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The Klingon language ('''''tlhIngan Hol''''' in Klingon) is the ''. That film marked the first time the language had been heard on screen, all previous appearances of the Klingons being in English. Klingon was subsequently developed by Okrand into a fully fledged language. Klingon is sometimes referred to as Klingonese (most notably in the '''' episode " The Trouble With Tribbles ", where it was actually pronounced by a Klingon character as ), but among the Klingon-speaking community this is often understood to refer to another Klingon language that is described in John M. Ford 's Star Trek novels as Klingonaase . A small number of people, mostly dedicated Star Trek Fans or language aficionados, can converse in Klingon. Its vocabulary, heavily centered on Star Trek or 'Klingon' concepts such as " Spacecraft " or " Warfare ", can sometimes make it cumbersome for everyday use — for instance, while there are words for "transporter ionizer unit" (''jolvoy''') or "bridge (of a ship)" (''meH''), there is currently no word for "bridge (that you drive over)". Nonetheless, mundane conversations are common among skilled speakers. HISTORY Though mentioned in the original ''Star Trek'' series, Klingon was first used on-screen in '''' (1991), Translation difficulties would serve as a Plot Device . With the advent of the series '''', when Klingons became a more important part of the series' overall plot arcs. Worf would later reappear among the regular characters in '''', " Broken Bow " (2001), the Klingon language is described as having "eighty polyguttural Dialect s constructed on an adaptive Syntax "; however, Klingon as described on television is often Not Entirely Congruous with Klingon developed by Okrand. LANGUAGE The Klingon language has a following and numerous reference works. A description of the actual Klingon language can be found in Okrand's book The Klingon Dictionary (Published by Pocket Books, Simon & Schuster, 1985, second edition with new addendum 1992, ISBN 0-671-74559-X). Other notable works include The Klingon Way (with Klingon sayings and proverbs), Klingon for the Galactic Traveler and the two audio productions Conversational Klingon and Power Klingon. Three books have also been published in the tongue: '' that Shakespeare is best read in the original Klingon (some fans assumed it to be a joke, though another explanation subsequently surfaced that a future Klingon time traveler had translated some Klingon operas and sold them to Shakespeare). Some Trekkie s take the time to learn it and at some Star Trek Convention s one can hear enthusiasts use it amongst themselves. They often greet each other with the Klingon word ''nuqneH'' (literally: "What do you want?"). This is the only greeting in Klingon. Another phrase commonly heard among Star Trek fans is ''Qapla''', the Klingon word for "success". Paramount Pictures owns a Copyright to the official dictionary and other Canonical descriptions of the language. Some people dispute the validity of Paramount's claim of copyright on the language itself in light of the U.S. Supreme Court's '' Feist '' decision1, but no challenge has actually been brought to court. It is commonly postulated that features of the Klingon language were taken from various real Earth languages which Okrand has studied, particularly Native American Languages . It is known however, that a design principle of the Klingon language was dissimilarity to existing natural languages. According to Guinness World Records for 2006, it is the most spoken fictional language by number of speakers. Mind Performance Hacks mentions learning a constructed language for reasons related to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis , suggesting that knowing an alternate language may provide a different method of critical thought when tackling a difficult problem; the book mentions Klingon as one such language. Other mentioned languages include Lojban and Solresol , as well as a passing reference to Sindarin (Elf, J.R.R. Tolkien ). CANON An important concept to spoken and written Klingon is canonicity. Only words and grammatical forms introduced by Marc Okrand are considered proper, canonical Klingon. It is a bone of contention among Klingonists as to what level of Neologism is permissible. Klingon as Linguistic Capital, Yens Wahlgren, June 2000 Sources of Canon The following are works which are considered to be canon Klingon and are the sources of Klingon vocabulary and grammar for all other works. KLI Wiki, ''Canon sources'' ;Books :The Klingon Dictionary (TKD) :The Klingon Way (TKW) :Klingon for the Galactic Traveler (KGT) Federation Travel Guide ;Audio Tapes :Conversational Klingon (CK) :Power Klingon (PK) ;Other Sources :certain articles in HolQeD (the journal of the KLI) (HQ) :certain Skybox Trading Cards (SKY) :a Star Trek Bird of Prey poster (BoP) :Star Trek: Klingon, a CD-ROM game (KCD, also STK) :On-line and in-person text/speech by Marc Okrand (mostly newsgroup postings) The letters in parentheses following each item (if any) indicate the acronym by which the source is referred to when quoting canon. NOTABLE SPEAKERS Some Klingonists have gained relative notoriety for various accomplishments. The Klingon Language Institute can award the title ''Friend of Maltz'' to a Klingonist who has furthered the language in various ways. Rich Yampell Rich Yampell (known to Klingonists as Captain Krankor) is a software engineer, currently residing in Bellevue, Washington State, USA. Probably the world's first ever conversational speaker of Klingon, he has been a source of inspiration for numerous enthusiasts of Klingon, many of whom now rank themselves among experienced Klingon speakers. He is the author of the book "The Grammarian's Desk," published in 1996 by the Klingon Language Institute, a collection of the columns he wrote for the Institute's scholarly journal "HolQeD." Captain Krankor is also the author and co-author of numerous songs, such as the Klingon Anthem "taHjaj wo' " (music and lyrics), " 'Iv maH" (music and lyrics), "yIH bom" (music). d'Armond Speers Dr. d'Armond Speers is an American computational linguist and a member of the KLI. He graduated from Georgetown University in the Spring of 2002. His dissertation topic was "Representation of American Sign Language for Machine Translation." d'Armond Speers homepage Dr. Speers is known for having undertaken the endeavour to raise his child bilingually in English and Klingon; Speers spoke in Klingon and his wife in English . A few years into his life, the child began rejecting Klingon and gravitating towards English, as he could use English with many more speakers. The fact that Klingon lacked many words for things that were important in a baby's life, such as "diaper," and "pacifier," was a lesser issue. At the time of Speers' attempt, Klingon even lacked words for many objects common around the house, such as "table". The experiment ultimately failed when the child refused to use Klingon when he got older. Gavin Edwards: ''Babble On Revisited'', Wired Magazine, Issue 7.08, August 1999 Lawrence M. Schoen Dr. Lawrence M. Schoen is the founder and current director of the KLI. He is the editor of the Institute's scholarly journal "HolQeD," and co-creator of the Klingon song "yIH bom" (lyrics). With only two exceptions, he has been the organizer of the KLI's annual summer conference, or qep'a'. He obtained a bachelor's degree in psycholinguistics from California State University, Northridge , and then master's and doctoral degrees in psychology from Kansas State University . He has worked as a professor, teaching and doing research, at New College Of Florida , Lake Forest College , Chestnut Hill College , and West Chester University . More recently he serves as the director of research and chief compliance officer for the Wedge Medical Center. He is also a professional science fiction author, a lifetime member of SFWA , and in 2007 was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award For Best New Writer . He resides in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania USA, and maintains a post office box in Flourtown, PA, the international headquarters of the KLI. Jyrki Kasvi Jyrki Kasvi is a Finnish politician and member of Finnish Parliament , representing the Green League . His personal website is available in Klingon as well as Finnish, English and Swedish. PHONOLOGY Klingon has been developed with a Phonology that, while based on human Natural Languages , is intended to sound Alien . When initially developed, Paramount Pictures (owners of the Star Trek Franchise ) wanted the Klingon language to be guttural and harsh and Okrand wanted it to be unusual, so he selected Sounds that combined in ways not generally found in other languages. The effect is mainly achieved by the use of a number of Retroflex and Uvular consonants in the language's inventory. Although natural languages use a number of different Airstream Mechanism s besides the common Pulmonic Egressive , these other mechanisms are not used in Klingon. This is perhaps because these sounds are a lot more difficult to learn to produce if one's language does not use them. Klingon has twenty-one consonants (the list below shows twenty-two - the '<D>' has two similar sounds) and five Cardinal Vowels . Klingon is normally written in a variant of the Latin Alphabet (see Below ). In this orthography, Upper and Lower Case letters are not interchangeable (uppercase letters mostly represent sounds different to those expected by English speakers). In the discussion below, standard Klingon orthography appears in ''<angle brackets>'', and the Phonemic Transcription in the International Phonetic Alphabet is written between ''/slashes/''. Consonants The inventory of consonants in Klingon is spread over a number of , and only one Sibilant . Deliberately, this arrangement is quite bizarre by the standards of human languages. The combination of aspirated Voiceless Alveolar Plosive and Voiced Retroflex Plosive is particularly unusual, for example. The consonants Vowels In contrast to consonants, Klingon's inventory of vowels is simple and similar to many human languages, such as Spanish. There are five vowels spaced evenly around the vowel space, with two back rounded vowels, and two front or near-front unrounded vowels — the most common for human languages. There is also a back unrounded vowel. The two front vowels, <e> and <I>, represent sounds that are found in English but are more open and lax than a typical English speaker might assume when reading Klingon text written in the Latin alphabet, causing the consonants of a word to be more prominent. This enhances the sense that Klingon is a clipped and harsh-sounding language. ; Vowel s :<a> — — Open Back Unrounded Vowel (in English ''spa'') :<e> — — Open-mid Front Unrounded Vowel (in English ''bed'') :<I> — — 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'')
Vowel stress In verbs, the stressed syllable is usually the verb itself, as opposed to a prefix or any suffixes except when a suffix ending with ' is separated from the verb by at least one other suffix, in which case the suffix ending in ' is also stressed. In addition, stress may shift to a suffix which is meant to be emphasized. In nouns, the final syllable of the stem (the noun itself, excluding any affixes) is stressed. If any syllables ending in ' are present, the stress shifts to those syllables. The stress in other words seems to be variable, but this is not a serious issue because most of these words are only one syllable in length. Still, there are some words which should fall under the rules above, but do not, although using the standard rules would still be acceptable. Syllabification
GRAMMAR Klingon is an Agglutinative language, using mainly affixes in order to alter the function or meaning of words. Some nouns have inherently plural forms: ''jengva''' "plate" vs. ''ngop'' "plates", for instance. Klingon Noun s take suffixes to indicate Grammatical Number , Gender , two levels of Deixis , possession and syntactic function. In all, 29 noun suffixes from five classes may be employed: ''jupoypu'na'wI'vaD'' "for my beloved true friends". Speakers are limited to no more than one suffix from each class to be added to a word, and the classes have a specific order of appearance. Gender in Klingon does not indicate sex, as in English, or have an arbitrary assignment as in Danish or many other languages. It indicates whether a noun refers to a body part, a being capable of using language, or neither of these. 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 word order in English: ''DaH mojaq-mey-vam DI-vuS-nIS-be' 'e' vI-Har'' now suffix-PL-DEM 1PL.A.3PL.P-limit-need-NEG that 1SG.A.3SG.P-believe "I believe that we do not need to limit these suffixes now." Note that hyphens are used in the above only to illustrate the use of affixes. Hyphens are not used in Klingon. Unlike most artificial Auxiliary Language s, which seek to either emulate elements of several evolved human languages in order to be easier to learn, or to be more regular with fewer exceptions than is the case in evolved existing languages, the Klingon language tries to break away from the most common features of other languages and embraces the exceptions to its own rules. WRITING SYSTEMS See Also: Klingon writing systems The official Klingon writing system is the Latin Alphabet as used above, but on the television series, the Klingons use their own alien writing system. In ''The Klingon Dictionary'' this alphabet is named as ''pIqaD'', but no information is given about it. When Klingon symbols are used in Star Trek productions they are merely decorative graphic elements, designed to emulate real Writing and create an appropriate atmosphere. The Astra Image Corporation designed the symbols (currently used to "write" Klingon) for ''. They based the letters on the Klingon Battlecruiser hull markings (three letters) first created by Matt Jeffries , and on Tibetan writing because the script had sharp letter forms — used as a testament to the Klingons' love for knives and blades. VOCABULARY A design principle of the Klingon language is the great degree of lexical-cultural correlation in the vocabulary. For example, there are several words meaning "to fight" or "to clash against", each having a different degree of intensity. There is a plethora of words relating to warfare and weaponry and also a great variety of curses (cursing is considered a fine art in Klingon culture). This helps lend a particular character to the language. There are also a very large number of "in jokes" built into the language. Puns in the Vocabulary of tlhIngan Hol For example, the word for "pair" is ''chang'eng'', a reference to the twins Chang And Eng , and the word for "fish" is '' GhotI' ''. CULTURAL REFERENCES
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