[Tlhingan-hol] yIntaH wIch

[De'vID jonpIn]

Qov:
> I happened to find this today. It's obviously the results of a survey of not
> what languages grade 11 (16-17 year old) boys can speak and read but of what
> languages they think it's funny to claim fluency in on a survey.  I wish
> they'd repeat the survey so I can find out if six years later more or fewer
> grade ten boys think it would be cool to speak Klingon.

>From the article:
"Of 35 students who completed the survey and indicated that they were
male and in Grade 11, only two indicated that they would be able to
carry on a conversation, read newspapers and write personal letters in
French. Three indicated they could do so in Klingon. (A fourth
Klingon-speaker did not indicate gender or grade. No females, or males
in other grades, checked off the language.)"

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).

The article suggests that the respondents had the option to indicate
their grade, which means that the participants were not all in Grade
11.  And yet, three of the four respondents who claimed to be skilled
in Klingon were male and in Grade 11 (the fourth did not specify
either gender or grade).  If the respondents had checked off Klingon
as a joke, I'd have expected them to be more distributed.  The
clustering suggests to me that they may indeed speak Klingon (or a mix
of Klingon and English), as a code language among themselves, like my
friend and I did in high school.  Of course, without further
information, we don't know for sure.  I wish the conductor of the
survey had asked the participants who claimed to know Klingon what
they meant.

Philip Newton:
> That makes me wonder how Klingon made it into a list containing just
> 18 languages.

It was probably put there as a control, to weed out the jokers.  (Of
course, this has the side effect of rejecting responses from people
who actually do speak Klingon, but the sample size was sufficiently
small that the reporter probably thought that this wasn't an issue.)

-- 
De'vID