Klingon language The Klingon language (in Klingon, tlhIngan Hol) is a constructed language created by Marc Okrand for Paramount Pictures and spoken by Klingons in the fictional Star Trek universe. He designed the language with Object Verb Subject word order to give an alien feel to the language. Klingon is sometimes referred to as Klingonese, but among the Klingon-speaking community this is often understood to refer to another Klingon language, that described in John M. Ford's Star Trek novels as Klingonaase. The Klingon language has the ISO 639 code tlh. Language A description of the Klingon language can be found in Dr. Marc Okrand's book The Klingon Dictionary (Published by Pocket Books, Simon & Schuster, 1985, second edition with new addendum 1992, ISBN 067174559X). 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: ghIlghameS (Gilgamesh), Hamlet (Hamlet), and paghmo' tIn mIS (Much Ado About Nothing). These last two choices were inspired by a remark by a Klingon ambassador in Star Trek VI that Shakespeare is best read in the original Klingon. Some Trekkers take the time to learn it and at some Star Trek conventions you can hear enthusiasts use it amongst themselves. They often greet each other with the Klingon word "nuqneH" (literally: "What do you want?"), which is said to be the closest thing to a greeting that exists in the language. There was an attempt by Dr. d'Armond Speers to raise a child bilingually in English and Klingon; it was decided that Dr. Speers would speak in Klingon and that his wife would speak in English. A few years into its life, the child began rejecting Klingon and gravitating towards English. Klingon had lacked many words for things that were important in a baby's life, such as "diaper" (nappy) and "pacifier" (dummy). At the time, it even lacked words for many objects common around the house, such as "table". In May 2003, the Multnomah County, Oregon Department of Human Services named Klingon on a list of 55 languages for which it might conceivably need interpreters; this story was circulated out-of-context as an urban legend claiming that the department was looking to hire a Klingon interpreter. County Chair Diane Linn called the listing the "result of an overzealous attempt to ensure that our safety net systems can respond to all customers and clients." http://www.snopes.com/humor/iftrue/klingon.asp Paramount 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 Feist v. Rural decision, but no challenge has actually been brought to court. A programming language called var'aq was inspired by Klingon. Google is available in Klingon. Phonology This is a tentative list of the SAMPA and IPA transcription of the Klingon phonemes as listed in Okrand's book. <Angle brackets> represent orthography whereas /slashes/ represent phonemes in SAMPA and [square brackets] phonetic transcription in IPA. (See also http://www.klingonska.org/dict/tables.html.) Consonants: <b> /b/ ~ [b] <ch> /t_S/ ~ [ʧ] <D> /d`/ ~ [ɖ] This phoneme could be realized as a retroflex nasal /n`/ ~ [ɳ] <gh> /G/ [ɣ] <H> /x/ ~ [x] <j> /d_Z/ ~ [ʤ] <l> /l/ ~ [l] <m> /m/ ~ [m] <n> /n/ ~ [n] <ng> /N/ ~ [ŋ] <p> /p_h/ [pʰ] even in medial or final position <q> /q_h/ ~ [qʰ] <Q> /q_X/ ~ [qχ͡] Rare phoneme, also occurs in several Khoisan languages <r> /r/ (note that this is trilled) ~ [r] <S> /s`/ ~ [ʂ] <t> /t_h/ ~ [tʰ] <tlh> /t_K/ ~ [tɬ͡] <v> /v/ ~ [v] <w> /w/ ~ [w] <y> /j/ ~ [j] <'> /?/ ~ [ʔ] Vowels: <a> /A/ ~ [ɑ] <e> /E/ ~ [ɛ] <I> /I/ ~ [ɪ] <o> /o/ ~ [o] <u> /u/ ~ [u] Klingon syllable structure is extremely strict: a syllable must start with a consonant (including the glottal stop) and a vowel, and may end with zero (fairly uncommon except in prefixes), a consonant or one of three biconsonantal codas: /-w' -y' -rgh/. Thus ta record, tar poison and targh targ (a type of animal) are all legal syllable forms, but *tarD and *ar are not. Grammar Klingon is an agglutinative language, using mainly affixes in order to alter the function of words. Some nouns have inherently plural forms (jengva' plate vs ngop plates, for instance). Klingon nouns 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. Verbs in Klingon are even more complex, taking suffixes from nine classes. Verbs are marked for aspect, certainty, predisposition and volition, dynamic, causative, mode, negation, and honorific, and the Klingon verb has two moods: indicative and imperative. Word order in Klingon is OVS, 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-ADV suffix.PL.DEM 1pl-3pl.limit.need.not that 1sg-3sg.believe I believe that we do not need to limit these suffixes now Cursing Cursing is considered to be a fine art among Klingons. That a person swears well is considered something of a compliment in Klingon culture. Some of the more common curse words include, petaQ toDsaH yIntagh taHqeq Qu'valth ghuy'cha lo'Be'voS Some of the words are general invectives, others are personal epithets. Adding the term jay intensifies the words. Writing system 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 Star Trek: The Motion Picture, although these symbols are often attributed to Michael Okuda. They based the letters on the Klingon battlecruiser hull markings (three letters) first created by Matt Jeffries, and on Tibetan and Devanagari writing because these scripts had sharp letter forms - a testament to the Klingons' love for knives and blades. The Klingon "pIqaD" according to Skybox The font was extended to represent the entire English alphabet by Skybox (with many of the Klingon letters representing more than one English letter and also the inclusion of an upturned and downturned triangle as punctuation) for writing Klingon on numerous Paramount endorsed Skybox trading cards. Known cards include s7, s8 and s9 from Star Trek TNG's series 2 trading cards, season 5 card 509 (checklist B), cards s19 and s20 (which contain belittling comments aimed at a certain video loans company) and the season seven card selection s37, s38 and s39. These cards exist as the only canon translation of Klingon writing, though this is not well known. The script is written in horizontal lines running from left to right, top to bottom- just like English. Also like English, Klingon can be written with spaces between words (a word being defined as any noun, verb or leftover, plus any prefixes and suffixes attacted to it) and punctuation. When this is the case, four punctuation marks are used: An 'up-turned triangle' with a function similar to a comma, semi-colon or colon. A 'down-turned' triangle with a function similar to a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark A mark similar in appearence and function to a hyphen A mark similar to an apostrophe possibly another version of the 'hyphen' but exact meaning is uncertain. Klingon can also be written with no spaces or punctuation at all, this form is more common than the afore mentioned punctuated text. As in English, Klinogn text can be left-justified, centre-justified, or right-justified, and written in vertical columns on banners. Due to its nature, the "Skybox" Alphabet is ill suited to writing Klingon, in that ambiguity in the alphabet is apparent, so different words are spelt the same way - these are homographs. The heartiest commendations and the gravest insults could be written identically, though it should be noted that context would go a long way to disambiguating homographs. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c3/You_are_officer.GIF ya SoH - You are a tactical officer va SoH - Ahh crap, it's you However another unofficial assignment of the characters with sounds (which also contains many made up characters) was given by an unnamed source at Paramount to a fan group. Michael Okuda, the TNG scenic designer, and other Paramount staff have repudiated the mapping. Nevertheless, in September 1997 Michael Everson made a proposal for encoding this in Unicode. The Unicode Technical Committee rejected the Klingon proposal in May 2001 on the grounds that research showed almost no use of the script for communication, and the vast majority of the people who did use Klingon employed the Latin alphabet by preference. A second script - again based more closely on the D7 battlecruiser hull markings - known as the Klinzhai or Mandel script, was included in The U.S.S. Enterprise Officer's Manual (1980), loosely upon the conceptual art of Matt Jeffries", TOS set designer. It maps to various letters and digraphs of English, but the phonemes have no discernable relation to Marc Okrand's Klingon Language. See also references to Star Trek External links Klingon Language Institute Klingon as linguistic capital — a Bachelor's Thesis in Sociology Klingonska Akademien Omniglot: Klingon Alphabet Deutsche-Welle's Klingon Language Service BBC article on Deutsche-Welle's Klingon Language Service Klingon Wikipedia information on the Skybox Trading cards, with Klingon writing tokipona:toki Sinan Most Popular Articles: Music    Musical Instruments    Guitar    Classical Music    History    Music Definition    Country Music    Rock Music    Pop Music    Hip Hop    Rap    DJ    Video Games    Casino Games    Poker    Blackjack    Casinos    Real Estate    Loan    Auction    eBay    Marketing    Search Engine Optimization    File Sharing    MP3    Music Industry    Kazaa    Internet    Supermodel    Fashion    Fashion Designers    Erotica    Modeling    Clothing    Boots    Shoes    Diamond Engagement Rings    Diamond    Rugs    Gospel Music    Affiliate    E-Commerce    Radio This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html You may copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license. You must provide a link to http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html To view or edit this article at Wikipedia go to http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_language