Notes of a Fringe-Watcher Klingon and Other artificial Languages you speak Esperanto? ike a native! MARTIN GARDNER ccording to Genesis there orig- Why God and the angels would gripped the minds of hundreds of lin- inally was only one human find this curse amusing is hard to fath- guistic cranks, who during the next language, the tongue spoken om. At any rate, who can doubt that three centuries proposed more than A the multiplicity of world languages is three hundred artificial or semi-artifi- by Adam and Eve. Why did Adam name the elephant an elephant? an enormous barrier to world peace. cial tongues. Because, goes an old joke, it looked like Clearly world unity would be greatly The first major effort was the 600- an elephant. Then a terrible tragedy augmented if somehow the babble of page Essay Towards a Real Character occurred. The Hebrews tried to scale tongues could be replaced by a single and Philosophic Language (London, the heavens by building the Tower of language. 1688), by John Wilkins, Bishop of Babel. God was so offended by this In ancient times Greek, Latin, and Chester. His book was greatly admired hubris that he said: Arabic served as universal languages for by Leibniz. All of Wilkins's words are large clusters of nations. French was self-defining in the sense that they con- Behold, the people is one, and they once Europe's international diplomatic vey their triple classification as to have all one language . and now language, and for centuries Latin was genus, species, and subspecies. For nothing shall be restrained from the favored language of scientists and example, his word for salmon is them.... Go to, let us go down, and scholars. Around Mediterranean ports zana—za for fish, n for scaly, and a for there confound their language, that they may not understand one anoth- lingua franca, Italian mixed with other red. The language was spoken and also er's speech. So the Lord scattered tongues, became a common form of written with symbols resembling mod- them abroad from thence upon the communication. Swahili, a Bantu ern shorthand. The Bishop wrote other face of all the earth. (Gen. 11:6-8) speech mixed with Arabic, has long eccentric works, including one arguing been the lingua franca of East Africa. that the moon was inhabited by intelli- In Paradise Lost (Book 12) Milton Today, for better or worse, the new gent creatures. His philosophic lan- described it this way: international language is English. In a guage was caricatured by the French few years there will be more non-native writer Gabriel dc Foigny as an To sow a jangling noise of words speakers of English than native ones! Australian tongue in his novel The unknown: Only France is trying desperately to Adventures of Jacques Saleur (1676). Forthwith a hideous gabble rises keep its fingers in the dike. The Encyclopaedia Britannica (14th loud In the seventeenth century, among edition) lists the following other totally Among the Builders; each to other calls such philosophers as Descartes and synthetic languages: Solresol (1817), Not understood, till hoarse, and all Leibniz, and the Scotsman George Lingualumina (1875), Blaia Zimondal in rage. Delgarno, the notion arose that per- (1884), Cabe aban (1887). and As mockt they storm; great laughter haps a completely artificial language, Zahlensprache (1901). Ro, invented in was in Heav'n based on logic, with simplified gram- 1904 by Edward P. Foster, an American And looking down, to sec die hubbub strange mar and spelling, might serve to unify clergyman, had a monthly periodical And hear the din. nations. This grandiose dream quickly called Roia. Solresol, created by musi- SKEPTICAL INQUIRER • JULY/AUGUST 1995 3 cian Jean Francois Sudre, combined the syllables of the music scale {do, re, mi, . .) to produce some 12,000 words. The plan was to send messages by playing a tune. The Britannica does not mention Spokil, perpetrated in France by A. Nicolas in 1887, or Alwato, the creation of Stephen Pearl Andrews, a nineteenth- century American attorney and aboli- tionist. Alwato was part of Andrews's 761-page crank work The Basic Outline of Universology (1872), and he elaborated on it in other books. All his nouns ended in o. A human is ho, the body is hobo, the head is hobado, and society is homabo. A vegetable is zho, an animal is zo, a dead animal is zobo, and a live one is zovo. Because no completely synthetic lan- guage has yet obtained much of a fol- lowing, one might suppose that efforts of this sort have ceased. Not so! The TV series "Star Trek" has spawned a gutteral extraterrestrial language spoken by the warriors of the Klingon empire. It was invented in 1984 for the film Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, by Marc Okrand. (He has a doctorate in linguis- tics.) Poetry has been written and wed- dings performed in Klingon. "Star Trek" fans are rapidly mastering the language, much to Okrand's amazement, because he does not speak it. He designed the language as a joke—its word for "love" words for such concepts as God, holy, adverbs in e. A j at the end of a word is "bang"—but now his peculiar lan- atonement, forgiveness, compassion, indicates a plural. For example, gradaj guage has developed a life of its own. or mercy. Is all this a put-on? The hundoj means "big dogs." There are newsletters in Klingon and an answer (in Klingon) is HISlaH (yes). More than 30,000 books, including audiotape on conversational Klingon On a more useful level than totally Shakespeare, Dante, the Bible, and the spoken by Michael Dorn, who plays a contrived languages are the semi- Koran have been translated into Klingon, Lieutenant Commander Worf, artificial ones based on a blend of nat- Esperanto. A recent translation of chief of security on the United ural tongues. Of these, by tar the most Lewis Carroll's Alice books calls Federation of Planets starship Enterprise, successful has been Esperanto, the Humpy Dumpy Homito Omleto, in "Star Trek: The Next Generation," brainchild of Lazarus Ludwig meaning Little-Man Egg. Some hun- the second "Star Trek" television series. Zamenhof, a Warsaw eye doctor. His dred periodicals around the world have The Klingon Language Institute, first book about it, Lingvo Internacia been written in Esperanto, one of the headed by Lawrence Schoen, a psy- (1887) bore the pseudonym of Dr. oldest issued by the Vatican. Reader's chologist at Chestnut Hill College, Esperanto. The word means "one who Digest publishes an Esperanto edition. Philadelphia, is said to be working on a hopes." It expressed Zamenhof's Here is the Lord's Prayer in translation into Klingon of Shake- quixotic desire that Esperanto would Esperanto: speare and the Bible.* The Bible will become the world's second language. Patro nia kiu estas en la cielo, not be easy, because Klingons have no Based on Europe's major tongues, sankta estu via nomo; venu regeco The Institute publishes a quarterly journal Esperanto's 16 simple grammatical via; estu volo via, kiel en la cielo, tiel called HolQeD (horn "Hoi," meaning language, rules have no exceptions. Spelling, ankau sut la tero. Panon nian ciuta- and "QeD." meaning science). It recently spon- using 28 letters, is uniform and pho- gan donu al ni hodiau; kaj patdonu sored a contest for palindromes written in al ni suldojn niajn, kiel ni ankau netic. As in Alwato, all nouns end in o. Klingon. For information, send an SASE to KLI, patdonas al niaj suldantoj; kaj ne Box 634, Flourtown, PA 19031-0534. Adjectives end in a, verbs in as, and knoduku nia en tenton, sed libetigu 4 SKEPTICAL INQUIRER • JULY/AUGUST 1995 nin de la malbono. priest.* It uses 27 letters, accents all And if you've decern luck. words on die last syllable, and adds The ultimate residuum You'll find is Volapuk! The movement peaked in the "ik" to all adjectives. The "iks" give it a 1920s, especially among one-worlders, strong icky sound. Some notion of its but even today about two million peo- ugliness can be gained from Volapuk's Many short-lived attempts from ple read and speak Esperanto. wording of the Lord's Prayer: 1900 to the late fifties were made to Enthusiasts hold conventions here and improve Esperanto. They have such there, and when traveling identify O fat obas, kel binol in siils, paisalu- names as Perio, Ulla, Mondlingvo, themselves to one another by green domdz nem ola! Komomod Romanizat, Europeo, Nepo, Neo, monargan ola! Jenomoz vil olik, as lapel pins shaped like stars. The move- Espido, Esperantuisho, Globaqo, and a in siil, i su tal! Bodo obsik, vadeliki raft of others. The most successful of ment continues to be popular in givolos obcs adelo! E pardolos obes Europe, but in the United States it is debis obsik as id obs aipardobs dcbe- these reform efforts was Ido—in now at a low ebb. In 1991 the Modern Ics obas. E no obis nindukolos in Esperanto it means "offspring"— tentadi; sod aidalivolos obis de bad. Language Association sponsored a invented in 1907 by the French phi- Jenosod! losopher Louis Couterat. A monthly seminar on Esperanto at its annual titled Progreso was written in Ido. convention. No one showed up. Couterat regarded all Espcrantists as Perhaps the main reason for its decline In France and Germany the depraved. In the first volume of his here is the inexorable rise of English as Volapuk cult gained a following of autobiography Bernard Russell recalls an international second language. In more than a million, with some two Couterat complaining that Ido had no The Shape of Thing to Come (Book 5, hundred Volapuk societies meeting word similar to "Esperantist." "I sug- section 7), H.