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yaaqov wrote

What do you have in mind?

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kittybecca OP wrote

I dunno, something like...

Tutpik Jak /tʼutʼˈpʼikʼ ˈd̠ʑɑkʼ/, the language of the Tutpik, a culture of space-faring pirates who fled the implosion of the empire ruled by their home planet Boddettarh /ɓoɗɗetʼˈtʼɑʁ/, which collapsed due to unbridled greed. The proto-Tutpik decided to live collectively and non-hierarchically, raiding large merchant or military vessels for supplies, forming several space-based nomadic collectives.

Also, their language is grammatically identical to a certain copyrighted language, but entirely relexified and put in the mouths of a different culture with its own story, then released CC0.

shrug

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yaaqov wrote

From what I understand, to whatever extent Paramount exerts ownership over Klingon, that ownership extends to word forms (specifically, those appearing in official media, in the dictionary, in any other commissioned works by Okrand or others) and to the corpus of Klingon works made under similarly official circumstances.

If this is true, then a relex should be safe. A language's morphosyntax is likely too abstract (and too invisibly derivative) to cause any problems in the arena of copyright. Your language also differs in its phonological inventory, right? What about syllable structure and other phonotactics?

That being said, making a couple small syntactic changes could add another layer of security here. I don't know what the nature or extent of your commitment to Klingon's grammar is.

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kittybecca OP wrote

I'm tweaking as I go. I'm starting with a clone and seeing where I can make changes when that's done. In a lot of senses it will never be a real clone because the lexicon will be considerably different, will lack many Klingon concepts and introduce many new concepts.

I think modifications to the grammar and things like that after a while will probably happen eventually. At the moment the syllable structure is only slightly different; it could be called a generalization of Klingon's CVC structure... even though the phonological inventory is different. And I've also already added "vowel dissonance," a requirement that two front vowels or two back vowels not appear consecutively within the same word (maybe their ability to produce sound is much more adept and the focus is on clarity via contrast). So even phonologically it's considerably divergent.

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yaaqov wrote

I see! Well, cool.

By the way, the "dissonance" you've described definitely appears in natural language! In contemporary phonology these phenomena are called OCP (obligatory contour principle) effects.

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