[tlhIngan Hol] is De' "data, information" countable ?

Will Martin willmartin2 at mac.com
Fri Jul 10 12:52:37 PDT 2020


So, the question becomes whether {tlhuD} is a Klingon physicist’s jargon, or a common Klingon’s word that might, as in English, have a wider scope of meaning.

I tend to think of radiation as, well, something that radiates.

[Long philosophical ramblings deleted, being more important for me to write than for you to read.]

It is interesting to think about, though.

charghwI’ vaghnerya’ngan

rInpa’ bomnIS be’’a’ pI’.

> On Jul 10, 2020, at 1:17 PM, SuStel <sustel at trimboli.name> wrote:
> 
> On 7/10/2020 12:55 PM, Lieven L. Litaer wrote:
>> Am 10.07.2020 um 18:40 schrieb nIqolay Q:> This sentence also provides 
>> another example of later canon changing 
>> [...] 
>>> In the example sentence, *tlhuD* is used with electricity. (Although 
>>> perhaps a jolt of electricity is close enough to radiation -- that is, a 
>>> discharge of energetic particles -- that it still counts.) 
>> 
>> That's what I thought too. I am not a physicist, but I think that [at 
>> least from aKlingon point of view] electricity pretty well fits into the 
>> idea of radiation. 
> As someone who has had some training in physics, I can tell you that electricity is not radiation, though the two are related phenomena. Electricity about is the presence and movement of electrically charged particles. Radiation is about the emission of waves or particles of all kinds. There is some overlap between the two, in that electromagnetic radiation (e.g., light) affects the electric (and magnetic) field.
> 
> 
> 
>> And even if it's not - perhabs we could accept that this is one of the 
>> things where the Klingon language just is that way as it is. Even though 
>> Okrand said "tlhuD refers to radiation only", he did not say that 
>> electricity is not part of it. The summary of all of this is that tlhuD 
>> is used with radiation and electricity. 
> I think it's more likely that the scientific terminology evolved AFTER the Klingon language, so scientific jargon may not be identical to the layman's language. We speak in quantum mechanics of waves, but the word just comes from the movement of water — which is waves, but the quantum mechanical Schrodinger Equation doesn't represent a physical object actually waving. We speak of an event horizon, even though the word horizon really refers to the point at which an object disappears around the curve of the Earth. We speak of quantum spin: even though the particle is not literally spinning, it behaves in certain ways as if it were. Scientific jargon grows out of ordinary language.
> 
> Also, Okrand is not a physicist. He's speaking in the same register as he did in The Klingon Dictionary: crudely. We have one example of 'ul tlhuD, which may mean that you can tlhuD electricity, or it may mean some writer got sloppy with scientific jargon. Maybe some Klingon scientist will push his duct-taped glasses up his ridgy nose, sniffle, and say, "ACTUALLY, people always say 'ul tlhuD, but 'ul doesn't actually get tlhuDed." We don't know.
> 
> For now, if someone says 'ul tlhuD, don't sweat it. Okrand said "radiation only," but we don't really know exactly how technically accurate that is supposed to be. tlhuD may or may not be used with electricity, and we don't have enough information to say for sure, but if someone uses it, there's no point in cracking down on it.
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> SuStel
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