Re: Klingon 'Google'...

From: George Partlow <pricerbumanto_at_hotmail.com>
Date: 19 Feb 2002 09:10:55 -0800

"Able Spacer Kelly" <vllyfrg_at_Yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<_chc8.1180$FVt.66650205_at_news2.randori.com>...
> George Partlow <pricerbumanto_at_hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:e5dfe6d0.0202171455.2f9ed463_at_posting.google.com...
> > "Able Spacer Kelly" <vllyfrg_at_Yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:<zYGb8.956$FVt.55509116_at_news2.randori.com>...
> > > Keeper of the Purple Twilight <no_at_spam.invalid> wrote in message
> > > news:160220021250403183%no_at_spam.invalid...
> (snip)
> > > > You mean people still speak Esperanto? I thought it was as dead as
> > > > Latin.
> > > >
> > > Esperanto was origionally constructed as "the ultimate international
> trade
> > > language", but was never used to any real degree. It was never a "living
> > > language" (like latin), just a language experiment which didn't work.
> > >
> > > So, it is as "living" as it ever was, and has more in common with
> Klingon
> > > than with Latin.
> >
> > There are perhaps as many as a thousand people in the world who speak
> > Esperanto as a first language; does that count? (See, for example,
> > <http://www.geocities.com/Paris/9231/>)
> >
> > George
> >
> I stand corrected. I had not realized that anyone spoke it *as a primary
> language*. Aparently it is alive and well.
>
> I wonder how many people speak Klingon? :-)

Depends on your definition of "speak", of course! If you mean "can easily carry on a conversation on everyday subjects with minimal hesitations to think of the right way to express an idea", then the answer seems to be "a few dozen"... according to the people I know who _do_ speak it, by that definition (see one at <http://world.std.com/~mam/>). AFAIK there has been just one attempt to raise a kid bilingual in Klingon, by d'Armond Speers (<http://higbee.cots.net/~holtej/index.htm>), as reported in a article in WIRED a few years ago, but he gave up when his son was about 3-1/2, largely I believe because the language at that time didn't have vocabulary for a lot of the everyday objects in a child's world. Just as with Esperanto, though, it's hard to answer the question, because there's no official census. It's perhaps similar to asking "How many people know how to play poker?"

It is interesting to me that d'Armond's thesis topic at Georgetown had to do with ASL, since Mark got his PhD at UCBerkeley with a thesis related to ASL, too!

For the record, I don't speak Klingon myself, either by the above definition or by the more common one of simply being able to say one word (probably "Qapla") and glower ferociously... ;-)

George Received on Tue Feb 19 2002 - 09:21:02 PST