[tlhIngan Hol] chabal tetlh voting criteria

[Jesse Manoogian]

What are some of the criteria you use when deciding whether to vote a chabal tetlh word submission up or down? There is, of course, the atomicist school of thought, which only votes +1 on words if Klingon can't already express them through a workaround with existing vocabulary. Not all chabal voters are atomicists, though. There there is the culturalist school, which votes +1 on concepts that would be important to the Klingons, given what we know about the culture Marc Okrand has illuminated.
The atomicist attitude is not sufficient alone, however, to account for all the -1 votes at chabal tetlh on Kli.org. I'm puzzling over why so many people are voting down "helicopter" and "hemp". (Does Kronos have a !hemp plant that I'm unaware of that already has a Klingon name?)
As for my votes, I tend to vote -1 on concepts that already have a canon way of being expressed, such as the suggestion for "already". I vote down words for Earth-specific concepts that are neither commonly used even in English nor of peculiar interest to Klingon speakers. (Saarbrücken, Germany is important to Klingonists, so that got a +1 from me, but does Klingon really need a word for "haiku" at this point?) I also vote down entries where someone seemed to stuff too many concepts in one request, like requesting the name for every country on Earth in Klingon.

Other than that, I vote up English words that are common, and *don't* already have a canon way of being expressed (like "gay"). I vote up non-planet-specific terms that don't have a straightforward and short workaround with existing vocabulary, even if they're less common (like "qubit"). And I vote +1 on classically Klingon concepts, like "path of a warrior" or Star Trek universe words, like "J'naii". (I will admit, though, that I had never heard of the J'naii until someone requested that word.)
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