[Tlhingan-hol] EuroTalk - First Impressions

[Robyn Stewart]

No word spoilers, just what it's like.

[I said before I couldn't install it, but then I found a rogue 
program that had created a file as big as half my hard drive, so 
deleted that and installed EuroTalk.]

There are two speakers, a man and a woman. That must be Charlotte and 
Jonathan. Jonathan's speech is better. You can hear the German 
accent, but it sounds cool, except when , he defers to his German 
spelling rules and pronounces a w as a v. Charlotte has trouble with 
some Klingon sounds. She says gIch for ghIch, baghneH for baghneQ, 
hImmey for Qimmey and maybe gHo' for ghop. Also I hear nIb for ngIb 
and lIlwI' for rIlwI'. In the game she says HIzha instead of HIja'. 
It's possible there is a bit of the McGurk effect going on with the 
little people that talk. It got so that I didn't want to answer 
correctly in the game, because I didn't want to hear that HIzha. But 
I have to hear a gobe' if I got it wrong. You can choose to click on 
Jonathan for his pronunciation, or they just alternate if you don't. 
Too bad ''ISqu' didn't do it.

I started with the body parts section. It has a picture of a person 
with arrows to all the parts and when you click on them the programme 
tells you the names.  No new body parts in here.

* The qanwI' is highlighted, so of course I said qanwI' but they want 
nItlh. In fact even my non Klingon-speaking husband looked at the 
initial learning diagram and said "they only have one of the fingers."

* The pictures are great. You have to identify body parts on a 
stunningly diverse group of people. I had to stop for a moment to 
FIND the DeSqIv on one, because his body shape is so unusual.

And then I click on the colours section. I see red, green light blue, 
yellow, orange, brown, purple, black, grey, white, pink and 
blue.  I'm in suspense, actually typing this before clicking on any.

On one colour, he says: SuD 'ej qugh. She says: SuD 'ej qoH. Heh, 
reminds me of the character in my bemorngan story. She couldn't say 
Hurgh either. There's new canon here, *I think* but not new words, 
more like confirmation of what we would have come up with on our own. 
Jonathan, why does your green SuD sound like Suj? Ooh, so does 
Charlotte's. There are people who will walk away from this thinking 
that green is Suj and yellow is SuD (they both get it right for 
yellow), and that red is dock and orange is Doq. They both use a 
short o for the red version. Even my husband heard that one, then 
said "maj" to praise them when I subsequently clicked on orange.

Countries are AWESOME, but mine is really hard to say. Two stopped 
syllables and an unstopped one. Jonathan stops all three and 
Charlotte does better but stresses the unstopped one. New Zealand is 
unexpected. The Klingon who named that one didn't speak any DIvI' 
Hol. I don't hear the middle vowel from either of them for Turkey. 
Whoa! What is the canon status of words that don't match their 
spellings on this DVD? Hmm there's a word other than wo' tay' here 
for the UK. And I think it is an error that the words for the US and 
UK do not end with the same letter.

The suspense and anticipation as I hover over something like a 
picture of a can of coke is so fun. Is it going to be a new word or a 
description? I was into the foods section, and not disappointed. 
Although it's sold as "as if Klingons lived on Earth" you can really 
read it as what a colony of Klingon ex-pats would call this stuff. 
And then ... I am forced to report, when I clicked on the pear, the 
program threw an exception and exited. I'll blame my computer.

This is cool. It was much cheaper than I expected. It's fun. Support 
your language and buy it! I would definitely buy this product for 
other target languages, too.

- Qov