Klingon Language

Kuplah! qoSlIj DatIvjaj! nuqDaq 'oH puchpa''e'!. bIjatlh 'e' yImev.

The constructed language spoken by the Klingons in StarTrek.

See http://www.kli.org. Their translation of "Gilgamesh" has just come out in book form, & "Hamlet" is now in paperback...

Klingon letters are in the ConScriptUnicodeRegistry.

(moved from EsperantoLanguage:)

In fact there are probably more native Esperanto speakers (at least a couple hundred people who learned Esperanto from birth, along with a local language) than fluent KlingonLanguage speakers. Klingon was deliberately designed to be as unlike human languages as possible. Well, in the way in which Klingons are designed to be as unlike humans as possible.

But what they came up with looks like a mix of Arabic and Turkish, which goes to show just how difficult the task is. (But what do Arabs & Turks think of Klingon? Do they find it familiar and comfortable? Or is it simply our own unfamiliarity with those languages that makes it seem that way?)

Interestingly enough, the grammatic structures used by Klingon are rather similar to the structures used by the KingJamesBible?, and to a lesser extent, similar to Shakespeare.

Of course it's similar to Shakespeare! Everyone knows that Shakespeare cribbed Hamlet from the original Klingon...

Perhaps what the StarTrek people wanted was just something unlike a European language, which is what their audience was familiar with, and the linguists had to get a model someplace. Don't forget, StarTrek is OnlyaTelevisionShow?. blasphemer! ;)

Maybe there was a precedent for this, such as when JrrTolkien used Finnish as the basis for one of his Elvish languages, and Welsh for the other.

Both FinnishLanguage?* and WelshLanguage are examples of IndoEuropeanLanguages, just like EnglishLanguage. (*Protest: the Finnish language isn't at all an IndoEuropeanLanguage, but belongs to the FinnoUgricLanguage? family - together with HungarianLanguage?, EstonianLanguage and a couple of other idioms spoken in the Siberian regions.) An objection to both of those. I don't believe there is any consensus on this, and it has borrowed from both so we can't really be sure.

There's a very strong consensus about the placement of Finnish and Hungarian in their own family, separate from IndoEuropeanLanguages. Debate comes in over whether the two families are more distantly related.

We keep talking about "they." The person who created Klingon as a (more or less) complete language is Mark Okrand, a linguist. I don't know what the ST people asked him to do, but he has explicitly said that he wrote the grammar to be as unlike terrestrial languages as possible. Ie, since SVO (subject-verb-object) is the most common WordOrder, Klingon is OSV (?) -- the least common WordOrder for terrestrial languages.

Is it? Object, Subject, Verb is not at all unthinkable in Japanese. Of course, it's a particle language, not primarly obsessed with word order in any case, but OSV is quite common.

That's not the point. The point is that one of the few widely used methods of categorizing language is by which order of S, V, and O they prefer. English is primarily an SVO language, but you can find examples of any of the other orderings in some more-or-less legal utterances. Japanese, also, is primarily subject-first (when forced into such a mold), as a primary category (or similarly topic-first, when forced into a different mold). In other words, statistically the order SOV is found far more often in Japanese than is OSV.

The ordering OSV is the very least common primary category for known human languages; quite a different question than whether the order OSV ever occurs as a secondary ordering. Sure, it does, in many languages. -- DougMerritt

No, Klingon is OVS, which is impossible in Japanese (but, though rare, possible in German if the subject and object are masculine singular). It can seem OSV if the subject is a pronoun, because both subject and object are indicated by a verbal prefix, but if the subject is explicitly stated it comes after the verb. In fact it's close enough to the reverse of English word order to make a complete mockery of the UniversalTranslators.

There is a great site that tells you how to create your own language: http://www.zompist.com/kit.html

CategoryNaturalLanguage