The Klingon Language: How to Speak like a Native

The Klingon language (tlhIngan Hol, in Klingon) is the language spoken by the warring culture known as the Klingons who inhabit the virtual realm of the Star Trek universe.

Designed by Planet Earth linguist Marc Okrand, the Klingon language is based heavily on Star Trek/Klingon-related concepts which evolve around spacecraft and warfare, making it somewhat awkward for everyday use by non-Klingons. For instance, while there is a word for the bridge of a ship (meH) there is no word for a bridge that crosses water.

Intentionally constructed to sound "alien," the Klingon language has a number of what linguists term typologically uncommon linguistic features.

While it was Okrand who succeeded in developing the Klingon language into a fully-functioning, grammatically complete language, the language's basic sound, along with the first few words, is credited to Chief Enterprise Engineer Montgomery "Scotty" Scott (James Doohan) for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. This film marked the first time the language had been heard throughout the course of Star Trek adventures; in all previous appearances (including the original Star Trek series), Klingons did not have a language of their own and were obliged to speak English.

The need to develop a fully-actualized Klingon language came about with the advent of the series Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1987, in which one of the crew officers, lieutenant junior grade relief flight control and tactical officer Worf, was a Klingon.

Wanting to be as precedent-setting and innovative as the original series, The Next Generation used the occasion presented in the episode "A Matter of Honor" to give late 20^th century viewers the opportunity to hear several members of a Klingon ship's crew speak their language--not filtered through an Enterprise universal translator--until one Klingon ordered the others to speak in human language.

Since that momentous event, Trekies and linguists around the world have studied the Klingon language, resulting in four Klingon translations of select Earth literature: ghIlghameS (Gilgamesh), Klingon Hamlet (Hamlet), paghmo' tIn mIS (Much Ado About Nothing), and pIn'a' qan paQDI'norgh (Tao Te Ching). The Shakespearian choices were inspired by a remark from Klingon High Chancellor Gorkon in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, who said, "You have not experienced Shakespeare, until you have read him in the original Klingon."

To further promote use and understanding of the Klingon language, The Klingon Language Institute was established on Earth.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amnQS5Rv9UU

With similarities to both English and several Native American languages, the Klingon language has twenty-one consonants and five vowels. Klingon is normally written in what superficially appears to be a variant of Earth's Latin alphabet. In this orthography, upper and lower case letters are not interchangeable, and the inventory of consonants in Klingon is spread over a number of places of physical articulation. In spite of this, the lingual selection has many sonic gaps: Klingon has no velar plosives (like the "k" sound), and only one sibilant ("s" or "sh")--making its sound variations much less diverse than English. The combination of aspirated voiceless alveolar plosive /t/ ("t") and voiced retroflex plosive /ɖ/ ("d") is particularly atypical.

Vowels

- /ɑ/ - open back unrounded vowel (in English spa)

- /ɛ/ - open-mid front unrounded vowel (in English bed)

- /ɪ/ - near-close near-front unrounded vowel (in English bit)

- /o/ - close-mid back rounded vowel (in French eau)

- /u/ - close back rounded vowel (in Spanish tu)

Diphthongs (two adjacent vowel sounds occurring within the same syllable) can be analyzed phonetically as the combination of the five vowels plus one of the two semivowels /w/ and /j/ (represented by w and y, respectively). Thus, the combinations ay, ey, Iy, oy, uy, aw, ew, and Iw are possible. There are no words in the Klingon language that contain ow or uw .

Klingon syllabic structure is strict. A syllable must start with a consonant followed by one vowel. In prefixes and other rare syllables, this is sufficient. More commonly, this consonant-vowel pair is followed by one consonant or one of three biconsonantal codas: /-w' -y' -rgh/. Thus, at (record), tar (poison), and targh (a type of animal on the Klingon home planet) are all legal syllable forms, but *tarD and *ar are not. Despite this, there is one suffix that takes the shape vowel+consonant: the endearment suffix -oy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGZV6fsotYo&feature=related

Verbs in the Klingon language take a prefix indicating the number and person of the subject and object, whereas suffixes are taken from nine ordered classes, and a special suffix class called "rovers." Each of the four known rovers has a unique rule controlling its position among the suffixes in the verb. Verbs are marked for aspect, certainty, predisposition and volition, dynamic, causative, mood, negation, and honorific, and the Klingon verb has two moods: indicative and imperative.

The most common word order in Klingon is Object Verb Subject, and, in some cases, the word order is the exact reverse of analogous word orders in English.

Here are some common phrases you can use when meeting a Klingon:

(Hello: Roughly, "What do you want?") nuqneH
(What's happening?) qaStaH nuq?
(Huh?) nuqjatlh?
(I understand) jIyaj
(I don't understand) jIyajbe'
(Good!: expression of satisfaction) maj
(Well done!) majQa'
(Where is the bathroom?) nuqDaq 'oH puchpa''e'
(Come in) yI'el (Inviting more than one person) pe'el
(Come here) HIghoS
(Go away) naDevvo' yIghoS
(Open the door!) lojmIt yIpoSmoH!
(Your mother has a smooth forehead!: an insult) Hab SoSlI' Quch! (Today is a good day to die) Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam
(Shut up!) bIjatlh 'e' yImev

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGZV6fsotYo&feature=related

References:

Klingon Language Institute

http://www.fanpop.com/spots/star-trek-the-next-generation

http://www.startrek.com/database_articles

http://www.startrekonline.com/splash?redir=frontpage

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