Due to my increasing fascination in foreign languages, I decided that I would start writing a series called "Exploring Languages." This time we'll talk about Klingon, the language only spoken fluently by more or less 50 people on Earth. For you who are not familiar with it, this language - that is spoken by fictional characters who inhabit an alien planet in Star Trek series - actually has its own structured and consistent language rules: phonemes and syntax and everything.
I think it's obvious that fictional / made-up languages are always better than the already-existent ones, but here we'll semi-subjectively review five ways that make it better than English in particular.
1. It's an official stamp of nerdiness / geekiness (along with only a few other languages, such as Sindarin and R'lyehian).
2. The number of phonemes (i.e. the smallest sound unit in a language that is capable of conveying a distinction in meaning) is exactly the same to the number of letters. In other words, every letter only resembles one phoneme. There is no change of speech sound of any letter despite its position in a word or its position in relation to other nearby letters.
For example, in English, the letter "u" is pronounced differently in the word "cut" and "u-turn"; the letter "e" is pronounced differently in "bee" and "bed". Klingon doesn't have this issue, thus simplifying the act of speech.
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| The Klingon Alphabets |
(If you're interested to listen to how these are pronounced, visit this page: http://www.kli.org/about-klingon/sounds-of-klingon/)
3. It has humorous implications from its intended purpose as the language of warriors. For example, the closest thing to translate to "Hello" is actually translated directly as "What do you want?"
Similarly, the closest thing to translate to "I love you" is " qamuSHa' " which is directly translated as "I unhate you" or "I don't hate you."
Well, it seems that the Klingons normally hate people.
4. It's both rough and romantic at the same time (I think it's universally agreed that those two adjectives combined constitute one adjective, that is "sexy.") For example, if you wanna ask, "What's the color?" then you'll actually say, "How is it stained / tinted / dyed?"
If you tell me that it doesn't turn you on, I judge you, people.
5. This language is relatively easy to be spoken especially for Indonesian people, since all vowels and almost all consonants (with the exception of "D", "gh", "H", "Q", "S", "tlh" and " ' ") it has are pronounced exactly the way Indonesians do it.
If you want to learn Klingon, know that there are reasons for the little number of Klingon fluent speakers. First off, the rules, although elegant, are alien. For example, there are only 6 words in Klingon to express colors: four of which are the colors themselves and the other two are translated as "dark" and "light". This kind of rules can easily stumble you in the learning process. Second, you will have to memorize all vocabularies from a scratch since they're nothing like any already-existent languages vocabs. You may have to stick with its dictionary longer than you expect.
However, if that doesn't stop you, you can start here:
or here:
and then you can learn its basics when available on https://www.duolingo.com/ (which has currently progressed to 9% in the hatching process).
Finally, you can do some self-help by reading Marc Okrand's (the creator of Klingon language) books, primarily "The Klingon Dictionary" and "Klingon for the Galactic Traveler."
That's all, folks. Hope you had fun reading this entry.
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