On 11 August 2017 at 02:46, Alan Anderson <qunchuy@alcaco.net> wrote:
On Thu, Aug 10, 2017 at 2:17 PM, De'vID <de.vid.jonpin@gmail.com> wrote:
Are people going to accept sentences from Star Trek: Discovery as canonical Klingon? (For example, no objection if I use sentences from the show as examples in {boQwI'}?)
I object. Why would you pick those sentences as examples, and not, for instance, sentences from Qo'noS QonoS?
Simple: demographics. It's said that there are 30ish fluent speakers, a small fraction of which use {boQwI'}. Let's say it's 5, and that's probably an overestimate. (By definition no fluent speaker needs an app to look things up.) Of people who have opted in to provide app usage statistics, there are currently over 5000 30-day-active users (meaning people who have actually used the app within the last 30 days), and over 64000 total installs. Probably most of these people are casual fans, but at least some are beginner or intermediate Klingon learners. But in any case, there are three orders of magnitude more users of {boQwI'} than there are Klingonists who use it. Every time a movie comes out, people type the English subtitles into {boQwI'} to find out what the Klingon was and how it breaks down. Every time a book comes out with Klingon text, they type that into {boQwI'} to find out what it means. If things are missing, people email me to complain, which is how I know. If I don't include the Klingon dialogue searchable by the translated subtitles from DSC, I expect to get dozens of emails asking me why those sentences are missing. If I do include them, I expect approximately zero complaints from Klingonists. (The slight wrinkle is that if I do include them, a "certain someone" will most certainly post them to the mailing list to ask about their grammar, and name {boQwI'} as the source, and *then* Klingonists will complain that I included those sentences even though they're not canon.) If thousands of people were reading {Qo'noS QonoS}, I'd consider including sentences from it as examples, too.
How would you answer if YOU were the one providing Klingon translations for the lines in Discovery scripts?
Fortunately, I'm not. Perhaps I asked the wrong question. I don't necessarily consider Klingon from DSC to be Okrandian canonical Klingon until Okrand retroactively blesses it, but I'm going to (unless someone persuades me otherwise) include them in {boQwI'} anyway before he does so. I suppose the question really is, does anyone have a serious objection to {boQwI'} containing both Okrandian canon and good Klingon which conforms to Okrandian Klingon but which isn't from Okrand? Such entries will of course be marked as having come from DSC. -- De'vID