On 12/20/2021 8:06 AM, mayqel qunen'oS wrote:
People like tolkien and okrand are one in a billion. Literally. They have been born with a special gift, a gift which none of us has: the ability to create something new.
Fond as I am of Marc Okrand and the Klingon language, he is no Tolkien. Tolkien didn't just create some conlangs. Tolkien invented some languages, then invented the complete etymologies of those languages and the legendary and mythic stories of the peoples who spoke those languages and the whole world in which they lived, and was constantly changing the languages to make it more suitable, while incorporating those changes into the etymologies. His work is astounding, and few have even come close to the incredible level of detail he did. (Although I haven't read any of it, I suspect M.A.R. Barker's Tekumel is probably one of the closest.) What Okrand made is pleasing and absorbing, but it's not a work of genius. I don't think our reliance on canon has anything to do with some innate ability of Okrand that we can't replicate. Rather, we rely on canon to maintain the fiction that this language is a real one spoken by aliens on another planet with a real culture and history, because otherwise we're just a bunch of cringeworthy geeks coughing and spitting at each other for no good reason. For me, at least, there is an important imaginative element to Klingon that must not be taken away, or the whole thing falls down. The ability of Klingon to survive a transition to a new keeper for people like us will not depend on someone being able to replicate the work of a genius. It will depend, rather, on how believably the fictional reality of Klingon can be maintained in its new context. If Okrand just says, "Maltz has decided to move to Joe's basement, so Joe gets to report new Klingon words now" or some such statement, I would find that ham-handed at best. If authority is granted to a committee to invent new Klingon words, that would be even worse, since I can imagine no good way in which a committee of human beings could be connected with reporting actual Klingon from the fictional universe. I would actually find it more satisfying to learn that our window into the secondary world has closed, leaving our canon of Klingon frozen at the current state, because that would be most believable. But it would be disappointing. -- SuStel http://trimboli.name