[tlhIngan Hol] I h-a-t-e transliteration

[Daniel Dadap]

> On Apr 13, 2019, at 04:15, mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Transliteration shows the inability of him who transliterates, to
> accept the simple fact, that vocabulary-wise, klingon will never be
> complete.

So by “transliteration” are you talking more narrowly about the particular act of using transliteration to import vocabulary from another language, instead of just dropping a non-Klingon word in, untransliterated?

> He knows that there are words missing, so what does he do ? He makes
> them up..  Now, I don't care whether he just transliterates. The
> reality is that he makes words up. Its *exactly* the same, as me
> saying: During this post, I will be using for "transliteration" the
> "klingon" word "ghaghtoH". Wouldn't that disturb you ? Would you
> accept it ? So, why should *I* accept it, if someone wrote
> {tranSlIteratIon} ? It's *exactly* the same.

It’s not quite the same. You can make up words using other words. I would probably call transliteration something like {ngutlh nov ghItlh} (or {nov ngutlh} if you want to use {nov} as a noun) or {ngutlh qa'} like others on this list have done. But if you just want to completely make up a word for transliteration you can at least do so more convincingly than *{ghaghtoH}. You could make up a word like *{tItlh} and say that it’s short for something like {tam ghItlh}. 

Going back to your point, though, it seems that what bothers you about this particular use of transliteration is that it demonstrates an unwillingness to acknowledge that Klingon possesses an “incomplete” vocabulary, whatever that means. Looking at your own writings, it seems that most of the foreign words you bring in (untransliterated, naturally) are proper nouns (usually from works of fiction) or things from Earth with no known Klingon equivalent (e.g., yogurt, dog). But Klingon is no less “complete” for lacking those words than English is for lacking words like {bI'rel} or {DuraS} or {meqleH}. And is it okay to talk about {‘archer HoD}, {qIrq HoD}, and {pIqarD HoD} with those names because we’ve been given official transliterations for those (including ones that violate Klingon phonology for Kirk and Picard!), but not {SISqo la’/HoD}, {jenwey HoD}, {jorjo HoD}, {lorqa HoD} {payIq/payq HoD}, etc.? And we can talk about the {DIvI’ ‘ejDo’mey} named {‘entepray’} and {DISqa’vI’rIy} but not {voyajer}?

I personally think that proper nouns are fair game, especially if context makes it clear that a transliterated proper noun isn’t intended to be a Klingon word, and that a reader familiar with the context for that proper noun would be able to deduce which proper noun was intended. At the same time, I understand that transliterating things can be confusing, and that especially for someone who’s still building up vocabulary, sending such a person on a {ngem Sargh} chase for a nonexistent word could be unfortunate.  But I also like to write in pIqaD. It’s quite jarring to read a string of pIqaD only to have it interrupted by a proper noun in a different script.

I get bothered by assertions that the Klingon vocabulary isn’t “complete”. What does that mean? That there exists a word to express every possible meaning that one could desire? I don’t think any language is complete, by that impossible metric. That it is possible to use a language as one’s primary language? I’d argue Klingon has been “complete” by this standard for some time. Sure, some things take more words to describe than others, but that is true even of languages that I expect you’d consider complete. I did a search for “words with no English equivalent” and this list was the top hit: https://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/lost-translation-30-words-with-english-equivalent.html

Of course “Schadenfreude” was the top entry on that list. It’s a well known one, for sure. Is English “incomplete” because it has no native word for this, and must either borrow it from German or resort to an awkward, unweildy phrase like “a feeling of pleasure derived from the misfortune of others”? But wait, it gets better! Going down the list, we only need to reach #8 to see one from a language that doesn’t use the Latin script. Now we have a word that not only does the obviously incomplete English language not have a word for, but we can’t even spell it correctly with the alphabet used for writing English! So if I can’t transliterate, and I am just looking for the perfect word to describe a feeling of nostalgia for a former love, then I obviously have to write разблюто in the middle of my English sentence, right?

Actually, разблюто is a bad example, since it’s not a real Russian word, and the best guess at its etymology is that it actually came from an error in an English-language TV show about Russians: http://languagehat.com/razbliuto-nyet/ - going further down the list, there’s a few Japanese words which I’ll skip since I’m not particularly familiar with Japanese and don’t want to misspell them in their non-transliterated forms, then at #13 (perhaps not coincidentally?) we have שלימזל, and I must say that I am absolutely outraged that the compilers of this list dared to transliterate this very important word whose absence in English definitively proves how woefully incomplete its vocabulary is. שלימזל is actually a very interesting example, as it is a portmanteau of a German word and a Hebrew word, written in the Hebrew alphabet, in a language that is neither German nor Hebrew. And portmanteau is an interesting word, as portmanteau (the type of suitcase) is itself a portmanteau, and English formerly had no word to express the concept that portmanteau now expresses.

All of this is just a long way of saying that borrowed lexicon, and indeed even transliteration of borrowed lexicon, happens in the real world of natural languages all the time. Of course, Kingon is different, in that we have agreed as a community that there is a single source of new vocabulary and grammar rules for the language. And indeed, it can be a slippery slope when we’re talking about a language with as small of a vocabulary and as small of a speaker population as we have with Klingon. So surely it’s safer to leave things like proper nouns untransliterated, but that only really works well if you’re writing Klingon using the Latin alphabet and using proper nouns that are written in that alphabet, too.