Re: Star Trek conlangs besides Klingon and Romulan

At 10:29 PM 12/20/98 -0500, Padraic Brown wrote:
>On Sun, 20 Dec 1998, Tim Smith wrote:
>> There have been several fannish attempts to invent a Vulcan language.  (I've
>> seen one of them; it looked to me like crudely relexified Japanese.)  But
>> none of them have any relation to the "Vulcan" dialog in the movies.
>
>This didn't happen to be the Starfleet Academy Training Manual "Vulcan
>Language Guide", would it?  I wish I could find that little Japanese
>dictionary that this work seems to be lifted from; but alas I fear it lost
>somewhere.  And of course I don't know any Japanese, so can't comment on
>it substantively.
As a matter of fact, it was.  I bought it at some con years ago and still
have it.  But I have to admit that I didn't read the whole thing; once I
noticed the strong similarity to Japanese, I decided that it wasn't
"interesting" and just put it aside.  And I also know very little Japanese.
So although it definitely still looks to me like relexified Japanese, I
really shouldn't have said "crudely".

BTW, I did look briefly at the Mark Gardner "Vulcan Language Institute"
website that several people on this list have mentioned, and I must admit
that I was more impressed than I expected to be.  It sounds like Gardner has
some real knowledge of linguistics and has put a lot of work into this
project.  However, it seems to be based on the assumption that the dubbed
Vulcan dialog in the Star Trek movies is a "real" conlang, which he's trying
to "reverse-engineer", and I really did hear Marc Okrand (in person) say
that there is no language there, that it's all just nonsense syllables made
up to match the lip movements of the actors who were speaking English.  So
this may be a case of "finding patterns where there is only random
clustering" (see the Alexander Jablakov quote in my sig file).  On the other
hand, maybe it's possible to take random data and create a pattern into
which it can fit.  Although I know virtually nothing about information
theory, it seems to me intuitively that this should work if the pattern is
large enough relative to the amount of random data.  (As an extreme example,
if there's only one data point, you should be able to fit it into any of a
very large, perhaps infinite, number of patterns.)

-------------------------------------------------
Tim Smith
timsmith@global2000.net

The human mind is inherently fallible.  It sees patterns where there is only
random clustering, overestimates and underestimates odds depending on
emotional need, ignores obvious facts that contradict already established
conclusions.  Hopes and fears become detailed memories.  And absolutely
correct conclusions are drawn from completely inadequate evidence.
        - Alexander Jablokov, _Deepdrive_ (Avon Books, 1998, p. 269)