[tlhIngan Hol] expressing baby animals (and words for dog)

[James Landau]

>From: "De'vID" <de.vid.jonpin at gmail.com>
>To: tlhIngan-Hol <tlhingan-hol at kli.org>
>Cc: "tlhingan-hol at lists.kli.org" <tlhingan-hol at lists.kli.org>
>Subject: Re: [tlhIngan Hol] expressing baby animals (and words for
    dog)


>> It isn't a Bing-style translation, is it?
>
>
>It's a word-for-word substitution using a word list without regard for
>meaning or grammar. (The project itself uses the word "relexification" to
>describe this process.)
>
>For example, in the link you posted, it listed {'elta'} as the substitution
>for "entered". (Why {-ta'} and not {-pu'}? Some verbs had substitutions
>with {-pu'} and others had {-ta'}, for reasons never explained.) The KLV
>would use {'elta'} for entering a house, synagogue, or ship, which is okay,
>but also for "ye are entered into their labours" and things like that.


So the man who spearheads the KLV knows it's not even correct Klingon grammar? Then why bother if it's going to be word salad? What a waste of time.

Having a conlang that is a "relex" or "cipher" is considered something to avoid in the conlanging community. Someone by the name of Marduk came to the CBB (a conlanging forum) earlier this year and spent a day sharing his sixteen languages, all of which had over 56,000 words of lexicon, with us. You could type English text in and it would output the translation in any of the sixteen conlangs you wished, and even print it in one of his constructed scripts. Well, it turned out that Marduk had designed the phonology and the con-scripts for his languages, but all of his lexica were computer-generated English ciphers, mapping up one-on-one with an English word-form regardless of meaning or part of speech, and the words were in the exact same order as their English equivalents! Sort of takes the fun out of making a conlang.

>It's debatable which is worse between this and Bing.


I'd say this is worse than Bing, since at least Bing was fed Klingon morphological and syntactic rules (from what I understand).

>p.s. Does the word "donkey" even appear in the KJV? I think not. I think in
>the English of King James' time, the word for what we now call a "donkey"
>was "ass", and that's the word actually used in the KJV. So the KLV isn't
>even a word-for-word substitution, it's a bowdlerised word-for-word
>substitution (presumably to avoid the association of "ass" with {Sa'Hut}).
>(Merriam-Webster and Wikipedia both say that the earliest attestation of
>"donkey" to refer to the animal is ca. 1785, so 174 years after the 1611
>publication of the KJV.)


I was wondering about this too. I remember when my father went to someone's bar mitzvah and came back with some Judaica that had the Ten Commandments printed in Hebrew and translated into Biblical English. The Hebrews were told not to covet their neighbor's wife, nor their neighbor's ass nor ox nor maidservant nor manservant nor anything else that was their neighbor's. I was about 9 or 10 at the same, and laughed because "ass", which meant *Sa'Hut* as well as donkey, was in the Bible, even though I knew what they meant. I've seen Biblical quotes with "ass" in them many times since then, and remember reading about the word "donkey" being coined as a substitute for "ass" around the same time people turned "cock" into "rooster" and "apricock" into "apricot". So I was wondering what version of the Bible was being used, if it has "donkey".
  
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