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

[Daniel Dadap]

> On Apr 13, 2019, at 11:59, mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Daniel:
>> 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?
> 
> I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say here. What is your
> point ? Elaborate further, so I'll be able to reply.

I think the rest of your reply more or less confirms what I was asking. I was just trying to understand what about transliteration you find problematic, as the pure act of writing a word with a different writing system than customarily used for that word’s language is, in and of itself, a rather benign one.

Others have noted that your name {mayqel} is a transliteration of the English version of your name. In fact, both the English and Greek versions are in turn transliterations of the Hebrew version. So I doubt that you have a problem with transliteration itself but rather with a particular use of transliteration.

>> Klingon possesses an “incomplete” vocabulary, whatever that means.
> 
> It means that klingon possesses an incomplete vocabulary..

But my point, as others have noted, is that all languages possess incomplete vocabularies, for a high enough standard of “complete”.

> So, who can seriously claim that the vocabulary we have is complete ?
> 
> Thank qeylIS, okrand doesn't share your view.. Because if he did, and
> went on saying "don't ask for new words, everything is perfect", then
> soon he would be the only one using the language.

My point wasn’t that we won’t benefit from more vocabulary. We absolutely will, as it will help us communicate more concisely. My point was that by the metric I was trying to imagine as one that would make sense for calling a language “complete”, Klingon is complete *enough* to be useful. Equating this with saying that there’s no room for further vocabulary growth is a false equivalence.

> Does klingon have a word for the breasts of woman ? Does klingon have
> a word for "joint" as in "knee joint" ? Does klingon have a word for
> "ash" ? Are there any natural languages which lack those words ?
> 
> So yeah, klingon *is* deficient, because it lacks essential words
> which ALL natural languages have.


I don’t know all of the languages of the world, but I would honestly be surprised if there *weren’t* a natural language out there that lacked a dedicated word for at least one of those things. I would not be surprised if there were one that lacked dedicated words for all three. Different languages draw semantic boundaries in different places. And it’s not like you can’t talk about those things in Klingon despite our not having words for them (yet): {logh'ob} or {nIm lIngwI'Du'} for breasts depending on context, {SIHwI'} for joint, {Sor Hap meQlu'chu'pu'bogh} for wood ash.

I was almost about to say that there isn’t a dedicated word for “breast” in Tagalog, as the usual way to say that is the same way you would say chest (dibdib), but then I remembered that there is indeed a separate word (suso) that can only mean breast, it’s just not the first one that one would usually use when not talking about lactation. But the Russian situation with limbs isn’t far off. Russian uses one word (рука) to mean both “arm” and “hand”, and one word (нога) to mean both “leg” and “foot”. Does that mean that Russian is deficient and incomplete compared to other languages that do have separate words for the things at the ends of the limbs versus the limbs themselves? Russian also splits up what we call “blue” in English into two separate colors (голубой, синий). Does that make English deficient and incomplete?

Here one might say that Klingon is deficient and incomplete because it only has four color words. But many natural Earth languages have a similar number of color words. What’s interesting about Klingon is that it draws its line between {Doq} and {SuD} in a different place than Earth languages with the same number of color words do.

If the line for “complete” is going to be something like “contains all the words that every natural language has”, that’s something of an impossible thing to measure, since nobody has a catalog of the vocabulary of every natural language, and in any case, there’s hardly a 1:1 mapping between words and concepts that holds true across even a small number of natural languages, let alone all of them. 

> But again, if your opinion is that klingon is complete, I respect it..
> But if you *do* believe that, then I expect that you, and any other
> members of the klingon community who share your opinion do one simple
> thing:
> 
> 1. request directly from okrand that he does not dispense new words
> 
> Simple isn't it ? Why don't you do it ? And why do ALL klingonists
> rejoice the moment they receive new words ?

Because, again, this is a false equivalence. Klingon is complete enough for people to use it for communication. That doesn’t mean it’s finished and we can tie a bow on it and never need new words.

> 
>> I personally think that proper nouns are fair game
> 
> Fair game is only Ca'NoN. Period. Nothing more, nothing less.

So I need to either wait for a canon transliteration of every place name I might ever use, or just have ugly Terran scripts in the middle of a pIqaD text if I dare to write about traveling to some place we don’t have an official transliteration for? Before we got {qebeq} from Maltz sometimes I would write or read it as {qebeq} and sometimes as {qeybeq}. Now I only write {qebeq}. Was I trying to pretend that {qebeq} was the right and only way to write the name of that province? Certainly not. Was I sad when it turned out the way to write it wasn’t {qeybeq}? No, I was happy to no longer have to guess.

> So, what are you suggesting ? That if the latin alphabet, can't
> describe e.g. a russian word, then the klingon alphabet will ?

No, I was pointing out that refusing to transliterate because doing so might make a world look Klingon when everybody knows it’s not is silly. Like I said, разблюто is a bad example because it’s not a real word. It even got flagged by my phone as being misspelled when I typed it in. But שלימזל is a real word in Yiddish (oh, I’m sorry - יידיש), and in fact one that has come into common use as a loanword in English. So if transliteration is so terrible because it tricks people into thinking that a word from another language is actually a word in the language that the word is transliterated into, I should never, ever, write a sentence in English like “the poor shlimazl can never catch a break”, right? And I definitely shouldn’t worry that people won’t recognize the word because I didn’t spell it “shlimazal” or “schlimazel”, either, because then I’d look like a total shlemiel, right?

> Things are simple: someone either
> expresses himself staying *exclusively* within the confines of Ca'NoN,
> or he just says "sorry guys, I can't find a way to express whatever,
> so here is the english word".
> 
> Much more honest this way..

So I think we agree that there’s no problem with calling something a “taco” rather than trying to think of a phrase like {Ha'DIbaH tIr jengva' je}, by analogy with the canon way we know to call a sandwich (which also seems unfair to meatless sandwiches, and tacos, FWIW). Where it seems we disagree is what writing “taqo” instead means. To me, it’s just writing the word the way I would if I were writing in pIqaD, like loghaD suggested. I’d want to pronounce it that way anyway, as the alien [k] sound would sound strange in an otherwise Klingon sounding sentence. I’m not claiming {taqo} is a Klingon word; I’m not even expecting that all Klingon speakers should understand me or accept my use of the word. I would probably expect that whoever I wrote that to would understand what I’m talking about. To you, however, it seems to mean much more.
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