[tlhIngan Hol] How "pure" is Ca'NoN ?
De'vID
de.vid.jonpin at gmail.com
Tue Apr 2 07:36:55 PDT 2019
On Tue, 2 Apr 2019 at 15:47, De'vID <de.vid.jonpin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun at gmail.com> schrieb am Di., 2. Apr. 2019, 12:34:
>
>> Can someone tell me, if the following scenario/sequence of events is
>> possible ?
>>
>
> Not only is it possible, but it's very common for vocabulary revealed as
> the result of their use in a movie or show.
>
Furthermore: Okrand is much less concerned about the purity of canon, and
being in charge of creating it, than the rest of us.
Someone wrote an essay on Klingon musical theory extending what Okrand
wrote, and Okrand was happy to endorse it as how Klingons do things. I
believe it's the same one that's now in the introduction to the paq'batlh.
I've discussed the "higher mathematics" hinted at in TKD (using 3-adic
system) with him, and he's suggested I write it up. He's not a
mathematician, but as a linguist he knows the sort of numbering system
which is possible outside of base-10. It's both outside of his field of
expertise and probably not a good use of his time to describe music theory
or mathematics beyond the basics, but he's heavily hinted at the systems he
thinks Klingon has and is happy for other people to fill out the details.
A suggestion he's made for {boQwI'} is to add more entries for "derived"
verbs. TKD has a bunch of these like an entry {QeymoH} "tighten" which is
derived from {Qey} "be tight". He added common ones for convenience, but he
didn't add all possible {-moH} derivatives of "be" verbs because it
would've added a lot of redundant entries and increased the length of the
book. But for an app, that's less of an issue, and he likes the feature
that (as an example) if he searched for "enlarge" and forgot that there's a
word {tIn} "be big", he would still get the correct result. In other words,
he doesn't mind people putting words into their Klingon word lists which
are derived rather than exactly as they appear in canon. This was how
{jotlhHa'} became "canon", because he was going through someone's word list
and that person had derived {jotlhHa'} from {jotlh}. He's perfectly fine if
people add {-moH} and {-Ha'} verbs to their word lists, if their derivation
from the root makes sense.
In fact, because he himself isn't obsessed with collecting every Klingon
word or sentence he's ever written (exactly as he wrote it, no more, no
less), or is made up for a show or book by someone else, he sometimes
forgets when he's used a word a particular way or has told someone (e.g.,
K.R.A. DeCandido, or a random fan he meets at an event) that a word can be
used in a particular way. He actually enjoys finding out about how fans
have expressed things which extend the given vocabulary, and he doesn't
want to contradict other people whenever possible. In other words, he's
perfectly fine with other people extending Klingon "canon", if their
extension basically respects the rules he's set up.
So I wouldn't worry too much about the "purity" of canon. I mean, it's
important to keep track of whether Okrand wrote something or not, for
record-keeping and historical purposes, but please don't worship pairs of
Klingon-English sentences like they're holy.
--
De'vID
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