I’m picking up where we last left off in my conversation with Dr. Lawrence M. Schoen of the KLI. In Part 1, we covered the founding of the KLI and got a brief insight into the Klingon mindset. Read on to learn more about the Klingon language itself.
Adeena: When the KLI was originally founded, it was before Star Trek: Deep Space Nine aired. It was before we knew we were going to have a lot of Klingon story arcs. At the time, did folks think we were done with Klingons or that the franchise was done with Klingons?
Lawrence: At the time, the language we’d heard had only come from the films. When they would do Klingon in episodes of Next Gen or DS9, Okrand was almost never involved. Sometimes he’d have to come back on his own and “backfit” something. As a minor example, in a wonderful episode involving the three Klingon actors from the original series — who all, of course, know Dax — two of them encounter one another in the hallways of DS9, and one calls to the other wIj jup which we’re told means, my friend. Well, jup means friend, and -wIj is a suffix that can mean my. But it’s a suffix, it doesn’t come at the beginning of the word. And when referring to an individual, somebody who possesses language, you’d never say -wIj you’d say -wI. Otherwise, you’re saying this person is a beast or a piece of furniture or something. So wIj jup is not only utterly ungrammatical, it’s also insulting.
So, Okrand did a backfit and said, “Oh, yes, but this is a special case where it means my really, really good old friend! Such a good friend that I can speak to you ungrammatically and insult you at the same time, that’s how good of a friend you are.”
Marc got to do a number of these things. Because the people doing the show — and remember that they’re doing a weekly show, they don’t have time to learn the language. I was impressed that they didn’t just make up some noises and call it Klingon. They actually picked up a copy of the dictionary, and flipped through and said, “What’s the word for ‘friend’? Okay, how do I say ‘my?’ Put these things together!” And, okay, that’s what happened.
Adeena: Interesting things like that happen in real life, in real languages, as we use terms differently over time. So, to me, that’s perfectly believable. And, you know, we think about, you know, some languages don’t even have pronouns or sense of time. So when you do literal translations of idioms, you get weird responses.
Lawrence: That’s why they’re idioms! But by the way, all languages have pronouns. Just so you know.
Adeena: I feel like I remember studying a bit about Malay, or one of those languages. I thought they didn’t [have pronouns]. I’ll have to look that up again.
Lawrence: I mention this because I was recently at the World Science Fiction Convention and doing two panels on language. I don’t remember which panel this came from. I think it was the panel on xeno-linguistics because I was looking up language universals and asking the question: “Would you expect an alien language to have the same language universals?”—because my linguistics classes are decades behind me. As I was looking up examples of linguistic universals, one of the ones that came up was pronouns. So I could be mistaken.
[Adeena’s Note: I did look it up and Lawrence was correct, I was mistaken. What I was remembering was that some languages, like Malay, don’t distinguish male/female gender. The word for ‘he’ and ‘she’ is the same in Malay. https://www.linguisticsnetwork.com/an-introduction-to-language-universals/ ]
Adeena: Is the Klingon language constructed like any actual language we know of?
Lawrence: The short answer to the question is no, because naturally occurring languages aren’t constructed, relatively overnight, relatively speaking. And we really don’t know a lot on how these kinds of languages evolve over time. As such, people start talking. Then one group goes away and their language changes over time when they come back—they’re not understood. They’re speaking a whole new language. But it’s a constructed language.
Adeena: But grammatically? Is it similar to anything that we know? For those of us who speak English, and have learned some European languages, we see similarities in those grammatical structures. Klingon appears to be very different.
Lawrence: Here was the problem that Marc had: He was given two mandates: One, come up with a language that is weird and alien, and two, make sure the actors can use it. Very pragmatic. Marc, at every step of the way, went out of his way to pick things that didn’t occur commonly among languages.
For example: word order. Syntactically, languages have three things you’re trying to put in word order: subject, verb, object, which happens to be the way we do it in English. “The dog bit the mailman.” This gives you six possible combinations if you work it out. The least common of these is the one used by Klingon, and deliberately so. Which is object, verb, subject. That is, first you find out who things happen to, then you find out what happened to them. And lastly, you find out who did it.
When I used to give lectures on this, I would describe every Klingon sentences as a murder mystery. First, you say, “oh, my god, who’s lying on the floor?” Then, “How did they die?” Then, “What/who was the killer?” In that order. It changes the way you look at things, which is the point.
But there is nothing in Klingon, no grammatical features, that aren’t found in at least a handful of other languages around the world, just typically not languages you’re apt to encounter. If your sole exposure to language is either English, or English and another Indo-European language, it’s gonna look really strange to you.
But out of that, has emerged a rather amusing thing. Because the sort of people who study Klingon have probably studied other languages first. For 30 years now, I’ve heard people say, “Oh, Okrand must have known Japanese.” Because Klingon uses topicalization like Japanese does. Well, in fact, Marc doesn’t know any Japanese. But there are other languages that have topicalization. But the people who remarked this, their entire exposure to topicalization was Japanese. So, they make that connection— that Okrand must have known about topicalization and thus also known Japanese. The thing is, Marc trained as a linguist, so he’d know about topicalization.
In case you don’t know what topicalization is, it’s where you identify a word as being a particular part of speech. Klingon lets you do this. Japanese does it much more interestingly. It’s like putting hats on your words. “Red hat” means you’re a noun and “green hat” means you’re a verb. And everybody knows at a glance. It’s very handy.
In Klingon it takes more of the form of: “As for the captain, whom we are speaking of, as for the captain, his ship is very fast.” It’s a nice way of organizing a sentence that lets you know what we’re talking about. It’s a good conversational, grammatical feature. But everything in Klingon exists somewhere in another language. The way they’re all thrown together—that’s new.
To someone who has a slightly more than passing interest in linguistics, that’s amazing. Look for the next article that continues the conversation where we talk about Klingon in Star Trek:Discovery!