Re: Loxian

Do you know, Mark, how many people are on the Klingon Institute Committee,
and how many of them collaborated to translate _Hamlet_ into Klingon?  Or
the Bible?  (How much of the Bible)?  How many women were involved?

Sally

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Tuesday, March 14, 2006 11:29 AM
Subject: Re: Loxian


> On 3/12/06, Joseph B. <darkmoonman@...> wrote:
>> Klingon (thlIgan) might as well be copyrighted as none but Okrand are
>> blessed enough to create new words.
>
> That's "tlhIngan Hol".   And there's no official stance on who's
> allowed to do what; there is merely consensus.  The particular subset
> of the Klingonist community that has grown up around the KLI has
> chosen to treat Klingon as a genuine, incompletely-understood
> language.  (To the degree that it is already complete in Marc Okrand's
> head, of course, this is 100% true. :))
>
> The Klingonists are linguists studying it, and not even the most
> knowledgeable have anything like complete or authoritative knowledge
> of it.  What they do have, on rare occasions, is access to an
> informant (Dr. Okrand, or in the conceit, "Maltz" via Okrand) who can
> answer questions.  In that situation, I think you'll agree that any
> linguist who made up his own words, claiming that they were part of
> the language under study, would be a fraud?
>
> Other fans of Klingon are free to do as they like (short of publishing
> anything that claims to be "Klingon" without Paramount's permission,
> of course), but neologisms aren't likely to be accepted outside of a
> small subset of the Klingonist community.
>
>
> On 3/12/06, Chris Peters <beta_leonis@...> wrote:
>> I've been told (I don't know if this is accurate) that Marc Okrand owns
>> the
>> copyright to the Klingon language.  The name "Klingon" is of course owned
>> by
>> the Star Trek production folks, but the language itself is leased to them
>> under license, if I recall correctly.  I might be wrong.
>
> I had assumed that the creation of the Klingon language was work for
> hire performed by Dr. Okrand for Paramount, in which case that company
> would own everything.  But at the very least they have refrained from
> doing anything with the property without his involvement; even in the
> episodes where the language was butchered, they at least used his book
> as a starting point. :)
>
> The Klingon Language Institute's quarterly journal, HolQeD, is
> expressly licensed by Paramount; the KLI had to jump through flaming
> legal hoops to get that permission, basically demonstrating that
> they're not out to make a profit; they're just a bunch of weirdos who
> get off on studying a fictional language.
>

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