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[johnslat]

There's No Klingon Word for Hello
A history of the gruff but surprisingly sophisticated invented language and the people who speak it.
By Arika Okrent

There's something missing from J.J. Abrams' reboot of the moribund Star Trek franchise, and that something is Klingon. I mean Klingon the language. If that sounds like a minor omission, consider this: The very first lines of the first Star Trek movie in 1979 were in Klingon: wIy cha'! HaSta! cha yIghuS! And those few words�which were subtitled as "Tactical � Visual � Tactical, stand by on torpedoes!"�have since blossomed into, if not a full-fledged language, one at least fledged enough to have a dictionary, a translation of Hamlet, and a small but dedicated community of (nonfictional) speakers, who'll feel miffed by Abrams' oversight.

Let's just skip over the customary jokes about 40-year-old virgins who still live in their parents' basements. Klingon speakers have heard them all. But the insults don't bother them, because they know something you don't. They know that Klingon is a sophisticated, extremely complex language that very few can master. I first came to Klingon as a linguist doing research for a book on artificial languages. My intention was to observe from a nice, distant, scientific perspective, but somehow I ended up with a little bronze pin indicating that I'd passed the first-level certification exam. The grammar offered an irresistible linguistic challenge. Klingon is difficult but not impossible, weird yet totally believable. Anyone can put on a pair of pointed ears or memorize some lines of dialogue, but learning to speak Klingon requires genuine hard work.

Most languages created for fictional worlds involve simple vocabulary substitutions, such as moodge for man in A Clockwork Orange, or meaningless streams of noise, like the high-pitched jabbering of the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi. Klingon is something altogether different. There is a logic behind it; a linguist doing field research among Klingon speakers would be able to work out the system and describe it as he would an exotic indigenous tongue. This is not surprising, considering that Klingon was created by Marc Okrand, a linguist whose dissertation was a grammar of a now-extinct Native American language.

Okrand was originally hired by the producer of Star Trek II to write dialogue in Vulcan for a scene, between Leonard Nimoy and Kirstie Alley, that had been filmed in English. His task was to create lines that could be dubbed over the actors' mouth movements in a believable way. Two years later, when the production team of Star Trek III wanted some scenes in Klingon, they called on Okrand again. This time he was not constrained by pre-existing mouth movements�the actors would be filmed speaking Klingon�but there were two other conditions that he had to take into account. The first was the existence of those few words of Klingon spoken in the first Star Trek movie (written by James Doohan, the actor who played Scotty). Second, he knew the language was supposed to be tough-sounding, befitting a warrior race. Klingons are rough, crude, loyal, violent, and honorable�a sort of Viking-Spartan-samurai motorcycle gang. They eat live worms, sleep on hard surfaces, and desire nothing more than to die in battle. So Okrand filled the language with back-of-the-throat sounds and made up a rich war vocabulary but left out social pleasantries like "Hello." (The closest translation for hello in Klingon is nuqneH �"What do you want?").

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.

Despite the fact that more than 250,000 copies of Okrand's Klingon dictionary have been sold, very few people know how the language really works. There are maybe 20 or 30 people who can hold their own in a live, unscripted Klingon conversation and a few hundred or so who are pretty good with written Klingon. But most Star Trek fans who buy the dictionary skip the grammatical rules that constitute the first half of the book and turn straight to the word list. They make up wedding vows, song lyrics, or insults to lob at their opponents in role-playing games, but they ignore the grammar, simply popping dictionary words into English sentences. So Star Trek discussion boards end up peppered with phrases like this: yIn nI' je chep.

That is some seriously bad Klingon. It's a string of words that's supposed to mean "Live long and prosper" but instead says something like "life � something is long � and � something prospers." It's ungrammatical. (Plus, it's a Vulcan sentiment; Klingons don't say such things.)

The correct form of the phrase in Klingon would be yIn nI' DaSIQjaj 'ej bIchepjaj.

And it breaks down (word for word) like this: "Life long you-it-endure-may and you-be-prosperous-may." Or, in proper English, "May you endure a long life and may you prosper."

Klingon sentence structure is about as complex as it gets. Most people are familiar with the idea that verb endings can indicate person and number. In Spanish, the -o suffix on a verb like hablar (to speak) indicates a first-person singular subject (hablo�I speak) while the -amos suffix indicates a first-person plural subject (hablamos�we speak). But Klingon uses prefixes rather than suffixes, and instead of having six or seven of them, like most romance languages, it has 29. There are so many because they indicate not only the person and number of the subject (who is doing) but also of the object (whom it is being done to). In the "Live long and prosper" translation above, for example, the Da- on SIQ indicates a second-person subject and a third-person object ("You endure it"), and the bI- on the verb chep indicates a second-person subject and no object ("You prosper").

As if that weren't complicated enough, Klingon also has a large set of suffixes. Attached to the end of the verbs SIQ and chep is the ending -jaj, which expresses "a desire or wish on the part of the speaker that something take place in the future." Klingon has 36 verb suffixes and 26 noun suffixes that express everything from negation to causality to possession to how willing a speaker is to vouch for the accuracy of what he says. By piling on these suffixes, one after the other, you can pack a lot of meaning on to a single word in Klingon�words like nuHegh'eghrupqa'moHlaHbe'law'lI'neS, which translates roughly to: They are apparently unable to cause us to prepare to resume honorable suicide (in progress).


Just saying a word like this one requires Klingon-like discipline and fortitude. To the layman, the time commitment involved in studying this invented language may seem ridiculous�why not take up a language with practical value, one that might earn you a little respect, or at least not encourage jeers? But Klingon isn't about practicality, or status, or even about love for the original Star Trek series. It's about language for language's sake, and the joy of doing something that's not easy, without regard for worldly recognition. Hence the Klingon Hamlet, which took years to compose and which maybe 100 people can appreciate. What a piece of work is man indeed. Or as Wil'yam Shex'pir would put it, toH, chovnatlh Doj ghaH tlhIngan'e'�"A Klingon is an impressive specimen."

Arika Okrent holds a Ph.D. in linguistics and a first-level certification
in Klingon. She is the author of In the Land of Invented Languages.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2217815/

[Mexicobound]

I figured you for a geek...
did you see the new release yet?

[johnslat]

Dear Mexicobound,
Going tomorrow - reviews are great so far. But avoid X-Men Origins:Wolverine - I've been told on good authority it's a real dud.
Regards,
John the Geek

[Mexicobound]

[johnslat]

Dear Mexicobound,
It was most excellent - and I'm not saying that just because I'm a Star Trek fan; there have been some pretty lousy (in my opinion) Star Trek movies.
Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier leaps to mind as does Star Trek: Insurrection.
Definitely worth seeing.
Regards,
John

[Justin Trullinger]

Don't speak Klingon, but somewhat embarrasingly do read and write reasonably good Quenya.


Justin the extreme geek.

[johnslat]

Dear Justin,
Why, you little old elf, you.
Regards,
John
P.S. Actually I AM a Klingon (but please keep that quiet.)

[Justin Trullinger]

FIctional languages have a lot to offer to linguists- seems that the creative imagination of linguists in behind most of them.

I studied Quenya from a self-study course I downloaded a couple of years ago. Limited, as the language doesn't really have the vocabulary, or number of speakers that would allow you to become truly "fluent" in it. But the patterns of language that it follows are anything but "made up." Funnily enough, last autumn when I was in Korea, I found the experience I had with "elvish" to be helpful in developing strategies to learn. (Both are highly inflected language, with not much attention paid to word boundaries. I think.)


Best,
Justin

[yaramaz]

Cool- so I guess my Turkish can help me communicate with elves! Bonus! It's strange actually, with those agglutinated lingos with permeable word boundaries- when I listen to both Turkish and Korean, it always sounds like people are reciting poetry in iambic pentameter with a semi regular rhyme scheme, based on how they've had to structure their sentences and suffixes.