Klingon language
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2 SAMPA representation 3 Features 4 Writing system 5 External Links |
The Klingon language (in Klingon, tlhIngan Hol) is a constructed language created by Marc Okrand for Paramount and spoken by Klingons in the fictional Star Trek universe. He designed the language with Object Verb Subject word order to give an alien feel to the language. Klingon is sometimes referred to as Klingonese, but among the Klingon-speaking community this is often understood to refer to another Klingon language, that described in John Ford's Star Trek novels as Klingonaase.
A description of the Klingon language can be found in Dr. Marc Okrand's book The Klingon Dictionary (Published by Pocket Books, Simon & Schuster, 1985, second edition with new addendum 1992, ISBN 067174559X). Other notable works include The Klingon Way (with Klingon sayings and proverbs), Klingon for the Galactic Traveler and the two audio productions Conversational Klingon and Power Klingon.
Three books have also been published in the tongue: Hamlet, ghIlghameS (Gilgamesh) and paghmo' tIn mIS (Much Ado About Nothing).
Some Trekkers take the time to learn it and at some Star Trek conventions you can hear enthusiasts use it amongst themselves. They often greet each other with the Klingon word "nuqneH" (literally: "What do you want?"), which is said to be the closest thing to a greeting that exists in the language.
There was an attempt by a man to raise a child bilingually in English and Klingon; it was decided that the father would speak in Klingon and the mother would speak in English. A few years into its life, the child began rejecting Klingon and gravitating towards English. Klingon had lacked any words for things that were important in a baby's life, such as "diaper" and "pacifier". At the time, it even lacked words for many objects common around the house, such as "table".
In May 2003, the Multnomah County, Oregon Department of Human Services named Klingon on a list of 55 languages for which it might conceivably need interpreters; this story was circulated out-of-context as an urban legend claiming that the department was looking to hire a Klingon interpreter. County chair Diane Lin called the listing the "result of an overzealous attempt to ensure that our safety net systems can respond to all customers and clients." [1]
Paramount owns a copyright to the official dictionary and other canonical descriptions of the language. Some people dispute the validity of Paramount's claim of copyright on the language itself in light of the Feist v. Rural decision, but no challenge has actually been brought to court.
A programming language called Var'aq was inspired by Klingon.
This is a tentative list of the SAMPA and IPA transcription of the Klingon phonemes as listed in Okrand's book. <Angle brackets> represent orthography whereas /slashes/ represent phonemes in SAMPA and [square brackets] phonetic transcription in IPA. (See also [1].)
Consonants:
Klingon is an agglutinative language, using mainly affixes in order to alter the function of words. Some nouns have inherently plural forms (jengva plate vs ngop plates, for instance).
Klingon nouns take suffixes to indicate grammatical number, gender, two levels of deixis, possession and syntactic function. In all, 29 noun suffixes from five classes may be employed: jupoypu'na'wI'vaD for my beloved true friends.
Verbs in Klingon are even more complex, taking suffixes from nine classes. Verbs are marked for aspect, certainty, predisposition and volition, dynamic, causative, mode, negation, and honorific, and the Klingon verb has two moods: indicative and imperative.
Klingon syllable structure is extremely strict: a syllable must start with a consonant (including the glottal stop) and a vowel, and may end with zero (fairly uncommon except in prefixes), a consonant or one of three biconsonantal codas: /-w' -y' -rgh/. Thus ta record, tar poison and targh targ (a type of animal) are all legal syllable forms, but *tarD and *ar are not.
The official Klingon writing system is the Latin alphabet as used above, but on the television series, the Klingons use their own alien writing system. This writing system is fictitious and the symbols are merely graphic elements designed to emulate real writing.
The fictitious script only contains ten symbols assigned to ten English letters in BitStream's Paramont-endorsed font. It is a mystery as to how they could represent the language. In fact the number of symbols and relatively long sequences of letters implies that it is a phonetic script on some level but whether it is alphabetic, syllabic or something else remains to be seen
A script, known as the Klinzhai or Mandel script, was included in The U.S.S. Enterprise Officer's Manual (1980), loosely upon the conceptual art of Matt Jeffries", TOS set designer. It maps to various various letters and digraphs of English, but the phonemes have no discernable relation to Marc Okrand's Klingon Language.
An extended Qo'noS font was designed for Star Trek: The Motion Picture by the Astra Image Corporation. This is the font used by the Klingon Language Instutute and Paramount. But Paramount uses the characters decoratively only without any consistant mapping to Klingon sounds and so says.
However an unofficial match of characters with sounds was given by an unnamed source at Paramount to a fan group. Michael Okuda, the TNG scenic designer, and other Paramount staff have repudiated the mapping.
Nevertheless, in September 1997 a proposal was made for encoding this in Unicode. The Unicode Technical Committee rejected the Klingon proposal in May 2001 on the grounds that research showed almost no use of the script for communication, the vast majority of the people who did use Klingon employing the Latin alphabet by preference.language
SAMPA representation
Vowels:
Features
Writing system