Talk:Klingon

Copyrighted material

Make sure that "all contributions to Wikibooks are considered to be released under the GNU Free Documentation License.) For this project it is doubly so because almost all of the material is copyrighted by Paramount Pictures and Michael Okrand. Make sure that anything that is added to this project meets all of the standards, and try to avoid "fair-use" material unless you are absolutely sure that it is legal.

That said, this is a neat language, and I think it is possible to write an original language guide for the "Warrior's Tongue". Good luck, and I hope that this turns into something more than a simple stub. --Rob Horning 00:40, 17 August 2005 (UTC)

Flesh this out

This Wikibook should really be fleshed out. The interesting thing about the Klingon language is it's structured differently than other languages. The way the human mind works is complex, but a lot of it involves piping through the language center; this makes Klingon extremely interesting.

Consider a room for a moment, an empty room with the following shape:

        Black
      a-------------b
      |             |
Black |             | Red
      c-------------d         Black

Each corner has a compartment to hide an object in. Hide food in it; spin a person around; and then have them find the object. You'll get varied results:

1. A normal person can find the food easily
2. A young child with workable language skills can find the food easily
3. A young child without developed language skills can find the food 50% of the time
4. A rat can find the food 50% of the time
5. A normal person with developed language skills can find the food 50% of the time if he is busy holding a conversation while the food is being hidden

You may ask why (1) and (2) find the food easily but (3), (4), and (5) can only get it half the time. It turns out that the room has two main properties, that being color and geometry. You have four corners in the room based on this:

• Red/Black Corners (2)
  • Black on the left (b)
  • Black on the right (d)
• Black/Black Corners (2)
  • Short wall on the left (a)
  • Short wall on the right (c)

Let's try to deinterlace these into solid categories geometry and color.

• Geometry
  • Short wall on the left (a, d)
  • Short wall on the right (b, c)
• Color
  • Red/Black (b, d)
  • Black/Black (a,c)

Considering either of these, we can identify any pair of corners; but we can't identify any corner uniquely. We have to actually combine color and geometry; notice each set in Color shares one and only one item with each set in Geometry.

It turns out that while the language center is occupied, humans can't connect Color and Geometry to form a complete identifier. This experiment was conducted and documented by Hermer-Vazquez, L., E. S. Spelke, and A. S. Katsnelson, 1999, "Sources of flexibility in human cognition: Dual-task studies of space and language," Cognitive Psychology, 39(1): 3-36.

More interesting is that a young child or an animal without language skills is incapable of doing it; this indicates that the language center doesn't just function as an extra blob of processing power, but an actual structured processing center that functions based on the language (or lack thereof) it is processing.

In other words, the structure and grammar of a language influence how the brain processes information. This in turn means that your choice of language affects exactly how you solve a problem. This is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

So there you have it. Mr. Whorf, fire.

--Bluefoxicy 18:37, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Audio

Someone should record some audio of Klingon for helping to instruct people how to speak it. It'd be a lot easier than trying to figure out pronunciation keys, since most lay-people don't quite get it. --Bluefoxicy 18:37, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

E-Prime

Nice to see a book aiming to write in e-prime but there are many cases where this isn't done... in 'Why Learn Klingon' you say "you're wondering" which is clearly a violation of the rules of e-prime. :) Xania 23:40, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Nice to see someone who notices ;) I'll clean that up as I go. I've mostly spent my time working on the English Dictionary of Klingon Words, and will clean up the other stuff before I go on to grammar. --Bluefoxicy 17:32, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Words

Just begging with Klingon, and I've seen the term petaQ also spelt p'tahk, at least, I think its the same, they seem to pronounce the same and they have the same meaning. Is this a common type of discrepancy? I would add some form of sig, but I lack an account.

Oh dear, that comment was added almost a year ago, but I'll answer it anyway for anyone who might stumble across this: petaQ is the spelling of the word in Klingon, and p'tahk is the English version that approximates the sounds of petaQ. This is similar to the difference between bat'leth and batlh'letlh, the former is the English version, the latter official tlhIngan Hol. --Bozwaldo (talk) 05:04, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

Updating

Seeing as this book hasn't been updated since the original Kahless was emperor ;-), I've been going around adding modules, fixing errors, etc. --Bozwaldo (talk) 19:29, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

So please help, if you can. :) --Bozwaldo (talk) 19:30, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Another thing: I'm thinking that a Sentence of the Week in Klingon could be maintained, as learning Klingon is so much easier when one has context clues to go on. :) Thoughts? -- Bozwaldo (talk) 22:37, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Titles

As the Esperanto wikibook has the title of each section in Esperanto and English, I'm planning on doing the same (with Klingon) for each title in this book. --Bozwaldo (talk) 21:55, 18 May 2009 (UTC)