[Tlhingan-hol] 19 new words to create

[Will Martin]

I well remember D’Armond smiling, pointing to a door and telling his son {lojmIt yIpoSmoH!} and his son gleefully ran across the room and slammed the door, laughing. He loved speaking Klingon.

I also remember D’Armond complaining that Klingon lacked common words, like “shoe”. When I pointed out to him that {waq} was the Klingon word for shoe, he couldn’t believe that he had missed that. I couldn’t, either, because most of the time his vocabulary was remarkably superior to mine.

Anyway, I’m sure that the greatest contributing factor to the end of his speaking Klingon was that his father was the only person he could communicate with using it. It was fun as a secret language, but consider the plight of immigrants where the children are bilingual and the parents speak only their native tongue, while nobody in the community does so.

Now, change that scene to one parent who speaks only English and the other who is bilingual and speaks English most of the time to most people. The kid has very little reason to continue speaking Klingon.

pItlh
lojmIt tI'wI'nuv



> On Jan 7, 2016, at 5:19 AM, De'vID <de.vid.jonpin at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Andrew:
>> I read a lot of articles about Klingon stating that D'Armond's son rejected
>> Klingon because it not only lacked words for things like "diaper", it even
>> lacked things for "table". Was this criticism misplaced?
> 
> As Qov said, the reason for the rejection wasn't because Klingon
> lacked vocabulary, it was because of its status among the people in
> the child's environment.
> 
> I actually recall the word D'Armond and I used for "table". It was
> {beQwI'} "thing which is flat". I don't recall the exact thing he said
> to me, since this was many years ago, but he pointed in the area of a
> food court and said something like, {Ha'! beQwI' retlh maba'!} "Let's
> go, we'll sit next to a flat-thing" or something like that. I
> understood that he meant a table more or less right away. The context
> didn't allow for another interpretation: in the direction in which he
> pointed, there was nothing but flat-things (tables) with seating
> beside them.
> 
> -- 
> De'vID
> 
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