[Tlhingan-hol] Klingon takeover of Canada Post

[De'vID]

On 3 May 2016 at 04:20, Robyn Stewart <robyn at flyingstart.ca> wrote:
> Some background: the person Canada Post contacted for this was Joey, a PhD student in Calgary who has gotten some press lately for "speaking Klingon" even though he's a beginner. I reached out to him after an interview he did on CBC, and have been coaching him. He was volunteering at the con and did a couple of presentations. Canada Post initially sent a script not unlike the legal brief that's being passed around: mostly English and peppered with Klingon idioms that they themselves had pulled out of some reference. I corrected all the I/l errors and mis-capitalization errors, and expressed disappointment that there wasn't anything more challenging to do.  Then the day before the event, they suddenly wanted more Klingon.  Joey made a stab at it, so what was eventually used was more my corrections of his work than my original work. He got no pronunciation coaching, but he's a linguist, so I expected him not to do too badly.  I haven't had a chance to listen to him mangle ghoHoHQo' yet.  I laughed at him when I realized he was going to have to say that.

He did very well. There was one instance where he pronounced {-law'}
like the English word "law", and I think another where he pronounced
{Qob} to rhyme with "cob", and he sometimes slipped with {gh}/{H}/{Q}
in the middle of words. But overall the pronunciation was very good
for a beginner.

There's one slide though where he mislabeled {Su-} as the third person
plural, and he repeated that error when he presented it as well.

> Even when they aren't necessarily the very best thing to say, I like the use of idioms in applications like this, because the vast majority of people who "speak Klingon" know only phrases like these, so let them hear something they know and understand, and know that it is Klingon. I'm very glad we were able to include more than that, to let them know that there is more.

I think it was a good mix of grammar (just enough to give an idea of
how it's different than English) and set phrases.

-- 
De'vID