of
Maltz", we have obtained a large collection of kinship terms, a word
(and an idiomatic expression) for jealousy, terms for specific fingers
and toes, and others. He is responsive to the annual "wish list" of
words and constructions which the KLI compiles. The book "Klingon for
the Galactic Traveler" is riddled with obvious answers to specific
questions that were posed to him in those wish lists over a period of
several years.
> http://ussgryphon.freewebsites.com/1994-10/23.htm
>
> Note that it says on that page that "Problems arose over translating
> words that have no corresponding Klingon words. The Klingons, vicious
> warriors that they are, have no words, among the 2,000 or so of which
> we know, for ideas like God, holy, mercy, compassion, atonement, and
> forgiveness."
Those words were obviously written by someone not very familiar with
Klingon. Though there are not direct translations for some of the
actual words, there are certainly ways to express these ideas, and
they're not very difficult to find. To express "atonement", for
example, there are verbs for "apologize", "be sorry", "regret", etc.,
along with phrases like {yem 'e' mev} "stop sinning" and {qa'
rIQHa'moH} "undamage the spirit".
Whoever write the article apparently misunderstood the nature of the
real problems, which were generally along the lines of what to do
about certain foods and animals. Klingon, as a supposed
extraterrestrial language, has no terms for "donkey" or "sheep", and
what animals it does have vocabulary for are not exactly good matches
for them. :-)
> That the project is moribund because of the problem of limited
> vocabulary is another idea which is not mine, but which I read on a
> Web page (for which I have no cite, unfortunately).
Web pages are poor substitutes for talking to the people involved.
> > Again, not so. Please tell me what feature of Klingon you believe
> > invalidates it as a "real language, as linguists would recognize the
> > term," and what makes you call it a "pidgin".
>
> It is not what features Klingon has, but what features it does not
> have. To begin with, I doubt that linguists will come to the
> conclusion that Klingon is a real language until it has stood the test
> of linguistic study, the results of which are printed in refereed
> scientific journals and verified by other linguists.
HolQeD (Klingon for "language science" or "linguistics") is a
peer-reviewed scientific journal, indexed by the Modern Language
Association.
http://www.kli.org/study/HolQeD.html
Klingon has been the topic of several theses in linguistics.
> So what makes a true language? Well, it has
> to pass certain tests of adequacy. Take a look at what *The Oxford
> Companion to the English Language* has to say about creoles:
>
> From
> http://www.xrefer.com/entry/441653
> [...]
> The difference between a pidgin and a creole (and thus a true
> language) is that a pidgin is suitable only for limited uses. A creole
> and all other true languages are suitable for any use to which their
> speakers put them. If new vocabulary is needed, it is made.
There's the one possible sticking point. One of the explicit goals of
fluent Klingonists is that someone ought to be able to understand a
Klingon sentence by using only the "officially published" reference
materials. There are enough people in sufficiently close contact with
each other that we *could* create new vocabulary if we had to. We
just refuse to do so.
If new vocabulary is needed in Klingon, it might be a while before it
gets "discovered"; in the meantime, necessary vocabulary is borrowed,
typically from English. The typical cases where that occurs are in
the areas of food and medicine. There is no known Klingon term for
"bread", for example, or for the category of "dessert". And the topic
of cancer and its treatments appears with unfortunate frequency on the
tlhIngan-Hol mailing list.
Occasional joke-words do pop up from time to time, and at least one of
them was good enough that it survives as an "unofficial" verb. It will
most likely never appear in a dictionary, but it is recognized by
nearly every fluent speaker of the language. And following a brief
discussion at qep'a' chorghDIch in Brussels this past summer, I expect
that fully ten percent of the KLI's membership would understand the
"unofficial" nouns {wI'} and {chI'}.
> The reason
> that vocabulary remains limited in a pidgin is that no one sees the
> point of going to all the trouble of learning a more complicated
> vocabulary: Otherwise, why not just learn the other side's language?
So a pidgin is a complete language except for gaps in vocabulary, and
grammatical completeness doesn't enter into it? Then I wonder what
the status of Latin is, since there's no established way to talk about
a VCR.
Thomas Kalinowski
> From
> http://www.xrefer.com/entry/441653
> [...]
> The difference between a pidgin and a creole (and thus a true
> language) is that a pidgin is suitable only for limited uses. A creole
> and all other true languages are suitable for any use to which their
> speakers put them. If new vocabulary is needed, it is made.
I just read that article, and I can't find the passage you quoted. Which
paragraph is it in?
mplsray
"Thomas Kalinowski" <thomk...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20011015232605...@mb-fa.aol.com...
It's not. Here's the above passage embedded in more of its original context:
[quote from previous Usenet post]
However, just because linguists don't yet
recognize it as a true language does not mean it is not, in reality, a
true language. ASL must have been a true language, after all, before
it was recognized as such. So what makes a true language? Well, it has
to pass certain tests of adequacy. Take a look at what *The Oxford
Companion to the English Language* has to say about creoles:
From
http://www.xrefer.com/entry/441653
[quote]
The process of becoming a creole may occur at any stage as a makeshift
language develops from trade jargon to expanded pidgin, and can happen
under drastic conditions, such as where a population of slaves
speaking many languages has to develop a common language among slaves
and with overseers. In due course, children grow up speaking the
pidgin as their main language, and when this happens it must change to
meet their needs. Depending on the stage at which creolization occurs,
different types of structural expansion are necessary before the
language can become adequate.
[end quote]
The difference between a pidgin and a creole (and thus a true
language) is that a pidgin is suitable only for limited uses. A creole
and all other true languages are suitable for any use to which their
speakers put them. If new vocabulary is needed, it is made. The reason
that vocabulary remains limited in a pidgin is that no one sees the
point of going to all the trouble of learning a more complicated
vocabulary: Otherwise, why not just learn the other side's language?
[end quote from previous Usenet post]
What follows after the "[end quote]" above is my own thoughts on the matter,
which were certainly not drawn from the citation in question. In fact, I
have been thinking of the matter for a long time. I was a linguistics major
for three years, was very interested in the subject of language for many
years before that, and am *still* very interested in the subject of
language. Over the years I've asked myself questions such as the following:
Is the language of the mangani (the "great apes") in Edgar Rice Burroughs's
Tarzan novels a true language? (When I was young I obtained a copy of
"Tarzan of the Apes" which had the complete vocabulary of mangani. It was
either the first or the second "foreign language" I had ever studied.)
Was the sign language used as a lingua franca among the American Indians a
true language?
Can Latin, as spoken and written in our time, be considered a true language?
Are computer languages true languages. (I have been an amateur computer
programmer.)
Is Esperanto a true language? (I've been an Esperantist since I was in high
school.)
Were other constructed languages true languages? (I've read quite a few
books on the subject of constructed languages.)
Is American Sign Language (ASL) a true language? How about those sign
languages which are used as a lingua franca among speakers of various
national varieties of sign language?
Were telegraph operators who were sending messages back to each other in the
time of the railway telegraph using true language, or just engaging in a
language-like activity? Same question for those telegraph operators who were
early ham radio enthusiasts.
Is Blissymbolics a true language or just a language-like activity?
Is Klingon a true language?
My point here is not to argue for or against any of these[1], nor am I
arguing that having read about these matters and thought about them makes me
an expert on the question. But I *do* want to show that I at least *have*
spent some time thinking about them.
Note:
[1]Well, I definitely do *not* consider mangani or computer languages to be
true languages. And I definitely *do* consider ASL to be a true language.
But those are just my conclusions, I'm not presenting an argument for them
here.
mplsray
"Alan Anderson" <aran...@netusa1.net> wrote in message
news:24f07aba.01101...@posting.google.com...
> mpl...@my-deja.com (Raymond S. Wise) wrote:
>
> > Sorry that I was insufficiently clear in what I wrote. When I said
> > "Unlikely in all three cases." I was referring not to the numbered
> > list above, but to the speculation that "Maybe more people speak
> > [Klingon] than speak Latin, Sanskrit or Esperanto?"
>
> That was a parenthetical comment in the third point. If you didn't
> actually mean the three numbered points when you said "all three
> cases" I'll take your word for it, but I don't understand it.
>
In fact, I wrote the comment "Unlikely in all three cases." *last,* and when
I did so I failed to take into account the larger context. I certainly knew
that Klingon had a grammar and a dictionary. I was once a linguistics major,
and am still interested in the subject of language. I am also a longtime
Star Trek fan. So when I learned that a linguist, Marc Okrand, was called
upon to create Vulcan dialog for a Star Trek movie, I took note of it, and
was also pleased when he was later called upon to create Klingon.
mplsray
>
[snip]
> >
> > It is not what features Klingon has, but what features it does not
> > have. To begin with, I doubt that linguists will come to the
> > conclusion that Klingon is a real language until it has stood the test
> > of linguistic study, the results of which are printed in refereed
> > scientific journals and verified by other linguists.
>
> HolQeD (Klingon for "language science" or "linguistics") is a
> peer-reviewed scientific journal, indexed by the Modern Language
> Association.
>
> http://www.kli.org/study/HolQeD.html
>
> Klingon has been the topic of several theses in linguistics.
>
Interesting. Hopefully, I'll be able to find some of those articles over at
the University of Minnesota libraries.
I am very definitely skeptical that Latin can be considered a true language
in its present form. Hebrew is, obviously, but it underwent changes to adapt
it to modern life. I'm skeptical of the status of Sanskrit as a true
language also. "Pidgin" isn't really adequate to describe the status of
either Latin or Sanskrit, or Hebrew before its modern reworking. Dead
languages have a special status. My tentative conclusion is that in both the
case of communicating using a pidgin and communicating using a dead language
as a lingua franca, one is engaging not in language, but in a language-like
activity. Some people would say the same thing about communicating using
Esperanto. It certainly *seems* like a true language to me when I speak it,
but that personal experience is not sufficient to have it be recognized as
such: I may, after all, be letting my biases cloud my judgment.
Nyrath the nearly wise
> There's the one possible sticking point. One of the explicit goals of
> fluent Klingonists is that someone ought to be able to understand a
> Klingon sentence by using only the "officially published" reference
> materials. There are enough people in sufficiently close contact with
> each other that we *could* create new vocabulary if we had to. We
> just refuse to do so.
That problem was tackled in the synthetic language
Lojban.
It has rules for creating new vocabulary by a process based
on metaphor. (these are called lujvo).
So while a new word will be unfamiliar to other
speakers, they can puzzle out the meaning by examining
the word's components.
For instance, there is no root word for "nurse"
in Lojban. But one can create the lujvo "kurmikce", and
other Lojban speakers can see it is composed of
"kurji" (take care of) and "mikce" (medic).
Angelique
Archer? Does anybody know?
Angelique
Alan Anderson
> > Klingon has been the topic of several theses in linguistics.
>
> Interesting. Hopefully, I'll be able to find some of those articles over at
> the University of Minnesota libraries.
If you decide you must read them, copies are in the KLI's archives.
I'm not sure how you'd go about getting access to them, though. At
least one is -- or was -- available online. I no longer have a
pointer to it, alas.
> I am very definitely skeptical that Latin can be considered a true language
> in its present form...
Aha! You're putting constraints on what you call a "true language"
which I'd never consider. If a language is "dead", you don't call it
"true". If a language has a calcified vocabulary, I suppose it might
as well be "dead" in your view?
I'll get a little wonky at this point and compare Klingon to French.
There is an official body which creates/approves vocabulary. If
French is a "true language", I don't see how you can say otherwise
about Klingon. :-)
> My tentative conclusion is that in both the
> case of communicating using a pidgin and communicating using a dead language
> as a lingua franca, one is engaging not in language, but in a language-like
> activity.
You have very high standards for what makes something "language".
Another post mentioned telegraph operators -- they're *obviously*
using language, quite often English. It's just encoded differently
from the spoken form of the language. (Pig-latin and arp-talk are
also encoded English, so omeonesay usingyay igpay atinlay is certainly
using language, though it's not reasonable to call pig-latin itself a
language.)
mplsray
Well, I don't believe that many of the ideas I expressed are exclusive to
me. These have been discussed by philosophers, anthropologists, linguists,
psychologists, and others for many years. The idea that telegraph operators
might not be using language is not mine, for example, so it is certainly not
obvious to some people. (On that matter, by the way, I have not made up my
mind.) Latin was certainly a true language at one time, and Hebrew certainly
is now, but I still think it is questionable to say that Latin, as spoken
and written nowadays, is a true language.
What the French Academy actually does is attempt to reform the French
language. True French is that language which the French themselves actually
speak and write, and is represented by such descriptive dictionaries as the
Grand Robert. A prescriptive dictionary such as that of the French Academy
does not represent true French: it is instead a wish list--a sort of
fantasy, in fact. Some of the reforms succeed, some fail, and the Academy
eventually accepts defeat when such defeat is overwhelmingly obvious. One
recent such failure appears to be the spelling reform proposed a decade ago:
"la nouvelle orthographe." It would seem to have been a spectacular
failure--but these things take time to sort out, when we're speaking of the
French Academy. :-) Another case where the French Academy did not have its
way was when it desired that a female government minister continue to be
referred to as "Madame le Ministre." The present government of Lionel Jospin
has simply ignored this, and has decreed that those who speak and write for
the government must say "Madame la Ministre."
Please note, however, that organizations such as the French Academy and the
Spanish Royal Academy are not really concerned with the totality of their
respective languages: they are concerned with setting a standard variety of
the language (something we do in English without an academy). That is not
what I mean by a true language.
By the way, here's something the average person may not have heard. Although
American Sign Language is indeed considered a true language, and the people
who take it in college think that they are learning a true language (and
often get foreign language credit as a result of studying ASL), I have read
that what is taught in those classes is not ASL, but a pidgin based upon
ASL. See the following Web page
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=ASE
where it says: "Pidgin Signed English is taught in schools in the USA rather
than ASL."
Thomas Kalinowski
>My tentative conclusion is that in both the
>case of communicating using a pidgin and communicating using a dead language
>as a lingua franca, one is engaging not in language, but in a language-like
>activity.
I'd be interested in hearing the difference between speaking a language and
"engaging in a language-like activity".
"Honestly, officer, I wasn't stealing that VCR, I was only engaging in a
theft-like activity."
>Some people would say the same thing about communicating using
>Esperanto. It certainly *seems* like a true language to me when I speak it,
>but that personal experience is not sufficient to have it be recognized as
>such: I may, after all, be letting my biases cloud my judgment.
It often seems to me that I'm using a language when I speak English, but I may
Alan Anderson
> I missed the original question and its answer. What *did* he say to
> Archer? Does anybody know?
What the Klingon Chancellor said sounded very much like "chewdahey
vulchavey" to me. It was captioned as "ChugDaH hegh volcha vay".
What does it mean? Beats me. In the dialect of Klingon *I* know, the
closest I've been able to come is approximately "Thruster death
shoulder, darn it!" But the Klingon dialect heard in Enterprise is
obviously not the one heard in the movies -- where I'd expect {lupHom}
to mean a period of time somewhat shorter than a second, Hoshi said it
means "ship". She translated "destroyed" as {SonchIy}, which I
understand as meaning a particular ritual performed upon a leader's
death. And I really don't see how "stinky boots" comes out of what
I'd translate as "the dish is very good"...
Seriously, I'm not convinced the writers even had any particular
meaning in mind when they put together the collection of syllables
they had the Klingon speak at the end of the episode.
mplsray
> Raymond S. Wise writes:
>
> >My tentative conclusion is that in both the
> >case of communicating using a pidgin and communicating using a dead
language
> >as a lingua franca, one is engaging not in language, but in a
language-like
> >activity.
>
> I'd be interested in hearing the difference between speaking a language
and
> "engaging in a language-like activity".
>
> "Honestly, officer, I wasn't stealing that VCR, I was only engaging in a
> theft-like activity."
>
First let me give you a URL to the article on language in the *Bloomsbury
Guide to Human Thought,* (C) 1993
http://www.xrefer.com/entry.jsp?xrefid=344213&secid=
The discussion of language on that page is the sort of thing which goes on
among philosophers, anthropologists, linguists, and psychologists. The way
they go about it--even the way they treat the word "language," is not how I
would do it, but my point in showing it to you is to demonstrate that there
are a lot of important questions about language about which there is no
definitive answer.
Now, as to my theories of what constitutes a "true language." First, I was a
linguistics major for three years, and I share the opinion of
anthropologists and linguists that there are no natural languages which can
be called "primitive languages," that is, something which resembles what our
pre-human or human ancestors spoke before they spoke a complex language. So
to see an example of a true language, we have only to look at any natural
spoken language.
Anthropologists and linguists believe that any natural language is up to the
task of communicating anything that its speech community needs to talk
about. If new vocabulary is needed, it is created or adopted. A pidgin, on
the other hand, is not a natural language but a sort of code: it has a
reduced vocabulary, a simplified structure, and a limited use. Once enough
people have been brought up able to speak the pidgin from birth, and have
modified it to fit their needs, it becomes a creole, and is considered a
creole: a type of complex language and what I would call a true language.
So one way you could learn about the difference between a language and a
language-like activity would be to read a book which compares creoles to
pidgins.
Linguists have gone on to recognize that American Sign Language is also a
true language: It is capable of communicating anything that its speech
community needs to talk about, and if it need to be modified to meet new
circumstances, it is quite up to the task. In fact, French Sign Language is
the result of a French savant taking an existing natural sign language and
making modifications. American Sign Language was a modification of the
French, and may have been further influenced by a naturally occurring sign
language of the island of Martha's Vineyard. (There is no controversy about
there being a naturally occurring sign language in Martha's Vineyard, but
there appears to be some controversy about whether that language actually
influenced ASL.) So ASL is a true language.
Note that although ASL is a true language, it is very doubtful that apes who
are taught ASL are engaged in true language. The quality of their speech is
extremely poor, and Martin Gardner, who writes for the Skeptical Inquirer,
is among those who do not believe that these apes are engaged in speech at
all. I would call it, at best, a type of primitive pidgin.
I think one other thing goes into being a true language, and that is that
language is what makes humans different from the animals. I earned a degree
not in linguistics, but in psychology, and that also affects how I look at
the question. I agree with Jared Diamond, who wrote in his book *The Third
Chimpanzee," that thought is essentially us (silently) speaking to
ourselves. Note that both of these points, "that language is what makes
humans different from animals," and "thought is essentially us (silently)
speaking to ourselves," are objected to by some philosophers and
psychologists. But that is where I am coming from.
I very much doubt that people who are able to speak a pidgin ever *think*
for extended periods in it, as people who are able to speak a foreign
language often do (some European scientists who came over to the United
States before World War II reported that they switched a very large part of
their thinking over to English). The advantage of true languages over
pidgins as far as thinking is obvious: Pidgins are used in a restricted way
(typically for business transactions) and have a limited vocabulary.
> >Some people would say the same thing about communicating using
> >Esperanto. It certainly *seems* like a true language to me when I speak
it,
> >but that personal experience is not sufficient to have it be recognized
as
> >such: I may, after all, be letting my biases cloud my judgment.
>
> It often seems to me that I'm using a language when I speak English, but I
may
> be letting my biases cloud my judgment.
You don't have to worry about your biases clouding your judgment if you are
a native speaker of English. I think any anthropologist, linguist, or
psychologist would take it for granted that you are using a true language.
If you are not a native speaker of English, then you have reason to question
your judgment about whether you are speaking a true language and not simply
speaking a type of pidgin. I noted in another post that the sign language
that is taught is schools in the United States is not actually ASL, but is a
pidgin version of same. If I were studying ASL, I would find that a bit
disturbing, wouldn't you? Of course, a person who has studied pidgin ASL is
in a good position to go on and learn the true language.
Come to think about it, that is another thing you could do to learn the
distinction between a language and a language-like activity. Go to school
and learn pidgin ASL, and then speak to deaf people (and other native
speakers) who speak actual ASL.
Or you could, like me, learn Esperanto. Then you would have something about
which you could ask many questions concerning the difference between what is
true language and what it not. Don't hold your breath for a quick answer to
your questions, however.
(Or you could learn Klingon: similar questions.)
(I also speak French, and while I have similar questions about whether what
I do with French can be considered to be a "true language activity,"--since
I am not a native speaker and would certainly like to be more fluent--I of
course do not doubt that French is a true language.)
mplsray
"mplsray" <illi...@NOSPAM.mninter.net.invalid> wrote in message
news:9qlk2...@enews2.newsguy.com...
[snip]
This is a followup to my longer discussion of the subject. I forgot about
one controversy about the difference between a true language and a
language-like activity that may (just possibly) have been settled.
At one time, there were linguists who believed that reading and writing did
not constitute true language: only hearing and speaking did. Under such a
theory then, reading, for example, would be a language-like activity, a type
of code, not an example of true language in use. And the question of whether
telegraphers were truly engaging in language or a language-like activity
would be obvious under this theory: it had to be the latter.
In a recent article by Martin Gardner, probably in his "Notes of a
Fringe-Watcher" in Skeptical Inquirer, while reviewing some scientist or
philosopher's work, he mentioned that it was now accepted that reading and
writing constituted true language (and he seemed quite pleased that that was
the direction that opinion was headed--I conclude he has felt that way about
it for a long time).
toddjo...@gmail.com
jrgb...@gmail.com
coun...@gmail.com
> Spoiler space below if anyone didn't see the pilot episode
> -
>
> -
> -
>
> -
>
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
>
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> At the end of "Broken Bow", Archer asks his translator what the Klingon said
> and she says "you don't want to know"---well, I would like to know! (unless
> they just had the actor speak gibberish, but since Klingon is an invented
> language that's pretty well established, I doubt it. Anyone here speak
> Klingon? What did he say?
> Thanks.
I always considered it a "dialect" of Klingon. The words were brute force translated one at a time using the word lists at the back of the old Klingon Dictionary Book. Translated that way it roughly means:
"I will not kill you today, Boy."
Chris Dobbins
William Wallace
> Hey idiot Klingon is not a real language!
> "Darrell" <darre...@home.com> wrote in message
> news:EXJt7.138177$K6.64341144@news2...