[Tlhingan-hol] Facebook Translation Project [FTP]: weekdays

[Qov]

Riffing off what SuStel wrote, as my contribution to the whole 
discussion. tl;dr? Summary at the bottom.

At 11:45 02/03/2012, David Trimboli wrote:
>Either way, it still comes out to "When you're speaking Klingon, you 
>say 'basketball' this way..."

Isolated communities of non-majority language speakers do develop 
their own vocabulary for things that aren't in their language to 
begin with, and it does come out differently in different 
communities, and it does cause confusion.

My ancestors left their homeland and came to Canada and then new 
things were invented. So although we continue to speak more or less 
the same language as the homeland, we adopted the words for parts of 
the automobile (hood, trunk, windshield) that were used by our 
nearest neighbour, while our homeland came up with their own terms 
(bonnet, boot, windscreen) for the new items. Our ancestors numbered 
floors of a building ground, 1, 2, 3 while our neighbours started 
with 1 on the ground floor.  Now in Canada you have to check how old 
the building is and who engineered it to know if you can get hurt 
jumping out of a first storey window or not.

I write to-do lists and shopping lists in pIqaD these days, and while 
it's likely that those of you who read pIqaD would be able to buy my 
groceries for me, at least half the items on any given list are 
nowhere near canon. DaHjaj {ray' tIr Hurgh ngat} vIpoQ. That's 
probably the furthest out there, and something that many of you 
didn't know existed.

The register of speech that allows me to say {gho moQ DaQuj DaneH} is 
very informal, not suitable for even this listserver, but supposing 
that I, SuStel and Qanqor actually liked basketball, we'd probably 
play it at qep'a' without griping about the language going to hell in 
a handbasket. I bet you money there are dozens of coinages between 
Qanqor and ISqu' that aren't on any published list. If you're going 
to communicate you're going to need words for things.

I suppose if I'm forced to commit, I am marginally on the side of 
preferring to have some people call Monday {jaj wa'DIch}, some people 
call it {jaj cha'DIch}, and some people call it {maSjaj}, over having 
some call it "Monday" and others "Montag".

This isn't an argument for or against anything, just the point that 
no matter how hard language authorities of any scale try to suppress 
new developments, they occur. Remember when the {mu' pegh} was 
noSvagh and everyone in the room was silently screaming 'I' but it 
couldn't be used? We have a chance here to influence the way I write 
my to-do lists and the way KAGsters call their meetings to order. Do 
we want to take it?

I'll try and stay out of this now, unless addressed directly, because 
all the sides of the argument are ably represented by smart committed people.

Summary : Personal and factional coinages will happen regardless of 
what this list or the KLI does. They don't belong on any official 
wordlist, but do we want to influence them?  Darned if I know.

- Qov