Wild and Whirling Words: the Invention and Use of Klingon

Wild and Whirling Words: The Invention and Use of Klingon MARC OKRAND, MICHAEL ADAMS, JUDITH HENDRIKS-HERMANS, AND SJAAK KROON Acco td In G to the 2006 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records, the world’s ‘largest fictional language’ is Klingon. Though the book acknowledges that there is no way of knowing how many speakers the language actually has, it nonetheless asserts that ‘there is little doubt’ that Klingon is the ‘most widely used language of its kind’ The appropriateness of the listing, of course, depends on what other languages ‘of its kind’ there may be and, perhaps more fundamentally, on what ‘kind’ of language Klingon is. Klingon is a constructed language tied to fictional context, rather than a constructed language like Esperanto (see Chapter 2) or a recon- structed one like Modern Hebrew (see Chapter 8) intended for use among speakers in everyday circumstances. Klingon started out as 111 The Invention and Use of Klingon * nothing more than a few lines of dialogue in film, and, once devised, owes its current shape as much to the practicalities of moviemaking as it does to careful design, and its place in the record book—deserved or not—to the phenomenon known as Star Trek. Arika Okrent, in her very informative and clever book, In the Land of Invented Languages, asserts that ‘Klingon is a solution to an artistic problem, not a ling- uistic one (2009, 282), intended to enhance the fiction of Star Trek by more fully realizing the speech of those populating the imagined universe of the films and television shows that make up the Star Trek franchise. In a sense, then, in the case of Klingon, necessity was the mother of invention. Origins Klingon is a language devised for the Klingons, a fictional race of humanoids sometimes allied with but more often in conflict with mem- bers of the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek movies, television programmes, video games, and novels. Klingons first appeared in ‘Errand of Mercy’ (23 March 1967), an episode of the original Star Trek television series, in 1967. In a later episode that same year, “The Trouble with Tribbles’ (29 December 1967), the fact that Klingons spoke their own language was first noted (one character boasts that half of the inhabitants in their quadrant of the galaxy are learning to speak ‘Klingonese’). Other than character names (and the word ‘Klingor), however, no ‘Klingonese’ was ever spoken in the original Star Trek television series, which stopped producing new episodes in 1969. After a ten-year hiatus, the series re-emerged on the big screen with the premiere of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). The first several lines of dialogue in the film are spoken by a Klingon captain in a language never heard before, translated in subtitles. Before his fleet of ships mysteriously vanishes, within the first few minutes of the film, the captain barks out half a dozen or so commands (subtitled) and also gives what is presumably a description of his fleet’s circumstances 112 The Invention and Use of Klingon * (not subtitled, and difficult if not impossible to make out under the English dialogue going on at the same time). These first words of ‘Klingonese’ were created by James Doohan, the actor who played the character Montgomery Scott (Scotty) in the series. His goal was to make a language that would not sound like any on Earth. According to Mark Lenard, who played the Klingon captain in the film, Doohan recorded the lines on a tape, and Lenard then lis- tened to the tape and wrote down the recorded lines in a transcription useful to him in learning the dialogue. How closely the lines actually spoken on film resemble those spoken by Doohan is not known. It is also not known what sort of grammatical structure, if any, Doohan had in mind. Klingons next appeared in the third Star Trek film, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984). For this film, writer and executive producer Harve Bennett decided that the Klingons should speak their own language—at least when talking with one another. Bennett hired lin- guist Marc Okrand to devise the dialogue. This would be Okrand’s second language assignment for Star Trek. Two years earlier, he devised four lines of Vulcan dialogue for Star Trek I: The Wrath of Khan, also written and produced by Bennett. Unlike ‘Klingonese} the language of the Vulcans—another human- oid race, but one allied closely with inhabitants of the Earth— had been heard in the original television series, as well as in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. On television, individual Vulcan words were used from time to time, most often uttered by Mr Spock, the most well-known Vulcan in the series. The words, presumably created by the writers or producers of the episodes in which the words were used, were mostly based on English phonology, that is, on sounds and sound combinations found in English. For example, some Vulcan words in the episode ‘Amok Time’ (15 September 1967, written by Theodore Sturgeon) are ahn-woon ‘type of weapon, koon-oot-kal-if-fee ‘marriage’ or ‘challenge, and kroykah ‘halt? The main exception to English phonological patterns is in names of female Vulcans, such as T’Pau 113 The Invention and Use of Klingon * and T’Pring; these forms begin with the consonant cluster /tp/, which is structurally unacceptable in English. By comparison, Star Trek: The Motion Picture contains quite a bit of Vulcan dialogue in a scene in which Mr Spock undergoes a ritual known as Kolinahr. In this scene, the Vulcan ‘masters’ conducting the ritual speak only in Vulcan. When it was filmed, however, the actors were speaking English. The filmmakers later decided to replace the English dialogue with Vulcan, and did so, not by reshooting the scene, but by dubbing in dialogue that would match the English lip move- ments (lip-syncing) for parts when the speaker was on screen and would simply not sound like English for parts when the speaker could not be seen. Using this lip-syncing technique, for example, the last word in the Vulcan salute Live long and prosper became moz-ma (first syllable rhymes with English doze), with the bilabial articulation of the two Vulcan /m/’s matching that of the English /p/’s, and the tongue position of Vulcan /z/ matching that of English /s/. The conversion also involved introducing sounds such as velar fricatives (similar to the /ch/ in German Bach) whose production does not involve parts of the speaker’s mouth (lips, teeth, tongue tip) visible when the speaker is on camera. In Star Trek II, Okrand used the same technique to replace four lines of English dialogue with four lines of Vulcan dialogue. The goal, again, was to have non-English sounds appear to be spoken by the characters who had actually spoken English. Some of the phonetic features of the Vulcan in Star Trek: The Motion Picture were incorporated (including the velar fricatives) so that the languages in the two films would sound somewhat alike, but there was no attempt to assign meaning to individual words or impose any sort of grammatical structure. When it came time to devise dialogue for the Klingons for Star Trek III, however, the goal had shifted from simply non-English-sounding verbiage to creating an actual language. In discussing how the language 114 The Invention and Use of Klingon * would be used in the film, Bennett and Okrand agreed that the best way to make the language sound real was to make it real—to devise phonological and grammatical systems and to make use of a consis- tent vocabulary. The script indicated which lines spoken by Klingons were to be in English and which in ‘Klingon; translated in subtitles. (The script referred to the language as ‘Klingon; and this usage replaced the earlier ‘Klingonese’) The plan, at this point, was not to create a ‘full’ language, but only what was necessary for the film—that is, just enough vocabulary and grammar for the lines marked as being in Klingon. This assignment was expanded to include Klingon versions of all the lines of English dialogue to be spoken by Klingon characters (when addressing other Klingons) so that if, during filming, someone thought a scene might be improved by having the character speak Klingon rather than English, the line would be instantly available. Even with the English lines included, however, the number of words and grammatical struc- tures to be created was limited. Again, the motive for inventing Klingon, piecemeal as that invention has been, was artistic, but at the same time very practical. Klingon has developed lexically and gram- matically as people needed it to develop for their particular artistic projects, first film and television, later translations of major works of world literature (see Appendix 5). The language was to be the same as that heard in the original television series (even though that consisted of character names only) as well as in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (words and phrases), so all of the sounds and syllable types associated with the earlier ‘Klingonese’ were incorporated into the new Klingon. To expand the phonetic inventory, there were two potentially conflicting guiding principles, the first calling for creativity, the second for pragmatism: (1) the language was an alien (outer-space) language, so it should not sound like a human language; (2) the language was to be spoken by human actors without benefit of electronic enhancement, so the dialogue had to be possible for a human being to pronounce (and to memorize).

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