On Mon, 22 Apr 2019 at 19:13, Daniel Dadap <daniel@dadap.net> wrote:
Sometimes I wonder what the most extreme, strict, adherence to Okrandian canon might look like. I picture people asserting that it’s not enough to simply use sentences composed by Dr. Okrand as examples of well-formed grammatical sentences, but that *only* full sentences that were composed by Dr. Okrand, so you could say {nIn 'ar wIghaj} but not {nIn 'ar boghaj} or {nav 'ar wIghaj} and everybody just uses the same sentences over and over again to mean different things and the situation starts to resemble the Tamarians from “Darmok” and everybody knows that {nuqDaq yuch Dapol} is only really a question about chocolate in the most limited of circumstances.
In fact, I have experienced exactly this situation. Here's a message from the archive in which I describe it: On Wed, 4 Jan 2012 at 18:56, De'vID jonpIn <de.vid.jonpin@gmail.com> wrote:
One of the reasons I started learning Klingon in high school was because one of my best friends and I wanted a secret language we could converse in without other people in our social circle understanding what we were saying, and we were both Star Trek fans. Obviously, I took it much further than she did. :-) Nevertheless, she learned enough to have memorised certain phrases, and these became our little injoke. She never got the prefix system, but memorised certain sentences with fixed prefixes ({pIpIH}, {HIghoS}, etc.) which she'd use correctly, either alone or in a mixed English-Klingon sentence. For example -- mutual friend to me: "We're having a party on Sunday at so and so's."; she to me: {pIpIH}, meaning "you're invited". Yes, she could only say "We are expecting you (sing.)", and not "I am expecting you (sing.)" or "we are expecting you (pl.)", etc. You'd be surprised at how much you can communicate using nothing but sentence fragments from TKD, CK, PK, and a mixture of English, if you allow a high tolerance for error (for example, I'd understand "{HIghoS} cafeteria" to mean "come with me to the cafeteria" if she was with me, or "come to me, I'm in the cafeteria" if she was calling me).
-- De'vID