Re: NPR interview

And Rosta wrote:

> > Oops.  I just rechecked the "New Times" site (it *is*
> > http://www.newtimesla.com, by the way) and discovered that, weeks after the
> > original article, they finally printed the correction about my
> > name--along with some other letters which you might find interesting.
>
> including this piece of ignorant baloney;
>
> #Dr. Marc Okrand's creation of the Klingon language is just as impressive as
> #what Tolkien accomplished, and I think it's wrong to suggest otherwise.
How is that ignorant baloney, as opposed to one person's subjective opinion?
Different people judge the impressiveness of conlangs by different standards.

Though it may be crude in other ways, Klingon at least has the virtue of being
well documented and accessible.  You can learn to speak sentences in it, and even
carry on conversations with other people.  You just can't do that with Quenya and
Sindarin, for all their wonderfully imagined and gloriously detailed vocabularies
and histories.  In that particular sense, Okrand could be said to have
"accomplished" as much as or more than Tolkien.

I'm not saying that I value accessibility/usability over artistry, but I
definitely believe that documentation is important.  Certainly when it comes to
my own conlang projects, I judge their 'success' as much by how well documented
the grammars are as by other criteria such as aesthetics and plausibility.

Matt.

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