For those interested in details, here's the transcript of talking to Marc Okrand at qepHom 2017 on Sunday, 19th November 2017, when he told me about {peD}: ---- MO: We just found a new word. LLL: Really? Tell me. MO: You got a piece of bread, a roll, with a hard crust, or whatever, and you cut it or you bite into it, it makes little crumbs. LLL: In German you would say "krümeln". "Das Brötchen krümelt." It means the little crumbs are falling out of it. MO: Yes. The Klingon word for that is {peD}. LLL: So, could there be other things falling out? MO: Maybe. LLL: Oh, {peD} is "snowing" anyway. So it can also be used for crumbs. MO: So the bread is doing that. Or has done that. LLL: Would there be other... Oh no, it's not transitive, so you cannot {peD} something. It's only {peD}. MO: [nods] LLL: Is there anything else we need to know? MO: Oh, probably. Most people need to know a lot of things. LLL: So I'll have the questions later. It's not a new word, anyway. MO: No. It's a new usage. LL: An extension of an existing word, I understand. MO: Yes. And that's one way to protect the three letters words. Cause they're an endangered species. You told me. LLL: You said it's for crumbs. What if I take confetti, for example, throw it in the air and it's raining down... so it's for everything falling down slowly? MO: [nods] LLL: But not rain? MO: No. LLL: So, water... If I'm spraying water we have {ghay}. And {SIS} is only related to rain. MO: No; {SIS} can also be used for something else, but I can't remember right now. ---- This information from #qepHom2017 will be added to the page "Message from Maltz" on qepHom.de: https://www.qephom.de/e/message_from_maltz.html -- Lieven L. Litaer aka the "Klingon Teacher from Germany" http://www.klingonisch.net http://www.klingonwiki.net/En/Apostrophe
On Mon, Nov 20, 2017 at 3:22 PM, Lieven <levinius@gmx.de> wrote:
MO: Yes. And that's one way to protect the three letters words. Cause they're an endangered species. You told me.
Maybe not quite an endangered species, perhaps closer to a vulnerable species. How many one-syllable words are there left in Klingon? (This isn't quite the same as three-letter words, since a syllable can also have two or four letters, but I already did the math for one-syllable words.) There are 21 consonants to start a syllable, 5 vowels for the middle of a syllable, and 25 ways to end a syllable (one of the 21 consonants, {rgh}, {w}', {y'}, or no consonant). That gives 21 * 5 * 25 = 2625. Then remember that {ow, ow', uw, uw'} aren't allowed to end syllables, so subtract 84 potential words. (21 ways to start, times 4 "forbidden" combinations of vowel and ending.) 2625 - 84 = 2541. Then subtract the three words Okrand has said he won't use: {pIS, SIt, Qov}, so that's 2538. (There's probably other words Okrand will end up avoiding, but AFAIK he hasn't said so explicitly.) (It's also possible that {Iw'} and {Iy'} can't end syllables, because they've never been used, but Okrand's not yet excluded them specifically. If they are also forbidden, rather than simply being very uncommon, then the number of potential words drops to 2496, which changes the numbers a bit.) Thanks to the boQwI' source code (already updated with the latest new entries) and a short Python script, I found that 1572 one-syllable words are already used. This leaves 2538 - 1572 = 966 one-syllable words left. This is 38% of the potential one-syllable words remaining. (If {Iw'} and {Iy'} are forbidden syllable endings too, then the numbers become 924 words (37%) remaining.) We've still got a ways to go before we run out, I think.
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