[tlhIngan Hol] XQeD -> Xtej

De'vID de.vid.jonpin at gmail.com
Mon Jul 29 08:29:18 PDT 2019


On Mon, 29 Jul 2019 at 15:56, Steven Boozer <sboozer at uchicago.edu> wrote:

> BTW were there any other items from Klingon Blockly (which I don’t
> remember hearing before)?
>

This was one of Google's April Fool's jokes in 2014:
http://googleresearch.blogspot.ch/2014/04/making-blockly-universally-accessible.html

I gave a talk about Google's history with the Klingon language at
the Saarbrücken qepHom'a' that year, which had some information about
Blockly.

While working on it, we emailed Okrand with requests and suggestions, and
he'd reply with what Maltz thought. We'd shown a version of the Klingon
demo to Okrand for him to try as well. The demo had this code snippet:

teHchugh [So'wI' Dotlh]
    [So'wI' Dotlh] choH; teHbe'moH
teHtaHvIS ([peng] >= 1)
    [peng] boq -1
maq: {Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam}

(The program would uncloak the ship if it's cloaked, fire all torpedoes,
then proclaim that "Today is a good day to die!")

The one expression that Okrand volunteered without being asked was {ghunmeH
ngogh} for "Blockly", the name of the language.

We'd suggested {mI'QeD} for the "mathematics" menu (which allows the user
to select a number of math operations), and asked for how to express the
various mathematical operations and concepts under it (prime, even, odd,
round [up/down], integer, mean, median mode). He approved of {mI'QeD}, and
said Maltz needed to think some more about the other math concepts. (He's
subsequently revealed some of those terms elsewhere, but since we needed to
launch on April 1, Neil Fraser made up the missing translations, which can
be found here: https://neil.fraser.name/news/2014/04/01/ )

Other than {meq} for the "logic" menu, the other translations were for
things like UI elements or things very specific to programming. That is,
they are technical uses of the words rather than everyday terms, so they
probably have no bearing on how those words are used in everyday contexts.
(So we can skip any debates about how official something is if Okrand just
approves of a suggestion made by someone else.)

The commands in the language were:
teHchugh = if
teHtaHvIS = while
choH = change (alter the value of a variable)
maq = proclaim (print or display a string)
teHmoH = set a boolean variable to true
teHbe'moH = set a boolean variable to false

The variable types were:
tetlh = list (a container of other variables, in some order)
ghItlhHom = string (a small piece of text, stored as data)
(We asked for but didn't get a word for integer.)

Other programming concepts:
QInHom = comment (a small piece of text, ignored by the computer, to
document the code)
vIHtaHbogh gho = loop (a section of program which repeats while or until
some condition is satisfied)
mIw = procedure (subroutine, a re-usable piece of frequently repeated code
which performs some operation)
lIw = variable (a symbolic identifier used to reference a piece of memory
for storing data)

For the "Ok" and "cancel" buttons, we used {ruch} and {qIl}, respectively.

-- 
De'vID
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