Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος

Oh, it’s a very good question, ’erIq qaDye qaH and raHul chabra qaH. Although it’s a question I did prompt.

Let me clarify the question I prompted, because it may not be as obvious from the wording. Klingon is a made up language. Noone has ever spoken it fluently. All the records we have of it are some barked orders in the Trek movies, which the actors occasionally fumbled.

And yet, people in the Klingon mailing list, where I learned Klingon, had a clear notion of what was good Klingon, and what was clumsy, what was Klingonic and what was a poor translation from English. What was fluent Klingon, and what wasn’t.

And the question that pops to mind is, how the hell did they know? Where did that sense of fluent Klingon come from, if noone actually spoke it?

It’s a question that’s intrigued me with conlangs, and that I pondered with Lojban as well; Lojban though is a more perturbed linguistic system, relative to the norm, than Klingon is. (Even though Klingon is deliberately designed to be alien!)

The answer isn’t actually that complicated when you get over the initial shock of it.

Partly, it’s tied up with what the structure of the language permits. This is a language with only a handful of postpositions, a rather cumbersome (head-internal) relativisation strategy, limited means of subordination, no passives, very marked nominalisation strategies.

That’s not actually that unusual for a language. It is unusual for a Standard Average European language, and it means that the kind of syntactic complexities that are typical in a Standard Average European are going to be very cumbersome to convey.

So you don’t convey them. You use structures that are clearly easier to put in the language—and for that matter, to parse as a learner of the language. You avoid syntactic embedding. You use active constructions. You avoid nominalisations, guided by the fact that they are already so marked (aspect + nominalisation suffix, and with no obvious way of expressing the subject or object of the nominalisation).

And you call the result Klingonic. You don’t say “I anticipate a hostile reception of the ambassador by the Terrans”; you’re hard-pressed to find a way of saying “by” at all, and “receivingness” looks heavy enough that you don’t want to stick anything onto it. Duy’a’ -vaD?? tera’nganpu’ HevtaHghach vID vIpIH? It’s a trainwreck of nouns in search of case, we don’t see Klingon do that, and we don’t want Klingon to do that.

You say: When the Terrans receive the ambassador, they will likely be hostile: I anticipate this. Duy’a’ luHevDI’ tera’ngan, ghaytan vID ’e’ vIpIH. And you know that’s the Klingon way of doing it.

There’s other stuff going on, of course. The emphasis in English language pedagogy of plain English, and active, straightforwardly parsable constructions. Exoticism and consciously distancing yourself from English.

And underlying it all, a notion I like to call folk functionalism. Functionalism in linguistics is the notion that language is the way it is in order to communicate meaning most efficiently. Folk functionalism, like folk psychology and folk botany, is a pre-scientific understanding of functionalism, which people can come up with in their heads without being trained linguists, and that they can apply to learning a language with Klingon—based on the resources available to them as Klingon linguistic structures, and their own linguistic common sense.

It’s a someone idiosyncratic method, and while it worked for me in both Klingon and Lojban, I certainly wouldn’t recommend it for a natural language.

I did lots of translating from English. Lots and lots of translating. With some experimenting, trying to work out what looked more fluent.

(The question of what the hell fluency means in a made up language is a fascinating one. It does in fact have an answer. But that’s not what you are asking me here.)

This helped me memorize words and grammar which otherwise would have been a chore. And it helped me prioritise what I actually needed to remember for my purposes.

It occurs to me that one of the reasons this is a useful way of learning conlangs, is that there is a dearth of reading material. I did not need to do this for Esperanto, because there was plenty to read. Although I strongly suspect that’s exactly what the very first generation of Esperantists did.

I thank you for the question, ’erIq qaDye qaH! I’ll answer a bit more broadly than your details ask, but I may get a big vague; it was after all 20 years ago.

I learned Klingon in 1994. I had enough arrogance and free time, that I knew I’d be the one to write the Holy Grail of Klingon, the translation of Hamlet. So I set out preparing for it.

I started with 9 Shakespearean sonnets (http://www.opoudjis.net/Klingon/…), then worked my way up to Much Ado About Nothing (http://www.kli.org/activities/kl…). By the time I’d pummelled Much Ado out, I was ready to tackle Hamlet.

And I then did something uncharacteristic of me. I made sure I would not have the Holy Grail to myself. I solicited the help of someone I thought I could work well with, and who also had enough arrogance and free time: Andrew Strader, then a high school student in Columbus OH. I agreed with him that I’d do the verse and he’d do the prose. (I then had to teach him how to recognise the prose. 🙂 I also solicited two expert Klingonists, Will Martin and Mark Shoulson, to proofread the text and improve it. I had arrogance enough not to, and enough of a sense of responsibility to anyway.

The translation is pretty straight. References to Renaissance artefacts are swapped out with Space Age artefacts, where there are no equivalents in the Klingon dictionary. Earth nations are replaced with Star Trek races. So the “sledded Polacks” that Hamlet Sr fought in I.i are replaced with “the Kinshaya in their armoured vehicles”. All such instances were noted in endnotes; indeed, they are the bulk of the endnotes. And since very few people who bought the book read Klingon, they are the bulk of what most people read.

But I really did try not to do too much violence to the argument of the text; we did not change the text, just individual words. The dialogue was not made more brusque or anti-intellectual; in fact the foreword revels in this: the civility of Elsinore and the self-doubts of Khamlet makes the play come across to Klingons as a Kafkaesque nightmare, and a sad commentary on the degradation of Klingon morals.

We never felt at liberty to create new words. The Klingon movement does reward outstanding Klingonists with a new word from the language creator; and I did request a word I needed sorely for Much Ado. The word I asked for, with a twinkle in my eye, was cousin. Marc Okrand, being a linguist after all, had a twinkle in his eye right back: we both knew of the insane variety of kinship systems that “cousin” can invoke cross-linguistically.

We did feel at some liberty to coin compounds. Not all the compounds were felicitous; my coinage of QoQDIr “music skin” for “drum” has been mentioned by Mark Shoulson as an example of How Not To Do Things. By the time of the second edition of Khamlet in 2000, the vocabulary had expanded a little (including animals and musical instruments), so the more egregious of these coinages could be dispensed with. Okrand’s The Klingon Way had also come out by then, and its proverbial expressions were a big help in making Khamlet’s Klingon sound more culturally grounded.

I got gazumped on publishing Khamlet; a splinter group published their Hamlet first. (It wouldn’t be a conlang without a splinter group, after all.) De mortuis nil nisi bonum (Obituary: Glen Proechel). But… his translation did take all the shortcuts and liberties mine avoided.

I haven’t revisited our translation since 2000. I remember, back when I first encountered Zamenhof’s Hamlet (his own proof that Esperanto was a real language, 7 years after creating it), thinking that it flowed well, and was arresting stylistically—but that it had none of the subtlety of Shakespeare’s English: that in such a young language, there was something fairy-tale about the rendering. (Newell’s rendering, decades later, was maybe more scholarly and sophisticated, but certainly nowhere near as poetic.)

I don’t think the verdict on my Khamlet should be anywhere near as generous. The Klingon vocabulary is much more blunt than 1894 Esperanto’s. The Klingon iambic pentameter I used has no finesse, and a lot of clumsy suffixes to pad out the metre. I used crude puns and assonances rather than any genuine wit. I don’t think it flowed that well.

But of course, I’m a harsh critic of myself. Maybe it wasn’t that bad. And whether or not it was that bad, I’ll tell you what, it was a hell of a lot of fun.