In the Land of Invented Languages

ridge behind your teeth. The S is similar to the English “sh,” but also with the tongue tip at the roof of the mouth. If you say the word SoD (flood) properly, it will feel bunched up and sluggish in your mouth. The q is pronounced like a k but farther back in the throat, as if you are choking. The Q is pronounced like the q, but more forcefully. If you’re the adventurous type, try saying the word for the verb “to mutiny”—qIQ. If some saliva flies out, great job. If your lunch flies out, try again later.

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:

“If it blocks you, cause it to fall!”

 

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 so-called great benefactors are seemingly unable to cause us to prepare to resume honorable suicide (in progress) due to their definite great self-control.”

 

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

“

As for these so-called great benefactors,”

“they are apparently unable to cause us to prepare to resume honorable suicide (in progress)”

“due to their defi nite great self- control.”

 

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