Category: Artificial Languages

I mentioned to long-time reader John Cowan, in comments, the joke of the three Finns. (“Did we come here to talk, or did we come here to drink?”) John in turn pointed me to the Old Irish joke of the three friars. Which, as a result, you can now read in Klingon—and you can now […]

Following up What is T’Kuvma saying in the trailer?, a transcript of the Klingon of Episode 1 of Star Trek: Discovery is now up. (I’m a little surprised it’s up as a Facebook document, but I guess the world has moved on.) So how did I do? Me: Donatu vaghDaq DIvI’ wIlulpu’, ’a qaSpa’ (?) […]

So, after posting What is T’Kuvma saying in the trailer?… Yes, it really was inevitable:

It’s a curious thing, having been the co-translator of the Klingon Hamlet. Those involved in the enterprise decided to efface our egos, and publish the translation as a group effort back in 1996. My name’s on the inside cover; my name’s certainly underneath the introduction, which I strongly suspected was the only bit that most […]

Klingon is back. Not that it ever really went away. And this time, Paramount is no longer massacring the language, like it did on the TV series. No more wij jup shit. Wij jup? That’s the notorious TNG Klingonese rendering of “my friend”. Literally, as “my” + “friend”. Where wIj in Klingon is a possessive suffix. […]

If you’re being brought up to speak Esperanto or Klingon or Lojban or (in the case of Itamar Ben-Avi) Revived Hebrew [yes, I’m calling Eliezer Ben-Yehuda’s work a made up language], the main issue you’d run into is not having anyone but your parents, and maybe occasionally your parents’ weirdo friends, to use the language […]

As Jarno Peschier’s answer says, the brief for Marc Okrand was to create an aggressive-sounding language, that would map onto the “Blakh Vakh Gakh” aggressive sounds James Doonan had made up for the first Star Trek movie. And Okrand accordingly went shopping for gutturals: /x, q, qχ, ʔ/ <H, q, Q, ’>. I guess you […]

https://literarydevices.net/my-kingdom-for-a-horse/ So how *would* I render this in Klingon? A battle in Star Trek space opera involves spaceships. Mobility in Star Trek involves spaceships, shuttles, and transporter beams. A quick exit in Star Trek routinely involves the latter. Therefore, obviously, jolpat! jolpat! jolpat vIDIlmeH, wo’ vInobrup! A transporter system! A transporter system! In order to […]

http://nypost.com/2017/06/11/inside-gwyneth-paltrows-ridiculous-goop-summit/ What does fluency mean in a conlang like Klingon? Actually “fluency” is something of a misnomer I committed. What does good style mean in a conlang like Klingon? People clearly do differentiate between good Klingon and bad Klingon; on what basis do they do so, when the language is made up, and we don’t […]

For a less emotive response, let us substitute Klingon with Norwegian, outside of Norway. It is not child abuse to bring up your kid to speak only Norwegian in Australia. As another respondent said, if they arrive at primary school with no English, they will pick up English pretty quickly at school. As is the […]