[tlhIngan Hol] DISvam chabal tetlh

[Will Martin]

It’s good to keep in mind Okrand’s motives for creating new words. It’s not a power trip for him. To some degree, it can make him a little uneasy, since some fans can be dangerously fanatical, and it’s not that easy for him to tell the difference.

It’s good to remember that Paramount didn’t hire him to create a language. They hired him to make up sounds for actors to make while they presented subtitles in movies. For him to take that commission and use it as an excuse to create a language and sell Paramount’s associated publisher on paying him to write The Klingon Dictionary says a lot about his nerd status. Here’s a guy with a day job that has nothing to do with creating a language. It’s an intellectual exercise that he found interesting, and he put a lot of effort into doing it and put a lot of thought into doing it well.

He was probably surprised when the publisher decided to put out the dictionary. He was further surprised when it sold a large fraction of a million copies. It’s like telling a joke on You-Tube and getting over a million hits, when you had no idea this could happen.

So, there has always been a balance to be struck between sending him a huge list of every word that anyone can think of to add to the language, or never requesting new words and just waiting for someone at Paramount to pay him to say something that might use new words. He’s not our servant or our employee. We want to keep the language fun and interesting for him so that he keeps the language interesting and fun for us.

So, this voting system is somebody’s idea of how to filter the list so that the most interesting and useful new words naturally bubble to the top. It’s not like he would be committed to creating every word we send him. We don’t want words that one person wants in the vocabulary. We want words that would be useful for most of us.

When I was granted a one-time privilege of coming up with a word, discussion had pointed out that we didn’t have any words to cover the basic concept of “top” or “bottom”. It seemed important and useful to a lot of us, so I used up my slot to ask for that, and he found it interesting enough to give us a group of useful words.

Some words are more interesting for their origins than for the words themselves, like our word for “armpit”.

Please trust that keeping it interesting and fun for everyone is the intent of the process. We’re not trying to exclude anybody, or make a power grab over who can and who can’t make up words. We’re just trying to keep it all fun and interesting for us and for him.

One awkward, but important conversation that might be good for someone to have with him is on what sort of political mechanism might take over the development of the language if by unpredictable quirks of fate, people still want to use the language after Okrand dies. I can say that because, hey, I’m old and getting older. Okrand should think about this.

For now, it’s 100% his language, as it should be. Does the language have to die when he does? If he ever gets around to something like a will, he should consider what should happen to the language when he’s not here to keep it interesting and to stop it from suffering from schisms.

Or maybe it should just dissolve into schisms and die out as we do. That’s valid, as well. But it should be a conscious choice and not just Entropy winning out because nobody wants to think about mortality.

charghwI’ vaghnerya’ngan

rInpa’ bomnIS be’’a’ pI’.




> On Feb 14, 2019, at 11:07 AM, mayqel qunenoS <mihkoun at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Does this process of submitting desired words, apply for the qepHom'a' as well ?
> 
> ~ mayqel *I love maltz* qunen'oS
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