[tlhIngan Hol] Klingon Word of the Day: rech

Sat Oct 21 17:09:15 PDT 2023

>> Let's look at the "Body Functions" section of the Landau Core Vocabulary
>> and see how many of these words we have in Klingon:
>
>That sounds like a good idea. To keep that list up to date, I have added
>it to the Klingon wiki, so we can easily keep track of it.
>
>https://klingon.wiki/En/BodyFunctions

majQa'! vImuSHa'!

>Besides, could you please tell me more about that list? Was it your idea?

Sure! Let me tell you the story.

In November of 1997, I was spending Thanksgiving vacation at Grandmom Alyce's house when I got an idea: a list of words that conlangers could use when building the vocabularies for their conlangs, or that foreign language learners could study to make sure they'd have under their belts. There was Rick Harrison's ULD (see at https://www.frathwiki.com/Universal_Language_Dictionary in its current incarnation), but that lacked a lot of basic words; for instance, it didn't have "hungry" nor "thirsty". And I thought it odd that the ULD had "safflower" but not "elephant". I set to work at creating a basic list of 2,000 words. I relied on lists like the Rebecca Sitton spelling program's 1,200-word list to get the most common words. I also used the Spanish Picture Dictionary (you know, the one with Strongman Sam, Fifi, Henry, Ben, Bill, and the baby called Mimi/Zizi?) I arranged them by part of speech and by content area within each part of speech, and finished with 2,000 words. I named it the Landau Universal Vocabulary, which unintentionally shortened to LUV -- as in "luv", the cutesy way of spelling "love". In 1998, I put it up on my old Kankonian language/Lehola Galaxy site, which went down with the old Prodigy in 2002.

In 2004, thoughts about a newer, bigger list with no round-number ceilings on number of words included brewed in my head. It would be divided into five parts, I decided: a Swadeshesque beginning part; function words, pronouns, adverbs, and grammatical concepts; numbers; and two lists of nouns, verbs, and adjectives (a Part IV with basic words and a Part V with more advanced words but covering more or less the same categories). Plus and appendix of proper names. This new list would be arranged by category, without the words being numbered, and would allow words of different parts of speech to be placed in the same vocabulary.

On Christmas Day of 2006, I copied LUV and began on my long journey of turning it into something new. I called it the Landau Core Vocabulary, or LCV (yes, as in League of Conservation Voters). I remember that QISmaS jaj well, as I received a phone call from my best friend Lamesha that day. I broke the list into five parts, with categories in Parts II, IV, and V. That included creating a subset called the Basic 150 List (words like "mother", "cloud", and "to breathe").

On August 18, 2010, I started a thread on it on what was then the brand-new incarnation of Aevas' CBB (Conlanger Bulletin Board). Not all the kinks were out of it, yet; I still had a Miscellaneous section at the time. Ossicone, now the co-admin at the CBB, helped me fit the Miscellaneous words into categories and get rid of my Miscellaneous section.

Over the next decade, the LCV grew. New sections, such as Air Travel, Space Travel, Sex, and Genetics and Biochemistry were added. I consulted dictionaries of German, Irish Gaelic, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese to find distinctions like "to sail (at the helm)" versus "to sail (as a passenger)". The size ballooned once I had found these distinctions, across English and twelve other languages, for all these words. I often bought foreign-language dictionaries from Barnes & Noble (and had to order my Oxford Russian dictionary through the post). By April 2014, the categories had been reworked considerably. Let's see if you recognize these "to be stuck" entries:

to be stuck (be immovable: the door is stuck)

to be stuck (be trapped, of a thing: the ring is stuck on my finge)

to be stuck (be trapped, of a person: Paul got stuck in the bathtub)

to be stuck (Alice was stuck in traffic)

to be stuck (I'm stuck at school)

to be stuck (I'm stuck with you)

to be stuck (Ken is stuck on this math problem)

In February of 2016, I reworked the Basic 150 List into a Basic 200 List, with some semantic splitting and some new words. (I had also dropped some words from the earlier list, such as the names of seasons, since not all cultures recognize spring, summer, autumn, and winter (the Ancient Egyptians didn't), or the words "wife" and "husband", since it's easy to conceive of an anthropic conpeople without the institution of marriage).

I sent preliminary copies (as in the work I've done on it so far) to many other conlangers and language learners, including Ossicone, HTH, CarsonDaConlanger, Tom H. Chappell, MissTerry, dva_arla, Galen Buttitta, Larry R. Lowe, Andrew Mac, All4Ɇn, Kimbwidini, some guy named Junior from Brazil (who had used the original LUV to learn English), and even Larry Rogers.

In March of 2019, I added a truckload of new words -- and a Part VI, for slang and conversation-only words (like "mm-hmm"). The vocabulary blossomed over the next few years adding words from corpora like COCA and IGCE and word lists like the Oxford 3,000 and iKnow.jp.

Starting in December 2019, I've been posting the relevant categories from the LCV for each week of Lexember on the CBB. (Since 2021, I've been participating in word-building too -- with my conlang Shaleyan).

As a sample of the LCV, here's a section (from Part IV) that's sure to be of interest to Klingons: Verbs of War.

===Verbs of War===

to fight (intransitive)*

to fight (transitive)

to mount (attack)

to launch (a missile)

to strike (torpedo, missiles)

to defeat

to conquer (a people)

to overcome, to conquer (enemy forces)

to take over

to overthrow

to recruit (soldiers)

to occupy

to invade

to surround

to surrender (oneself)

to surrender (forfeit a town, kingdom, etc.)

to capture (enemy, prisoner)

to seize, to capture (land, fort)

to attack (the enemy in war)

to defend

to resist (an enemy country/army/faction)

to move (troops)

to be killed, to die (an untimely death)

to advance (an army)

to retreat

to win (a battle/war)

to lose (a battle/war)

The LCV now stands at 12,419 entries + 1,000 names.

And that, my friends, is the story of the Landau Core Vocabulary.

>Message: 5>Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2023 18:29:37 +0200
>From: "Lieven L. Litaer" <levinius at gmx.de>
>To: tlhingan-hol at kli.org
>Subject: Re: [tlhIngan Hol] Klingon Word of the Day: rech
>Message-ID: <0e1686f5-4816-dc3c-5b9d-434133586994 at gmx.de>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
>
>Am 20.10.2023 um 04:36 schrieb James Landau via tlhIngan-Hol:
>> Let's look at the "Body Functions" section of the Landau Core Vocabulary
>> and see how many of these words we have in Klingon:
>
>That sounds like a good idea. To keep that list up to date, I have added
>it to the Klingon wiki, so we can easily keep track of it.
>
>Besides, could you please tell me more about that list? Was it your idea?
>
>https://klingon.wiki/En/BodyFunctions  
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