[tlhIngan Hol] Clarification on SIch

[Daniel Dadap]

> On Apr 24, 2019, at 03:29, mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> If we're to understand each other, while using this language, there
> has to be a central authority/institution/organization, through which
> new knowledge will be established.

I’m not saying that it wouldn’t be a good and useful thing to continue having a centralized source of truth, but I’m not convinced that it’s a necessary one. With very few exceptions (I’m looking at you, Académie Française) natural languages don’t have central authorities that govern their usage and development. Yet we users of natural languages still manage to understand each other, for the most part.

Languages naturally drift over time. If speakers of a language drift their usage in sufficiently different directions and to a sufficient degree, then it ceases to be one language. But that level of change usually requires the community of language speakers to be isolated into discrete pockets over an extended period of time. There aren’t really enough of us (people who can speak Klingon well enough to be able to understand each other when discussing a wide variety of topics) who are isolated enough from each other for that to really seem like much of a concern.

For the most part, I don’t see Klingonists lamenting the lack of freedom of the individual language user to coin new words or grammar. And I think that even without the continuance of a central authority, we will likely continue to exercise restraint in doing so, not because we’re not allowed to change the language on our own, but because we recognize the need for continued mutual intelligibility, and also because for most general discourse, there simply isn’t much need for change. And when speakers do choose to take the language in a new direction in some small way, those changes would either catch on or they won’t. I do very much appreciate Dr. Okrand’s continued work on the language, and also hope that he will be willing and able to continue contributing to it for a long time to come. In the longer term, I also hope that an active community of speakers will keep the language alive for a long, long, long time after Dr. Okrand’s involvement inevitably stops.

I’ve heard the stories about the ILS, and how they went off and did their own thing with Klingon to the point where ILS Klingon and KLI Klingon were no longer mutually intelligible. I found this quite interesting, so I tried looking into it further, but sadly I wasn’t able to find much information about the ILS or very many samples of Klingon produced by them. Within the small body of text I was able to find, I didn’t encounter anything that I found to be totally incomprehensible. Certainly, there were some usage choices I found questionable, and maybe harder to understand for a Klingon speaker who didn’t also speak English, but it seemed to me that the claims I had heard about ILS Klingon might have been somewhat overblown. If anybody has some ILS texts that they consider to be particularly incomprehensible, I’d be very interested to read them.