[tlhIngan Hol] Clarification on SIch

[Daniel Dadap]

> On Apr 22, 2019, at 02:21, Lieven L. Litaer <levinius at gmx.de> wrote:
> 
> It should just remain a general reminder for beginners who should be
> aware not to use spoken or written lines from DSC as being a rule for
> learning. Advanced speakers otoh can use them as good examples.

As somebody who had tried learning Klingon off and on since the time when TNG was still airing new episodes every week, but never got past the point of {nuqDaq 'oH puchpa''e'} and {matlh, jol yIchu'!} until a little over a year ago, I respectfully disagree. The spoken Klingon in Discovery is what inspired me to try learning Klingon again, in what turned out to be the attempt that was finally successful.

The spoken dialog on the show was absolutely a model for Klingon grammar for me, before I knew about Okrandian canon. Even now that I do know about it, I still think it’s a good model for beginning speakers. The lines were spoken clearly enough that I could transcribe them reliably enough to be able to plug my guesses into Hol 'ampaS and/or boQwI' until I landed upon something that made a reasonable pint of sense. The {qeylIS} prayer in particular was an “aha!” moment for me which rekindled some faded memories of the grammar described in TKD and planted the seed for my first fully functional mental model of the Klingon language, as I analyzed words like {matay'taHvIS} and sentences like {maleghmeH yIwovmoH}. The timing of the Duolingo course launch just a few weeks after starting my most recent attempt was good too, as it provided a seemingly endless supply of example sentences to further grow my mental model with. (It seemed endless at the time, after a few weeks it started getting obviously repetitive, but by the time I noticed it was getting repetitive my mental model was taking shape and I probably didn’t really need Duolingo any more.)

While I was practicing on Duolingo, I still didn’t know a lick about Okrandian canon, so I obviously also didn’t know that the Duolingo example sentences fell outside of it. Now that I do know about Okrandian canon, I know enough to ask questions like “can a {-taHvIS}ed verb really be used without an accompanying verb indicating another action that occurs during the {-taHvIS}ed activity?” or “can a time adverbial like {reH} be used without a verb?” These are interesting questions to ponder, and to my knowledge neither of these situations is explicitly prohibited by any known rule, but I’m also not aware of any canonical examples to support them. In the context where they are presented on the show (as the “response” line in a “call and response” style interaction) my personal feeling is that it works, even if it does turn out to be, strictly speaking, ungrammatical to do either of those things normally. Is my judgement influenced by the fact that I was exposed to pieces of non-Okrandian-canon text as my earliest “real” Klingon that I could understand? Probably. Does that make me incapable of recognizing the distinction between Okrandian canon and non-canon? I don’t think so.

I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect beginners to know or care about what Okrandian canon is. Of course I knew who Dr. Marc Okrand was when I started studying Klingon (his name is on the book!), but apart from knowing that he devised the language for Star Trek III, I had no awareness of which specific Star Trek productions he was involved in, or to what extent. I didn’t know that the reason I couldn’t understand the Klingon spoken in the TV shows was because that wasn’t actually Klingon, and thought it was just because I hadn’t learned enough Klingon to understand it yet. In contrast, anybody learning Klingon today can start watching Discovery and immediately begin recognizing the vocabulary and grammar that is described in TKD. We’ve thankfully moved past the days of {maj ram} and {wIj jup} (which, ironically, as obviously bad as they are, got retroactively approved by Dr. Okrand in KGT.)

Anyway, I guess my point is that saying something like “beginners should be discouraged from using materials which are not Okrandian canon as examples when first learning the language” does the beginner a disservice. There are plenty of high quality materials which follow the vocabulary and rules set forth by Dr. Okrand which I think are excellent resources to the beginning student of Klingon.

Sometimes I wonder what the most extreme, strict, adherence to Okrandian canon might look like. I picture people asserting that it’s not enough to simply use sentences composed by Dr. Okrand as examples of well-formed grammatical sentences, but that *only* full sentences that were composed by Dr. Okrand, so you could say {nIn 'ar wIghaj} but not {nIn 'ar boghaj} or {nav 'ar wIghaj} and everybody just uses the same sentences over and over again to mean different things and the situation starts to resemble the Tamarians from “Darmok” and everybody knows that {nuqDaq yuch Dapol} is only really a question about chocolate in the most limited of circumstances.