Teddy Bear, etc.

[Mark Mandel]

"Marc's language [i.e., the topic of his dissertation], whose name I can no
longer recall, bears striking phonological and syntactic similarities to
Klingon..."

On the contrary. From Arika Okrent's article in Slate (
http://www.slate.com/id/2217815/), "There's No Klingon Word for Hello: A
history of the gruff but surprisingly sophisticated invented language and
the people who speak it":

===
Knowing that fans would be watching closely, Okrand worked out a full
grammar. He cribbed from natural languages, borrowing sounds and
sentence-building rules, switching sources whenever Klingon started
operating too much like any one language in particular. He ended up with
something that sounds like an ungodly combination of Hindi, Arabic, Tlingit,
and Yiddish and works like a mix of Japanese, Turkish, and Mohawk. The
linguistic features of Klingon are not especially unusual (at least to a
linguist) when considered independently, but put together, they make for one
hell of an alien language.
===

>From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Okrand):

===
His 1977 doctoral dissertation from the University of California, Berkeley,
was on the grammar of Mutsun, a dialect of Ohlone (a.k.a. Southern
Costanoan), which is an extinct Utian language formerly spoken in the north
central Californian coastal areas from Northern Costanoan down to 30 miles
south of Salinas (his dissertation was supervised by pioneering linguist
Mary Haas).
===

I also recall UCB in the seventies, rather vaguely, but Mary Haas quite
clearly.

m a m

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 7:56 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:
>
> Marc Okrand, inventor/discoverer of Klingon, does in fact have a PhD
> from UC Berkeley, resulting from a dissertation written almost 40
> years ago on an extinct Amerindian (as we used to say) language of
> California, using the documentary resources of the Smithsonian and
> the significant training he received with Mary Haas and the
> insignificant training he received with a very junior
> semanticist/pragmaticist and future member of the ADS who vaguely
> recalls hanging out in Berkeley in 1970.  Marc's language, whose name
> I can no longer recall, bears striking phonological and syntactic
> similarities to Klingon, but no genetic relationship has yet been
> established.
>
> LH
>
> >------Original Message------
> >From: Laurence Horn
> >Sender: ADS-L
> >To: ADS-L
> >ReplyTo: ADS-L
> >Subject: Re: [ADS-L] Teddy Bear, etc.
> >Sent: Sep 13, 2010 3:49 PM
> >
> >At 2:26 PM -0400 9/13/10, Mark Mandel wrote:
> >>Hija'! Hol 'oHbej thlIngan Hol'e'!
> >>
> >>Yes! Klingon certainly is a language! }}:-)>
> >>
> >>This is not to claim that it's a natural language or a fully functional
one.
> >>
> >>tlhIngan veQbeq marqem la'Hom -- Heghbej ghIHmoHwI'pu'!
> >>      Subcommander Markem, Klingon Sanitation Corps
> >>                Death to Litterbugs!
> >>           http://mark.cracksandshards.com/Klingon/
> >
> >Besides, how many "languages" were created by someone with a PhD in
> >linguistics?
> >
> >LH
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org