[tlhIngan Hol] Clarification on SIch

[De'vID]

On Mon, 22 Apr 2019 at 19:13, Daniel Dadap <daniel at dadap.net> wrote:

> 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.
>

In fact, I have experienced exactly this situation. Here's a message from
the archive in which I describe it:

On Wed, 4 Jan 2012 at 18:56, De'vID jonpIn <de.vid.jonpin at gmail.com> wrote:

> One of the reasons I started learning Klingon in high school was
> because one of my best friends and I wanted a secret language we could
> converse in without other people in our social circle understanding
> what we were saying, and we were both Star Trek fans.  Obviously, I
> took it much further than she did. :-)  Nevertheless, she learned
> enough to have memorised certain phrases, and these became our little
> injoke.  She never got the prefix system, but memorised certain
> sentences with fixed prefixes ({pIpIH}, {HIghoS}, etc.) which she'd
> use correctly, either alone or in a mixed English-Klingon sentence.
> For example -- mutual friend to me: "We're having a party on Sunday at
> so and so's."; she to me: {pIpIH}, meaning "you're invited".  Yes, she
> could only say "We are expecting you (sing.)", and not "I am expecting
> you (sing.)" or "we are expecting you (pl.)", etc.  You'd be surprised
> at how much you can communicate using nothing but sentence fragments
> from TKD, CK, PK, and a mixture of English, if you allow a high
> tolerance for error (for example, I'd understand "{HIghoS} cafeteria"
> to mean "come with me to the cafeteria" if she was with me, or "come
> to me, I'm in the cafeteria" if she was calling me).


-- 
De'vID
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