thank you to 99bit for requesting this episode.
welcome to Conlang Critic, the show
that gets facts wrong about YOUR favorite conlang!
I'm jan Misali, and in this episode, we'll be
looking at one of the two conlangs people who know
nothing about conlangs are sometimes vaguely aware of,
Klingon. yeah, it's been a while
since I've done a big name language, and as far as
conlangs go, Klingon is about as famous as
they come. there's huge amounts of works written in it,
mainly fanslations, as well as multiple,
as in more than one, full operas. heck,
at one point, someone tried, and failed,
to make it his kid's native language. we probably
won't cover a more famous conlang until either
~LATE FEBRUARY OR EARLY MARCH 2017~
Klingon is an artlang created by Marc Okrand in
1984 for the Star Trek franchise.
in universe, it is a language spoken by the warrior
alien species called Klingons. since its creation,
Klingon has gained a reputation as "that
language some nerds speak". since it's supposed to
be an alien language, it was designed to not feel like
any human language, but I'll be the judge of that.
Klingon's consonants are:
huh. well, it sure
doesn't sound like English! but like,
is that it? the way Klingon
tries to seem inhuman is...
having a lot of guttural sounds?
and a couple retroflex consonants?
honestly, it wouldn't be too farfetched
to imagine a natural language with this exact
inventory. of course, if it were from
a natural language, it would probably be described like this,
but with some footnotes explaining the subtle differences.
looking at it this way exposes just
how "normal" this is. there's only four
consonant sounds in Klingon that don't have straight up English
equivalents: the glottal stop, which exists
in English but isn't phonemic, the lateral affricate,
the uvular affricate, and the
voiced velar fricative. I mean, it doesn't have
any non pulmonic consonants and it doesn't even have
the uvular trill! like, what?
/ʀ/ is the definition of
"sound that isn't in English that English
speakers think sounds kinda harsh for some reason".
I gotta say, I'm kinda underwhelmed here.
Klingon's vowels are:
if this chart looks familiar
to you, that might be because I used an extremely
similar one on the Láadan episode. for the
record, Láadan came first. I'm not saying
Klingon ripped off Láadan or anything, but I
am saying that Klingon, a language that tries to sound
harsh and violent, has the same exact
set of vowels as Láadan, a language that
tries to sound soft and elegant. Klingon's Romanization
system is just really bad.
so, Klingon uses mixed case,
like aUI, but where aUI used
mixed case to get more milage out of the Latin alphabet,
Klingon only has one pair of
sounds where case even matters, and not only does it
have digraphs, but it actually has a trigraph.
it doesn't even do this to make otherwise similar looking
letters look more distinct, because
l is always lowercase and I is always capital.
there is no reason for Klingon to do this
other than to look slightly more alien, which
it doesn't need to do because this is a Romanization
system! the average viewer of Star Trek isn't
going to see Klingon written down this way.
it could've done something like this, and it would've been just fine.
I mean, it's not that hard to make a decent
Romanization system, you know? I really don't get
why Klingon is written the way it is. even in universe,
this is supposed to be a transliteration system
for its native writing system, called "pIqaD",
which, by the way, is just a basic,
left to right, fully phonemic alphabet, which
is boring and not very alien.
yeah. the grammar also
attempts to be alien by using features that
are rare cross linguistically. and,
well, it uses OVS word
order, which is extremely uncommon, but
pretty much every other thing Klingon does with its
grammar just isn't. like, oh look,
it's got noun cases that aren't based on gender!
oh look, it's got agglutination!
oh look, verbs are marked for number and
person of both the subject and object!
oh look, it doesn't even have articles!
clearly this is something only an alien species could
come up with! meanwhile, it's got nominative accusative
alignment, a base ten numbering system,
two grammatical numbers, and a suffix you put on
the end of verbs to turn them into nouns that mean "performer
of this verb", all of which are blatantly
from English. I'd say that
Klingon's vocabulary is its best feature.
reading through any phrase list really gives you a
feel for Klingon culture, like how the basic
greeting "nuqneH" literally means
"what do you want?". there's also some words like DaS
and ghotI’ that are derived
from jokes, so that's pretty cool. in general,
I found myself pretty disappointed with
Klingon. I expected it to be really bizarre,
unfamiliar, and, you know, alien,
but honestly, most of the stuff it does
isn't that uncommon. it could've done
so much more, but its alienness consists
almost entirely of an inventory full of sounds
made in the back of the throat, and a word order that's
like English but backwards. I do
understand why Klingon is so popular, but
I really don't think anyone would care about it
at all if it wasn't from Star Trek. all in all,
I'd say that I don't like Klingon as much
as I like Láadan, making it the fourth best artlang
reviewed so far. thanks for watching,
and I'll see you next time, where I'll be reviewing
Na'vi.