In the Land of INVENTED LANGUAGES (35 page)

The other Klingon spellings requiring explanation are
ng
(the same as in English, but it can also occur at the beginning of a word,
as in
ngav
—“writer's cramp”),
gh
(the same sound as Klingon
H
, but with the vocal cords vibrating, as if you were gargling),
tlh
(begins like
t
, but leave the tip of your tongue in position while you lower the sides to let the air through),
j
(the
j
of “job,” not of “hallelujah”), and finally, the glottal stop', indicating a complete closure of the glottis, as performed before “oh” in the phrase “uh-oh.” Now go back to the previous page and try a proverb, if you dare.

The phonological system of the language is by design harsh, guttural, and alien, like Klingons, but it also makes a certain kind of linguistic sense. The language doesn't include barks, growls, or other sounds not used in human languages. And the sounds it does use are not even that exotic as far as real languages go: no clicks, trills, ingressives, or voiceless vowels.

“The goal was for the language to be as unlike human language as possible while at the same time still pronounceable by actors,” I was told by Marc Okrand, the inventor of the Klingon language. “The alien character of Klingon doesn't stem so much from the sounds it uses as from the way that it violates the rules of commonly co-occurring sounds. There's nothing extraordinary about the sounds from a linguistic standpoint. You just wouldn't expect to find them all in the same language.”

Okrand, who has a Ph.D. in linguistics, came to be the creator of Klingon through a happy accident involving the 1982 Academy Awards. At the time, he was working for the National Captioning Institute (where he still works), developing methods for the production of real-time closed-captioning for live television. That year's Oscars presentation, the year of
Chariots of Fire
and
On Golden Pond
, was the first major live closed-captioned event. “I arrived in Hollywood a week before the broadcast, and they weren't ready for me yet. I had nothing to do, so I called an old friend, who happened to work for Paramount. While we were
having lunch there at the commissary, a secretary for the associate producer of
Star Trek II
came by, and my friend introduced me, mentioning that I was a linguist. The secretary said they happened to be looking for a linguist. They needed a few lines of dialogue in Vulcan [the language of Mr. Spock] for the movie, and I think an arrangement with another linguist had just fallen through. I thought it sounded like fun, so I asked when did they need it? End of the week.”

Despite his other obligations Okrand came through on time and skillfully—the scene, between Leonard Nimoy and Kirstie Alley, had been filmed in English, and he had to create lines that could be dubbed over their mouth movements in a believable way—so two years later, when the production team of
Star Trek III
wanted some scenes in Klingon, Okrand was their go-to linguist. This time he was not constrained by preexisting mouth movements—the actors would be filmed speaking Klingon—but there were two other preexisting conditions he had to take into account. The first was the existence of a few words of Klingon already invented by James Doohan (the actor who played Scotty) for a short scene in the first
Star Trek
movie. He had to incorporate those lines of Klingon into his own language. Second, he knew the language was supposed to be tough sounding, befitting a warrior race—which he achieved through the preponderance of back-of-the-throat sounds and the intentional absence of small-talk greetings such as “Hello.” (The closest translation in Klingon
is nuqneH
—“What do you want?”)

Okrand did not just make up a list of words. Knowing that fans would be watching closely, he worked out a full grammar with great attention to detail. Klingon both flouts and follows known linguistic principles, and its real sophistication lies in the balance between the two tendencies. It gets its alien quality from
the aspects that set it apart from natural languages: its phonological inventory of sounds that don't normally occur together, its extremely rare basic word order of OVS (object-verb-subject). Yet at the same time it has the feel of a natural language. A linguist doing field research among Klingon speakers would be able to work out the system and describe it with the same tools he would use in describing a remote Amazon language.

He would quickly deduce, for example, that Klingon is an agglutinating language. Such languages, like Hungarian and Finnish, build words by affixing units that have grammatical meanings to roots, one after the other. In these languages, entire phrases can be expressed in single words. This is how the Klingon proverb “If it is in your way, knock it down” can be expressed in only two words: “
Dubotchugh yIpummoH
.” The words are composed of smaller meaningful units:

Klingon has twenty-six noun suffixes, twenty-nine pronominal prefixes, thirty-six verb suffixes, two number suffixes, a phrasal topicalizing suffix, and an interrogative suffix. Words have the potential to be very long. The Klingon Language Institute publishes a journal called
HolQeD
(Language Science, or Linguistics), which held a contest asking readers to come up with the longest possible three-word Klingon sentence. The winning entry, from David Barron:

The sentence contains three roots (give, kill, control) and twenty-three affixes. Here is the breakdown:

The functions of these affixes are common, from a linguistic point of view. The representation of causation (-
moH
) or verbal aspects such as “in progress” (-lI') by verbal suffixes is routine in the language world. The use of an augmentative suffix (-‘
a
’) to convey literal or figurative largeness of the root to which it attaches occurs in languages as familiar as Italian, where the augmentative -
one makes padre
(father) into
padrone
(boss, master,
big daddy). The -
law
' ending in the second word belongs to a class of suffixes called evidentials, used in languages such as Turkish, which qualify statements according to how strongly the speaker can attest to their validity. Honorifics (-
neS
), used to recognize superior social status in the person being spoken to or about, are a part of Korean and Japanese.

The
nu-
that attaches before the verb “to kill” in the second word is part of a complex verb-agreement system that uses prefixes to show who did what to whom. Most people are familiar with a system that uses word endings that indicate who is doing the verb. For example, in Spanish, the -o ending on a verb like
hablar
(to speak) indicates a first-person-singular subject (
hablo
—“I speak”), while the -
amos
ending indicates a first-person-plural subject (
hablamos
—“we speak”). Klingon has such affixes, but they attach before rather than after the verb root, and instead of having six or seven of them, like most Romance languages, it has twenty-nine. The prefixes proliferate because they indicate person and number not only of the subject (who is doing) but also of the object (who is being done to). For example,
qalegh
means “I see you,” and
vIlegh
means “I see them”;
cholegh
means “you see me,” and
Dalegh
means “you see them.” This type of system is unusual in the realm of languages that people typically study, but not as a general possibility for language.

Subject and object agreement by prefix is quite common, for example, in the Native languages of North America. However, it is not a feature of Mutsun, a West Coast language of the Utian family and the subject of Okrand's dissertation. Many have speculated that Klingon is based on the Native languages that Okrand studied as a linguist. “I used some features from other West Coast languages, like the ‘tlh’ sound, for example,” said Okrand, “but my basic strategy was to switch sources whenever it started becoming
too much like any one language in particular.” This strategy explains my reaction, as a linguist, to Klingon: it is completely believable as a language, but somehow very, very odd.