[tlhIngan Hol] A long document

[Will Martin]

paq’a’ ‘oH. qargh paq. tlhoy lut lengbogh ‘oH SoSnI’ nav QIn’e’.

A verbal speech can be {nI’}, but written words escape the experiential element of time. They take time to write and time to read, but the words themselves are frozen in time while they remain readable. That’s the whole point of writing words. 

That’s the only reason Deaf people learn English. American Sign Language (ASL) doesn’t have a written language of its own. Signed English (perversions of ASL invented to encode English into gestures) takes too long to communicate, and ignores the spacial advantages of expressive capacity in visual space of signing, which is why Deaf people hate Signed English. It’s also why they never developed a written language for ASL. Writing is not 3-D. Signing is. Spoken language is not 3-D. Signing is.

ASL has one word for “give/take” with the direction of the sign telling you which word it represents. You give someone directions to the bathroom or to the bus station by building a mimed, 3-D map, starting with a commonly known landmark, with a set of half a dozen hand shapes to represent the landmarks and the relationships between them. Time and distance gestures have facial expression modifiers to give a sense of scale.

My point is that words that describe physical or temporal dimension apply to the medium, not to the symbolic content. For the quantity of symbolic content, I’d use the suffixes {-‘a’} and {-Hom}, though they primarily apply to significance, as opposed to quantity of words. If you had a digital recording of an insignificant speech with many words, it would probably be {mu’mey law’ ghajbogh SoQHom’e'}. The Gettysburg Address would be {mu’mey puS ghajbogh SoQ’a’’e'} 

My cousin was in charge of the field repair manual for the M1 tank. The manual was on microfiche. It wasn’t very big, though the reader took up some space in the tank.

A general wanted the manual to be on paper, until it was pointed out that, printed on 8.5”x11” newsprint-thin paper, the manual would be 18’ thick. Many words. Many pictures. And it’s a reference manual. NOBODY would read the whole thing. But on microfiche it was quite small.

charghwI’ vaghnerya’ngan

rInpa’ bomnIS be’’a’ pI’.




> On Mar 11, 2019, at 7:49 AM, Daniel Dadap <daniel at dadap.net> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Mar 11, 2019, at 04:21, De'vID <de.vid.jonpin at gmail.com <mailto:de.vid.jonpin at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>> For a {tetlh} or {Qumran}, {tIq} might be appropriate.
> 
> Hmm. I was mainly thinking of transcribed speech or prose written in a very speech-like style. (I guess a recipe isn’t necessarily that; I was just being a little silly. But maybe Grandma has a particular style when it comes to writing down recipes.) I hadn’t really thought of {tetlh}. I wonder if {tIn} would work for a {tetlh}. Can {tIn} be used for things that are large without being physically large?
> 
> I agree that {paq tIq} sounds like a book with uneven physical dimensions.
> 
>> On Mar 11, 2019, at 03:52, Lieven L. Litaer <levinius at gmx.de <mailto:levinius at gmx.de>> wrote:
>> 
>> But i'm not sure one would say that the bible, as an example, is a {lut tIq}.
> 
> Well, it’s a {lut tIQ}.
> 
>> In this case, also remember the quite new word {qargh} which is used to describe a "thick book".
> 
> Ooh, that’s a useful word. I agree that it doesn’t generalize, but I think I missed that one when it was revealed, or saw it and then forgot it.
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