ON RESPECTING KLINGON.

March 12, 2004 by 9 Comments

SC, who had “held a rather dyspeptic view” of artificial languages (in particular Klingon) and the people who study them, had his eyes opened by exchanges with Rachel Shallit of a tear in the fabric of spacetime and Qov, proprietress of bo logh (one of two Klingon blogs I know of, the other being jIqel’s Journal); his discussion of Why SC likes fictional languages now is well worth reading.

Comments

  1. Eliza says
    March 12, 2004 at 2:43 pm

    Okay, languagehat, I’ll call a truce. If I tolerate Klingon, will you tolerate Cornish? I’m not asking you to fly St Piran’s flag, just to try to understand a little of the pride of its speakers. (I speak neither Cornish nor Klingon, which makes me ideally qualified to make pronouncements on both). Liz

  2. language hat says
    March 12, 2004 at 3:43 pm

    It’s a deal!

  3. dale says
    March 12, 2004 at 6:09 pm

    Any harmless, profitless thing lovingly tended is all right with me.

  4. mike says
    March 16, 2004 at 12:15 pm

    Must see Frazier giving a speech in Klingon thinking it is Hebrew being rendered phonetically

  5. mike says
    March 16, 2004 at 12:17 pm

    Must see Frazier giving a speech in Klingon thinking it is Hebrew being rendered phonetically
    sorry for repeat but forgot to check remember personal info

  6. Qov says
    March 16, 2004 at 9:43 pm

    There’s a brand new Klingon blog on the block, by qurgh remarkable not for its “I’m bored at work again” musings but that it is the first blog in pIqaD, the Klingon writing system. The author worked out a way for us to use chat and blog programs even though the Unicode rejected the proposal to place Klingon script in plane 1. You do have to download the correct font, and use Netscape Navigator, at least 1.7.
    Klingon has, true to stereotype, a large community of computer-savvy speakers, but as you’ve learned from SC’s recent post we’re language positive. If you think the ability to IM or blog in a native orthography would help your study language, our hailing frequencies are open.

  7. Jimmy Ho says
    March 18, 2004 at 12:45 am

    Qov, I am not sure if you intended to attach an URL to the sentence about Unicode’s rejection of pIqaD, but if this is the case, you have probably forgot something in the HTML tag. I would be glad to see it, since I am highly interested in Unicode (to which I am thankful for making writing different scripts, mostly Greek and Chinese, in my case, on the same page so easy ; only that did a lot to increase the rapidity of my thesis writing).
    I used to be on the same line with SC and care only about natural languages (for my defense, I did meet people who didn’t know any “foreign” language other than Esperanto), but I had to revise my views after reading Nick Nicholas’ pages about Klingon and Lojban. I knew some of his work as a Hellenist, but I hadn’t suspected he was so serious about invented languages.

  8. Qov says
    March 26, 2004 at 3:22 pm

    Yes, I seem to have mistyped a tag there. I can’t e-mail you with the information because my ISP deleted all my accounts (they claim they called me about it in advance, when actually they left a message asking me to call a number belonging to a phone sex company, but I digress). If you check out this blog entry you will find links to, respectively, the list where the newly approved tlh code Klingon language appears, the original proposal to encode Klingon in ISO 10646-2, a discussion of the rejection of that proposal, and an example of how people consider blogging in Klingon to be a farfetched joke. The second link would be the one I misinserted in my previous comment.

  9. Jimmy Ho says
    March 27, 2004 at 3:48 am

    Thank you, Qov, that’s exactly what I was looking for. The discussion in this Newsgroup link, in particular, is quite instructive, indeed, and I’m glad to see that it’s conducted, once again, by a Kazantzakis-quoting Nick Nicholas.

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