[tlhIngan Hol] tlhIngan Hol DajatlhtaHvIS nItlhejpu' 'Iv? / Counting conversant speakers

[Will Martin]

Back in the day, I knew two people (and maybe a third) who knew 100% of the vocabulary. We used to talk about Qov words — words that only Qov knew and would use casually, sending the rest of us to our dictionary of choice to figure out what she just said.

HoD Qanqor, who was DEFINITELY conversational in the language on a wide range of topics, and was the unquestionably the first person to be conversational with it, with Seqram being the second to develop that level of access to both grammar and vocabulary. Neither of them kept up with new words when the new words became so arbitrary, depending on the demands on Okrand for whatever project he was helping someone with, whether needing a bunch of 21st century nation names, poetic/mythical words that don’t come up in casual conversation, technical words about chemistry, material science, physics, obscure Star Trek stuff that doesn’t come up in conversation, etc. Even Qov admitted that she wasn’t keeping up with the new stuff.

To be honest, it got to feel like, “Okay, here’s a new word I have zero reasons to memorize…” It got harder and harder to learn each new word, and I had less and less reason to remember most of them. So, here’s my personal news I can’t tell you in Klingon because of lack of vocabulary:

****
Yesterday, my car’s horn started blowing because the computer is malfunctioning and I had to use a wrench to remove the bolt on the battery clamp and a pry bar to remove the ground strap from the battery. I called the service department of the car dealership where I bought the car and I have an appointment for tomorrow afternoon, but I’m not sure that, if they can’t fix it without waiting days for parts, they’ll give me a loaner so that I can go to my “Plus” level square dance class tomorrow night in Waynesboro. I have an extended warranty on the car, but I suspect I’ll have to sue them to get them to get them to pay for the repair.

I’ve recently taken up playing a cittern that I bought from a local luthier. It has five pairs of strings, each pair tuned in unison. You can think of it as an octave mandolin with an added low C pair of strings, or as a mandocello with an added high E pair of strings. I’m getting pretty good on it, but next month, I’m flying an a jet airliner to Ireland for a couple weeks and can’t take the instrument, so I built a mandolin from a kit, hoping it will fit in the carry-on luggage. 

The wood looks nice: curly maple back and sides, mahogany neck, and Madagascar ebony fingerboard and bridge (unlike Gaboon ebony, it has white streaks running through it), though I didn’t do a good enough job sanding it, so it has scratches in the wood that the spray lacquer didn’t mask well at all.

I like to play Wordle every day. My wife thinks I’m cheating because I use a spreadsheet to calculate the statistical frequency of letters used in five-letter words in English in each of the five positions to improve my ability to guess well. Before I did this, I usually solved it in four guesses, but now I have it down to three.

****

I mean, yes, I could go through a process and claim to translate that story, but nobody would actually understand the result.

... yet the language has words for things I would never want to say in conversation.

I count myself as someone with a good grip on the grammar, and a useful but very limited vocabulary, and uncommonly good pronunciation. There are fringes of both grammar and vocabulary that I’m quite weak on. Am I “conversational”? Probably not, though if I worked at it within a community of speakers, I’d probably be there in short order, except that I’m unlikely to invest the effort, given, well, learning to play the cittern, preparing for a trip to Ireland, and dealing with a disabled car and a car dealership with a bad reputation for service or dealing honorably with warranties they were happy to sell me. I’m also trying to learn to shrink the fingering of all the tunes I play to the mandolin’s scale length.

As you suggest, it’s a very arbitrary line between those who are or are not conversational. Two different “conversational” speakers might have different vocabularies because they typically talk about different things, thereby having difficulty holding up their end of a conversation with the other person.

“Brush… up… ya Klingon…. Start quoting it now…"

pItlh

charghwI’ ‘utlh
(ghaH, ghaH, -Daj)




> On Apr 24, 2023, at 2:27 AM, Lieven L. Litaer via tlhIngan-Hol <tlhingan-hol at lists.kli.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> Am 23.04.2023 um 19:27 schrieb Iikka Hauhio:
>> As a test of fluency, I was once suggested a survival test: can you survive in a foreign city using only their native language?
> 
> I have also heard of that kind of test, and that's the one I would like
> to set as a counting method for "Klingon speakers", accepting that this
> does not mean "perfect Klingon speakers".
> 
> If one is able to explain and/or understand a word by using other
> existing words, I believe it counts as being a speaker.
> 
> I remember being in the US as an exchange student. I had had only two
> years of English classes before. My English skills were surely below
> being expert, but if there was a word I didn't know, people could
> explain it to me. So per definition, I was a speaker, and even a
> "fluent" speaker. But never on the level of a native speaker.
> 
> We should not forget that when counting Klingon speakers. Don't only
> count those who are at 100%.
> 
> 
> --
> Lieven L. Litaer
> aka the "Klingon Teacher from Germany"
> http://www.tlhInganHol.com
> http://klingon.wiki/En/AliceInWonderland
> _______________________________________________
> tlhIngan-Hol mailing list
> tlhIngan-Hol at lists.kli.org
> http://lists.kli.org/listinfo.cgi/tlhingan-hol-kli.org

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