Re: [tlhIngan Hol] Klingon Word of the Day: rech
Let's look at the "Body Functions" section of the Landau Core Vocabulary and see how many of these words we have in Klingon:
That sounds like a good idea. To keep that list up to date, I have added it to the Klingon wiki, so we can easily keep track of it.
majQa'! vImuSHa'!
Besides, could you please tell me more about that list? Was it your idea?
Sure! Let me tell you the story. In November of 1997, I was spending Thanksgiving vacation at Grandmom Alyce's house when I got an idea: a list of words that conlangers could use when building the vocabularies for their conlangs, or that foreign language learners could study to make sure they'd have under their belts. There was Rick Harrison's ULD (see at https://www.frathwiki.com/Universal_Language_Dictionary in its current incarnation), but that lacked a lot of basic words; for instance, it didn't have "hungry" nor "thirsty". And I thought it odd that the ULD had "safflower" but not "elephant". I set to work at creating a basic list of 2,000 words. I relied on lists like the Rebecca Sitton spelling program's 1,200-word list to get the most common words. I also used the Spanish Picture Dictionary (you know, the one with Strongman Sam, Fifi, Henry, Ben, Bill, and the baby called Mimi/Zizi?) I arranged them by part of speech and by content area within each part of speech, and finished with 2,000 words. I named it the Landau Universal Vocabulary, which unintentionally shortened to LUV -- as in "luv", the cutesy way of spelling "love". In 1998, I put it up on my old Kankonian language/Lehola Galaxy site, which went down with the old Prodigy in 2002. In 2004, thoughts about a newer, bigger list with no round-number ceilings on number of words included brewed in my head. It would be divided into five parts, I decided: a Swadeshesque beginning part; function words, pronouns, adverbs, and grammatical concepts; numbers; and two lists of nouns, verbs, and adjectives (a Part IV with basic words and a Part V with more advanced words but covering more or less the same categories). Plus and appendix of proper names. This new list would be arranged by category, without the words being numbered, and would allow words of different parts of speech to be placed in the same vocabulary. On Christmas Day of 2006, I copied LUV and began on my long journey of turning it into something new. I called it the Landau Core Vocabulary, or LCV (yes, as in League of Conservation Voters). I remember that QISmaS jaj well, as I received a phone call from my best friend Lamesha that day. I broke the list into five parts, with categories in Parts II, IV, and V. That included creating a subset called the Basic 150 List (words like "mother", "cloud", and "to breathe"). On August 18, 2010, I started a thread on it on what was then the brand-new incarnation of Aevas' CBB (Conlanger Bulletin Board). Not all the kinks were out of it, yet; I still had a Miscellaneous section at the time. Ossicone, now the co-admin at the CBB, helped me fit the Miscellaneous words into categories and get rid of my Miscellaneous section. Over the next decade, the LCV grew. New sections, such as Air Travel, Space Travel, Sex, and Genetics and Biochemistry were added. I consulted dictionaries of German, Irish Gaelic, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese to find distinctions like "to sail (at the helm)" versus "to sail (as a passenger)". The size ballooned once I had found these distinctions, across English and twelve other languages, for all these words. I often bought foreign-language dictionaries from Barnes & Noble (and had to order my Oxford Russian dictionary through the post). By April 2014, the categories had been reworked considerably. Let's see if you recognize these "to be stuck" entries: to be stuck (be immovable: the door is stuck) to be stuck (be trapped, of a thing: the ring is stuck on my finge) to be stuck (be trapped, of a person: Paul got stuck in the bathtub) to be stuck (Alice was stuck in traffic) to be stuck (I'm stuck at school) to be stuck (I'm stuck with you) to be stuck (Ken is stuck on this math problem) In February of 2016, I reworked the Basic 150 List into a Basic 200 List, with some semantic splitting and some new words. (I had also dropped some words from the earlier list, such as the names of seasons, since not all cultures recognize spring, summer, autumn, and winter (the Ancient Egyptians didn't), or the words "wife" and "husband", since it's easy to conceive of an anthropic conpeople without the institution of marriage). I sent preliminary copies (as in the work I've done on it so far) to many other conlangers and language learners, including Ossicone, HTH, CarsonDaConlanger, Tom H. Chappell, MissTerry, dva_arla, Galen Buttitta, Larry R. Lowe, Andrew Mac, All4Ɇn, Kimbwidini, some guy named Junior from Brazil (who had used the original LUV to learn English), and even Larry Rogers. In March of 2019, I added a truckload of new words -- and a Part VI, for slang and conversation-only words (like "mm-hmm"). The vocabulary blossomed over the next few years adding words from corpora like COCA and IGCE and word lists like the Oxford 3,000 and iKnow.jp. Starting in December 2019, I've been posting the relevant categories from the LCV for each week of Lexember on the CBB. (Since 2021, I've been participating in word-building too -- with my conlang Shaleyan). As a sample of the LCV, here's a section (from Part IV) that's sure to be of interest to Klingons: Verbs of War. ===Verbs of War=== to fight (intransitive)* to fight (transitive) to mount (attack) to launch (a missile) to strike (torpedo, missiles) to defeat to conquer (a people) to overcome, to conquer (enemy forces) to take over to overthrow to recruit (soldiers) to occupy to invade to surround to surrender (oneself) to surrender (forfeit a town, kingdom, etc.) to capture (enemy, prisoner) to seize, to capture (land, fort) to attack (the enemy in war) to defend to resist (an enemy country/army/faction) to move (troops) to be killed, to die (an untimely death) to advance (an army) to retreat to win (a battle/war) to lose (a battle/war) The LCV now stands at 12,419 entries + 1,000 names. And that, my friends, is the story of the Landau Core Vocabulary.
Message: 5>Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2023 18:29:37 +0200 From: "Lieven L. Litaer" <levinius@gmx.de> To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org Subject: Re: [tlhIngan Hol] Klingon Word of the Day: rech Message-ID: <0e1686f5-4816-dc3c-5b9d-434133586994@gmx.de> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
Am 20.10.2023 um 04:36 schrieb James Landau via tlhIngan-Hol:
Let's look at the "Body Functions" section of the Landau Core Vocabulary and see how many of these words we have in Klingon:
That sounds like a good idea. To keep that list up to date, I have added it to the Klingon wiki, so we can easily keep track of it.
Besides, could you please tell me more about that list? Was it your idea?
On Oct 21, 2023, at 8:09 PM, James Landau via tlhIngan-Hol <tlhingan-hol@lists.kli.org> wrote:
The LCV now stands at 12,419 entries + 1,000 names. And that, my friends, is the story of the Landau Core Vocabulary.
I’m unable to reconcile the myriad words with the “core vocabulary” concept. -- ghunchu'wI'
I believe that the “core vocabulary” concept is based on a theory that ignores the nature of language, replacing reality, a.k.a. the concept of “stuff that the population using THIS language talks about” with a fictional concept of some universal group of things that all populations talk about. There is no universal person. IDIC. Jargon is the most obvious exclusion from core vocabulary. Meanwhile, we can’t agree on the boundary between one person’s core words that another person thinks is jargon. We have a lot of words in Klingon that are, to the general American population, jargon, because they refer to the Star Trek fictional Universe. We also have a lot of words that are proper names of 21st century nations, here on Earth, that any Star Trek Universe Klingon would consider jargon, since only Terran historians would have any use for these words. It’s curious that Klingon has the term {Hut’In vIl}, yet they haven’t bothered with a set word or phrase for a screwdriver, for instance. Then again, in the 1700s, here on Earth, a “screw driver” was a hammer, since many screws were coarse-threaded, very strong-holding nails “driven” in with a hammer. Finer threaded screws were turned with a “screw turner”. You also might use a screw turner to remove a screw that had been installed with a hammer. So, what’s the phrase that Klingons use for the tool that installs or removes screws? We can only guess. Is religious vocabulary jargon or universal? (I vote jargon, since, for example, early missionaries trying to translate the Bible into Native American languages were stunned to discover that many of these languages had no word for “god”, “heaven”, “devil”, etc..) Are food words universal? Would a fruitarian tribe in a jungle have a word for “meat”? Do all languages have the generic and separate words for “fruit” and “vegetable”? English doesn’t have a generic, common word for “edible plant” without this distinction that I’m aware of. “Roast, bake, fry” would likely not be core vocabulary for a culture that eats food raw. The real issue here is a search for a minimal vocabulary that one person who speaks multiple languages would like to have on hand for all the languages that that one person speaks, including whatever jargon that person is drawn to include, noting where specific vocabulary is missing in each language, more elegantly spoken in other languages. Since we are not one person, and we each favor certain collections of words, that means that each of us has to find a core vocabulary that works for us. There’s a personal drive to help others by offering them our version of a core vocabulary, but despite the positive intent, the effort is probably misguided. Qov learned the entire Klingon vocabulary (when it was smaller). She could easily have insisted that THAT IS the core vocabulary. Meanwhile, Klingon vocabulary has grown to the point that I don’t know anyone now who claims to have current, conversational-level access to the entire Klingon vocabulary. Then again, I am out of touch. So, each pair of us attempting to have ongoing conversations in Klingon will, through habit, form a core vocabulary between those two speakers. Most of that will apply between each and any third person, and, as in natural languages, the whole of the population will have most frequently used and familiar words, but any new pairing will involve at least one of the two having to look up words the other one thinks is “core”, and there will be words that one thinks is core and the other absolutely refuses to be forced to memorize, because that word is nothing close to the other person’s core. pItlh charghwI’ ‘utlh (ghaH, ghaH, -Daj)
On Oct 22, 2023, at 12:52 AM, Alan Anderson via tlhIngan-Hol <tlhingan-hol@lists.kli.org> wrote:
On Oct 21, 2023, at 8:09 PM, James Landau via tlhIngan-Hol <tlhingan-hol@lists.kli.org> wrote:
The LCV now stands at 12,419 entries + 1,000 names. And that, my friends, is the story of the Landau Core Vocabulary.
I’m unable to reconcile the myriad words with the “core vocabulary” concept.
-- ghunchu'wI' _______________________________________________ tlhIngan-Hol mailing list tlhIngan-Hol@lists.kli.org http://lists.kli.org/listinfo.cgi/tlhingan-hol-kli.org
participants (3)
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Alan Anderson -
James Landau -
Will Martin