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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