By now the story of the Klingon interpeter request by a mental health facility in Oregon has been seen everywhere, discredited, dismissed, and retracted--see for example Alas, a Blog's overview [1]. Seems the original statement by the mental health pros was misread, some journalists wrote a misleading article, it was picked up by the wire and circulated widely, and now the story has killed itself. The county issued an official list of languages they could, conceivably, find a need to hire interpreters for--for example, if a patient came in who only spoke Slovakian, the county would hire someone proficient in English and Slovakian to act as an interpreter. As a sort of tongue-in-cheek gesture, the people making up the list added "Klingon". No damage was done--it doesn't cost anything to include a language, the only time money is spent is when an interpreter is actually hired. Somewhere in the press, this got twisted around to say that these were languages that the county was looking to hire intepreters for, but that wasn't actually the case. Because of all the publicity and misunderstanding, the country has now removed "Klingon" from the list--although if a patient was admitted who indeed spoke only Klingon (a possibility no more unlikely than, say, an English-speaking person fluent in French losing the ability to speak English due to some trauma), they would still hire a Klingon-speaking interpreter.
It's all kind of a joke until you realize that a lot of people are working to make Klingon ("tlhIngon") a functioning language. Not only by publishing dictionaries and grammars--there are Klingon-only retreats, language classes, and an annual conference. People have translated the New Testament (I'm sure that the bit about the meek inheriting the earth presented something of a difficulty--an idea akin to colourless green ideas sleeping furiously, I would think), Shakespeare's plays, Kafka's ("Khafka") short stories, Aesop's Fables, and other works into Klingon. Google offers a Klingon-language interface [2] to its search engine (but no option to restrict searches to pages in Klingon). There is a Klingon word processor [3]--with spell check. There is even a Klingon programming language called "var'aq [4]" (interestingly, the author claims that var'aq is a Forth- or PostScript-like, stack-based language because of the limitations imposed on computer programming by the structure of the Klingon language. I'd never stopped to consider how programming syntax reflected the syntax of it's developers, but it makes sense that there is some Whorfian--or should I say "Worf-ian"?--kind of effect there).
The real kicker is that there are people who are raising their children as bilingual Klingon speakers (while we still continue to insist on waiting until high-school to start teaching foreign languages at school). I recently watched the documentary Trekkies [5], which is a pretty interesting glance at the Star Trek fan communities, of which the Klingon contingent are a part. Star Trek, for some reason, manages to grab some people's attention in ways that even Tolkien's world does not--maybe because of the inherent pessimism in Tolkien vs. the inherent optimism in Star Trek? Anyway, there is a section in the film on people learning and using Klingon--not only the language, but the culture as a whole. Klingon has managed, through the efforts of otherwise "normal" people (as opposed to the mainly academics who have pushed constructed languages such as Esperanto), to achieve an incredible foothold. A "Wired" article published in '97 claims there were 1200 speakers [6], although Wired claimed a year earlier in a nother article that the number who were fluent was less than a couple dozen.
From an essay on constructed languages [7] (the second Wired article mentioned above) comes this technical overview of Klingon:
Klingon has three official parts of speech: nouns, verbs, and everything else. Adjectives don't exist per se: there is no word meaning simply "greedy," although there is a verb "to be greedy" (qur). And most adverbs are agglutinative; that is, limitless strings of suffixes can be attached to a verb to modify its meaning. Some of the suffixes are familiar, such as the ones that can be translated as "perfectly" or "seemingly." Some are not, such as the suffix that indicates the sentence's subject is changing something in the world, or the suffix that lets you know the sentence is a question answerable with "yes" or "no."
.... Sentence structure is object-verb-subject, a virtually nonexistent combination in human linguistics. It can be found in about six out of the tens of thousands of languages that humankind has spoken through the ages. The word order for 'Lieutenant Worf killed the Romulan with his phaser' in Klingon is 'phaser his using while Romulan kill Worf Lieutenant.'"
The official home of the Klingon language is the Klingon Language Institute [8], which is surprisingly serious given the dismissal most of us treat its subject matter with. To be honest, I can't really think of any deeper meaning to all this, but it sure is intriguing.
LinktoComments('94292684')
Old Comments [9]