[Tlhingan-hol] rup

[Will Martin]

In The Klingon Dictionary (TKD), Okrand consistently uses the term “capable of using language”. Perhaps I’ve missed his reference to “speech”.

The question then becomes, if telepathic beings are capable of communicating directly between each other’s minds feelings and ideas and any other concept or meaning, does that involve language?

In my opinion, language is a method of representing something in a mind so that it can be communicated to another being. True, pure telepaths would not require language to communicate. There would not be any representative. Communication would be direct, without the formation of words or symbols of any kind.

I wrote a sci-fi novella recently with this as the primary interesting sci-fi element. There were three races. Humans communicate only through language. A second race communicated through language and through telepathy. A third race communicated only through telepathy. The second race could communicate with the other two, but the first and third could not communicate at all. The second race developed a box the third race would wear which would…

… okay, this is challenging to describe briefly.

A human says something to a pure telepath. The pure telepath's box records the human’s voice and record’s the thoughts of the human which the human's language processes then used to utter the human words. The telepath tries to communicate something to the human. The box reads that thought, looks through the accumulated vocabulary of the human’s recorded voice and picks out the massively edited recording of the human words and plays it to the human.

This makes for initially very stilted and incomplete communication, but as the vocabulary of utterances from the human accumulates, conversation becomes more natural. The weird part is that the human has to listen to everything said by the telepath in the human’s own voice. Add that vocabulary gleaned from one human was useless in communicating with another human because of differences between ideas in different human minds.

My example was, “When I say ‘soap’, I’m thinking of how soap feels when it is wet and when I’m washing my hands with it. When you say ‘soap’ you are thinking of what it smells like when it is dry, just as you open a package and slide the dry bar out into your hand. The box doesn’t recognize these two different experiences as being associated with the same physical object, so it doesn’t recognize that we are saying the same word.”

Also, the box records thousands of versions of each word because our thoughts are slightly different each time we utter a word. It picks the version closest to the idea the pure telepath is trying to convey, so over time, the box even begins to have emotionally expressive speech because the emotional element of the thought selects the specific recording (and its emotional tone of expression).

I thought it was a cool story, but it was rejected as not being original enough because it also involved aliens eating humans, and apparently that’s been done to death. All the cool stuff about three different kinds of communicating minds apparently wasn’t interesting enough to the editors in question. Zing! Right past them. They either didn’t get it, or simply chose not to notice it enough to comment on it. The only comment was about having humans on the menu, which really was a very minor subplot in the story, and they misinterpreted things enough to expect that the hero of the story was headed off to be eaten, which he wasn’t.

Oh well.

So much for becoming a famous sci-fi author…

Anyway, I would have used {‘oH} to describe the pure telepath and {ghaH} to describe the race that built the box.

Fortunately, I didn’t quit my day job.

pItlh
lojmIt tI'wI'nuv



> On Nov 12, 2015, at 10:55 AM, qunnoQ HoD <mihkoun at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> interesting thoughts.. I hadn't noticed the distinction between "use of language" and "use of speech" !
> 
> On Thu, Nov 12, 2015 at 5:37 PM, De'vID <de.vid.jonpin at gmail.com <mailto:de.vid.jonpin at gmail.com>> wrote:
> qunnoQ HoD:
> > A Klingon vessel encounters aliens who DON'T speak. They DON'T use words.
> > They telepathically feel each others wishes/intentions etc. Or they use
> > colors to communicate. What would Klingons use ? {-pu'} or {-mey} ?
> 
> Note that the definition revolves around whether a being is capable of
> language, not speech. Not all language is spoken. If the Klingons
> recognised the beings as able to communicate, even using colours, they
> would probably use {-pu'}.
> 
> If they're incorporeal, Klingons might use {HoSDo'}.
> 
> --
> De'vID
> 
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