back to article 'IwlIj jachjaj! Incoming LibreOffice 7.3 to support Klingon and Interslavic

The LibreOffice project has confirmed support for two new languages in the forthcoming version 7.3, Klingon and Interslavic. McMinnville, Oregon, USA: Closeup of a man dressed as a Klingon at annual UFO Festival in 2015 A potential user dressed as a Klingon at the annual UFO Festival in McMinnville, Oregon, in 2015 There's …

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        1. EnviableOne

          Re: Manx should be spoken

          something like this happened on the Tube...

          Behind us in the train were a group of Germans conversion in their native tongue and discussing how great it was that no one else could understand a word they were saying, but they could easily understand the locals.

          My little sister, having spent considerable time over the preceding years visiting in southern Germany, and not being of the sort to stay quiet when a conversation is to be had, stood up turned around and smiled, issuing in perfect german the phrase "Ich Verstehe"

          queue the four young germans going red in the face, some awkward silence, followed by an interesting conversation about educational differences and the propensity for young English people to actually learn german, some ahead of french as was more traditional

    1. Liam Proven Silver badge

      Re: Manx should be spoken

      > That's as daft as saying English people (off of England), that speak a Brythonic language are a minority.

      Less than 50% of the ~85,000 people who live in the Isle of Man were born there.

      Simple.

      This is why Mec Vannin finds it hard to attract much support.

      https://www.mecvannin.im/

      The more vexed question is of ethnic Manxness. Of the people born there, many are born to non-Manx parents. There are multiple uniquely Manx surnames (Kissack, Mylchreest, Quayle, Quilliam and many more) and Manx families, but these days, there are more people of English, Irish and Scottish descent living there than Manx people.

      Some of my native-Manx friends from my teens over there learned the Manx language as adults, in night school, partly as a way of reinforcing their Manx identity, and more power to their elbows. It's come back from the dead.

      Now they have finally ratified a unified spelling system, maybe Cornish could be next.

      1. TimMaher Silver badge
        Holmes

        Re: Quilliam

        Didn't he work with George Smiley?

        1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

          Re: Quilliam

          That would be "Gwillam", the Welsh cognate.

      2. Charlie Clark Silver badge

        Re: Manx should be spoken

        With it being an island, it's not surprisin that the Isle of Man also has a very proud Norse tradition so any kind of Celtic purity was lost over a millennium ago. Same is true for much of coastal Ireland including places like Galway.

        A lot of common linguistic ideas are caught up in the 19th century romatincism that created them

    2. dvd

      Re: Manx should be spoken

      I'm going to risk getting downvoted to oblivion here, but here goes.

      When a minority language dies I think that we should document it, dance on it's grave and move on.

      Why revive it? Why force it on the kids?

      Think of the advantage that a young person would have learning Spanish or Mandarin or Russian rather than an obscure extreme minority language that you can only speak to fifty other people in, and fifty people that you could talk more efficiently to in English anyway. And a language whose vocabulary for everything invented since the industrial revolution is English, just badly spelled.

      1. Daniel M

        Re: Manx should be spoken

        I think that it is dangerous to forget history. Examples abound.

        That said, I really wonder about the modern Western preoccupation with "extinction." Ever since caveman took up a club, we have been killing things. Eating is good, and it is preferable to getting et.

        Maybe it is the way of nature, and God's plan, for species to go extinct from time to time, just as it could be for new species to arise from time to time.

        Circling back to the question of languages: should we forbid Esperanto and Klingon as illegitimate languages, or do we have to preserve them somehow as soon as they become some poor infant's first language?

        1. Timbo

          Re: Manx should be spoken

          "Eating is good, and it is preferable to getting et."

          I though ET had left the planet already...so it can't be "got" anymore ? ;-)

          1. jake Silver badge

            Re: Manx should be spoken

            I'm pretty sure et was a correct past tense of eat (12th C), at least in English, long before ET got here.

            We won't go into proper use of capitalization here ... it always attracts the loonies who seem to think CAPS don't matter in written English

    3. Bowlers

      Re: Manx should be spoken

      I'm confused, here in the NW lots of people speak Mancs.

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Bill Shatner & Constructed languages

    Not sure if Bill Shatner is a Libre Office user or if he speaks Klingon, but he did once make a movie in Esperanto.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubus_(1966_film)

    1. Kane
      Joke

      Re: Bill Shatner & Constructed languages

      "Not sure if Bill Shatner is a Libre Office user or if he speaks Klingon, but he did once make a movie in Esperanto.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubus_(1966_film)"

      Oh yeah? Well, as the Esperanto would say, "Bonvoro alsendi la pordiston, lausajne estas rano en mia bideo!" And I think we all know what that means.

      1. jake Silver badge

        Re: Bill Shatner & Constructed languages

        "And I think we all know what that means."

        Beware of Alice's poisoned lasagna run through my bidet?

        I guess they were right! Esperanto is easy!

        Kiu sciis? Mi scivolas, ĉu estas mono en ĝi...

  2. Yeti

    Fourth gender

    Which one is the fourth Czech gender? I'm aware of only three.

    t. Czech

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Fourth gender

      I’m surprised there hasn’t been a joke made in bad taste about 4 genders not being enough for my language; an LGBTQ+ Compatible language needs to be more ‘inclusive’ and have even more genders.

      No joke, a mate of ours is that way inclined and even he refers to the sub-culture as the alphabet people.

      A/c because this will no doubt offend someone. Welcome to the internet!

      1. Tom 7

        Re: Fourth gender

        Is not one gender enough for 99.99% of purposes? You dont serve coffee any differently to any of the above so you dont really need to differentiate someone's sexual orientation unless its actually pertinent and 99.99% of the time we're not trying to shag each other.

    2. renke

      Re: Fourth gender

      Isn't the masculine gender divided in animate and inanimate?

      Full disclosure: I could be totally wrong. I struggle enough with my first language :)

      1. Yeti

        Re: Fourth gender

        All three (four??) genders may be animate or inanimate but I ain't no linguist.

        I'm just getting more and more curious.

        1. Liam Proven Silver badge

          Re: Fourth gender

          As I understand it -- I do not speak Russian -- all 3 basic genders in Russian are divided into animate and inanimate, but Czech does it only to masculine.

    3. Charles 9

      Re: Fourth gender

      Well, in general, gender can have several groupings depending on the language: masculine/feminine/neuter, personal/nonpersonal, and animate/inanimate, for starters.

      1. jake Silver badge

        Re: Fourth gender

        And yet we have people attempting to completely remove gramatical gender from English.

        Ain't nowt daft as folks.

        1. 42656e4d203239 Silver badge
          Coat

          Re: Fourth gender

          >>And yet we have people attempting to completely remove gramatical gender from English.

          I think you are getting gender (male/female/whatever) mixed up with masculine/feninine/neuter in the linguistic sense - they are both called gender (don't you love English?) but mean different things (depending on context of course)

          Grammatically English is all neuter - IIRC becasue various tribes who invaded eventually had to talk to each other and the pople they vanquished. The gendering of the separate conquest languages made things too difficult so it was just abandoned. English is (almost?) unique, globally, in not having masculine/feminine verbs as well as netuer

          In our local geographical neighbours, French and Spanish and, probably, Portugese have abandoned Neuter as a bad job... arguably they should have abandioned masculine and feminine. Don't start on about German though, get the m/f/n wrong and you can say completely unintended things.)

          To what I think you were saying..... Socially people are trying to de-gender English as she is spoke/writ large so as not to offend/misclassify sections of the population which is a whole other discussion.

          1. Stork

            Re: Fourth gender

            Confirmed: PT doesn’t have neutrum

          2. doublelayer Silver badge

            Re: Fourth gender

            "English is (almost?) unique, globally, in not having masculine/feminine verbs as well as netuer"

            You may be unfamiliar with non-European languages, but it's really not that unique. For example, one other language that doesn't have grammatical genders is Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, and other variants included). Most of languages spoken in eastern Asia do this, including Korean, Japanese, Thai, and Vietnamese. That's quite a large one. Here's a short, non-exhaustive list of largely-spoken languages that don't have grammatical gender: Bengali, Yoruba, Javanese, Basque, Persian/Farsi, Turkish, Finnish, Tamil, and Quechua. There are loads more. It's just that a lot of the languages spoken in and around Europe do have genders, so they have become expected in many cases.

            1. 42656e4d203239 Silver badge
              Thumb Up

              Re: Fourth gender

              Thanks for that.... it was something I heard somewhere - I should have gone to fact checkers first!

          3. EnviableOne

            Re: Fourth gender

            linguistically English actually has 4 genders, Masculine, Feminine, Neuter, and Common.

            He, She, They, IT.

            1. doublelayer Silver badge

              Re: Fourth gender

              That's gendered pronouns, not grammatical gender. You, for example, do not have different adjective forms if the described noun is one of those genders, nor do you assign those genders to inanimate nouns. For that matter, you also don't have different adjective forms (though there are different verb conjugations in some cases) for singular or plural nouns.

      2. Liam Proven Silver badge

        Re: Fourth gender

        I believe Polish has the personal/impersonal split, but Czech -- thankfully -- does not. I do not speak Polish either, though.

    4. F. Frederick Skitty Silver badge

      Re: Fourth gender

      I'm thankful that Finnish, my second language, has no gender distinction. It does make Czech sound easier in other respects though, as it has fifteen cases...

      1. Yeti

        Re: Fourth gender

        Finnish is allegedly 100% regular, whereas Czech is a completely different beast. Or so have I heard.

        1. jake Silver badge

          Re: Fourth gender

          If you had to live with an outhouse in Finnish winters, you'd be 100% regular too.

          1. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge
            Pint

            Re: Fourth gender/an Underground Movement and Novel Race of Alien Species

            That made me laugh, jake. :-) Thanks for that. Have a beer on me.

            It has been my experience that there can be even a great number of native English language speakers who do not understand that the future cannot be revealed and experienced by them if they do not accept and realise that new words are necessary for them to escape from their captivity which has them stuck in the past slaving to the status quo mastering race/executive office elite.

            The opportunity then that presents itself is that foreign language native spaces, similarly interested in the nature of the future, are an equally valid and possibly rabidly virile market place to enter with one’s wares for sharing/import/export/sale/purchase/lend/lease whenever the only logical conclusion on the home team is reached that they are either retarded or terrified and petrified and/or incapable of change themselves.

        2. F. Frederick Skitty Silver badge

          Re: Fourth gender

          Standard Finnish is extremely regular - the only exception I can think of is the case endings on place names can be a bit unpredictable. Colloquial Finnish is a bit looser with grammar, while regional dialects can differ quite a bit as well.

      2. Liam Proven Silver badge

        Re: Fourth gender

        As well as no grammatical gender, Finnish also has no subjunctive mood and no true future tense.

        In other words, in Finnish, there is no sex, no hope and no future.

        1. F. Frederick Skitty Silver badge

          Re: Fourth gender

          I'm surprised I've never heard that joke before - it's brilliant!

    5. Liam Proven Silver badge

      Re: Fourth gender

      Veděl jsem, že se nekdo zepta!

      Ženský, střední, mužský životný a mužský neživotný.

      (There are probably mistakes in there. Mea culpa.)

      I knew that someone would ask.

      Feminine, neuter, masculine animate and masculine inanimate.

      So, for example, "I will have grilled salmon" is "já se dám grilovaného lososa" (got to remember that accusative declension) but "I will have grilled cheese" is "já se dám grilovaný sýr".

      I know, it only changes the accusative and not the nominative, genitive, dative, vocative, locative or instrumental but even so, it's different.

      And it's impossible to work out, so I have to remember.

      A snowman is masculine animate (sněhulák) but a tree (strom) and a forest (les) are masculine inanimate. But trees are alive, while snowmen are not.

      1. Yeti
        Pint

        Re: Fourth gender

        No mistakes up there (well, except "zeptá"), good job!

        OK, what about "I will have grilled fish" = "dám si grilovanou rybu"? Ryba is feminine, animate.

        As you most likely know, there are "model words" (or how's that in English) for each gender and er... "animateness". Each gender has two animate and two inanimate + masculine has two more specials ("předseda" and "soudce"). So you only have to learn declension of these 14 models and then determine which of them fits the word you're trying to say. Easy peasy! ;)

        Have several of these, they help communication -->

        Still relatively cheap here, despite the inflation.

  3. Haynomonous

    Nice to see Stephen Fry in the pic, out and about trying new things.

  4. Primus Secundus Tertius

    Unique features

    "the only language I've ever met with invisible diacritic marks, which aren't written but you must pronounce"

    Every language has its own special features. Welsh is the only language I have met which, in some circumstances, conjugates prepositions.

    1. Tom 7

      Re: Unique features

      Are these the drunken umlouts you meet outside a pub on a drinking night?

      1. khjohansen

        Re: Unique features

        Pffft - as if drånken ûmleüts wære particulær to Wæls!

  5. alain williams Silver badge

    Pity that Klingon Unicode ...

    did not make it. There is still a proposal which probably will not go far.

  6. Balcom A

    Open Office & or Libre Office.

    Must agree with "Demon Driver" above. The changes to Libre Office have not always been successful and (over time) the altered / reduced colour palette has thrown a spanner in the works. I have generated my genealogy charts over the last 10 years using both suites, but every change throws something out.

    I use both. With the size of modern hard disks / SSD's why not keep both of them. Manipulating lines and boxes is currently easier in Open Office, so that's what I use most.

    1. John Sager

      I have a template for generating and printing Christmas card address labels from a Libre office database. It gets used once a year and every year I have to fix something to get the print to register correctly on the label stationery. I used to have to export to PDF and print that but this time that didn't work - the scaling isn't 100%!. Then I found that printing from Libre office worked perfectly when it didn't last time for other scaling issues. I wonder what I'll find next December!

  7. Dwarf

    Dont know what took them so long.

    Google search has had Klingon, Bork. Elmer Fudd, Jawa, Pirate and Hacker for a good while. Its a great way to teach people not to leave their computer unlocked as its not immediately visible to them.

    Go to Google, settings (bottom right), Search Settings, Language.

    Often English is fairly readable from the list when you need to get back to some form of normality.

  8. This post has been deleted by its author

    1. heyrick Silver badge

      Re: Wait, No Ferengi?

      Maybe some day, Hymmnos and Ar-Cielan too.

    2. EnviableOne

      Re: Wait, No Ferengi?

      Ferengi have no interest in LibreOffice, Open Source is an anathema to the rules of acquisition

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

      2. This post has been deleted by its author

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