On 24 December 2016 at 12:27, Lieven <levinius@gmx.de> wrote:
For a long time I had thought these were different sources, but if I understand correctly, these are all the same. Is there any agreement on naming the canon source of the "MSN expert Forum", which is sometimes called "the usenet newsgroup" or "startrek.klingon" - or am I confused entirely mixing up things?
I'm talking abut the thing where Okrand ansered questions from 1996 to 1999, revealing lots of interesting information.
There are actually three separate, but related, sources. Prior to late 1997, there was msn.onstage.startrek.expert.okrand. (This is the "Microsoft Network expert forum", where there were different forums with recruited experts on a variety of topics.) This was a Usenet group run by Microsoft and discontinued in late 1997. When that happened, the groups migrated to other (publicly run) Usenet newsgroups. In particular, the Star Trek experts forum moved to startrek.expertforum. This turned out to be very confusing, as all the topics were merged into one forum, so the topics were split up and posts about Klingons went to startrek.klingon in early 1998. So there is no "the" Usenet newgroup. There were 3 newsgroups, each of which hosted messages about the Klingon language (but also other things) in succession. In particular, the "MSN expert forum" is an entirely different thing from "startrek.klingon". -- De'vID