[Tlhingan-hol] yIntaH wIch

[Robyn Stewart]

They were asked to indicate languages in which they could read a 
newspaper, write a personal letter and carry on a conversation. 
Considering that "alkjrghlaerf cafeteria" would not be too hard to 
figure out as "come to the cafeteria" and "we're having a party on 
Saturday" would generally be interpreted as "you're invited to the 
party on Saturday," fun as it is to use a language that way, it 
doesn't  exactly communicate.

It's possible that four grade eleven boys carried out some 
communication in Klingon. It's also likely that four grade eleven 
boys who sat near one another laughed at the Klingon language 
offering together and conspired to select it.

I too had a Klingon-language buddy who could "Chinese room" simple 
phrases like {megh vIneH}. Perhaps the KLI should fund a project to 
seek out and evaluate every so-called Klingon speaker who hits the media. :-)

At 09:56 04/01/2012, De'vID jonpIn wrote:
>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
>
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