by Arika Okrent
The Klingons, the Conlangers, and the Art of Language
Flaws or Features?
The story of invented languages has not been entirely a story of failure. While Wilkins’s project did not become a universal language of truth, he produced an extraordinary document, a snapshot of linguistic meaning in his culture and era—and paved the way for the thesaurus. Esperanto did not become an auxiliary language for the whole world, but it did become a real, living language, and in the small sphere of people who use it, it does seem to promote a general atmosphere of international understanding and respect. Blissymbolics found a way to be useful, despite the wishes and actions of its creator, and Loglan lives on today, despite not having fulfilled its scientific mission.
One could argue that the “success” of these languages is only accidental, and makes their inventors no less naive, or misguided, or presumptuous. Just because they produced something that turned out to have some value for someone doesn’t mean they deserve to be admired. We should admire them, however, for their raw diligence, not because hard work is a virtue in itself, but because they took their ideas about language as far as they could go and really put them to the test. Who hasn’t at one time or another casually suggested that we would be better off if words had more exact meanings, or if people paid more attention to logic when they talked? How many have unthinkingly swooned at the “magic” of Chinese symbols or blamed acrimony between nations on language differences? We don’t take responsibility for these fleeting assumptions, and consequently we don’t suffer for them. The language inventors do, and consequently they did. If we pay attention to the successes and failures of the language inventors, we can learn their hard-earned lessons for free.
We can also gain a deeper appreciation for natural language and the messy qualities that give it so much flexibility and power, and that make it so much more than a simple communication device. The ambiguity and lack of precision allow it to serve as an instrument of thought formulation, of experimentation and discovery. We don’t have to know exactly what we mean before we speak; we can figure it out as we go along. Or not. We can talk just to talk, to be social, to feel connected, to participate. At the same time natural language still works as an instrument of thought transmission, one that can be made extremely precise and reliable when we need it to be, or left loose and sloppy when we can’t spare the time or effort.
When it is important that misunderstandings be avoided, we have access to the same mechanism that allowed Shirley McNaughton’s students to make use of the vague and imprecise Blissymbols, or that allows deaf people to improvise an international sign language—negotiation. We can ask questions, check for signs of confusion, repeat ourselves in multiple ways. More important, we have access to something that language inventors have typically disregarded or even disdained—“mere” conventional agreement, a shared culture in which definitions have been established by habit. It is convention that allows us to approach a Loglan level of precision in academic and scientific papers or legal documents. Of course to benefit from the precision, you must be “in on” the conventional agreements on which those modes of communication depend. That’s why when specialists want to communicate with a general or lay audience—those who don’t know the conventions—they have to move back toward the techniques of negotiation: slowing down, answering questions, explaining terms, illustrating with examples. Convention is a faster, more efficient instrument of meaning transmission, but it comes with a cost. You have to learn the conventions. In the extreme cases this means a few years of graduate training or law school. In general it means getting experience with the way other speakers—of English, Spanish, Greenlandic Eskimo, or whatever language you’re interested in learning—use their words and phrases.
When language inventors try to bypass convention—to make a language that is “self-explanatory” or “universal”—they either make a less efficient communication tool, one that shifts too much of the burden to negotiation, like Blissymbolics, or take away too much flexibility by over-determining meaning, like Wilkins’s system did. When they try to take away culture, the place where linguistic conventions are made, they have to substitute something else—like the six-hundred-page book of rules that define Lojban, and that, to date, no human has been able to learn well enough to comfortably engage in the type of conversation that any second-semester language class should be able to handle.
There are types of communication, such as the “language” of music, that may allow us to access some kind of universal meaning or emotion, but give us no way to say, “I left my purse in the car.” There are unambiguous systems, such as computer programming languages, that allow us to instruct a machine to perform a certain task, but we must be so explicit about meanings we can normally trust to inference or common sense that it can take hours or days of programming work to achieve even the simplest results. Natural languages may be less universal than music and less precise than programming languages, but they are far more versatile, and useful in our everyday lives, than either.
Ambiguity, or fuzziness of meaning, is not a flaw of natural language but a feature that gives it flexibility and that, for whatever reason, suits our minds and the way we think. Likewise, the fact that languages depend on arbitrary convention or cultural habit is not a flaw but a feature that allows us to rein in the fuzziness by establishing agreed-upon meanings at different levels of precision. Language needs its “flaws” in order to do the enormous range of things we use it for.
But what about irregularity? All those exceptions to the rules? Does language really need that? Probably not. But it comes about as a natural by-product of convention. Languages like Esperanto have an advantage in that they are built from preexisting conventions—the general language habits of speakers of European languages. Esperanto itself does particularly well because it developed its own culture and community, and therefore has better-defined conventions for what words mean and how they should be used. But at the same time, it has sacrificed some of the perfect regularity that it was intended to have. For example, the accusative -n ending used to mark the object of a verb is in the process of being lost. Speakers often leave it out—and joke about what a pain it is to remember to use it—and one study found that even native speakers don’t use it all that consistently, even when the language of their home country has an accusative marker. But they always use it when they say saluton, “hello,” or dankon, “thanks.” Those words were originally formed as the objects of verbs (as in “I wish you greetings” or “I give you thanks”); now they are just set phrases that happen to have an -n ending. But they are used so often, and their forms are so established by habit, or convention, that they are immune from the erosion of the grammatical marker they express.
Some of the irregularities in natural languages came about in a similar way. At one stage in the history of English, the past tenses of verbs were marked by a regular vowel change process; instead of “help/helped,” we had “help/holp.” Over time, -ed became the preferred way to mark the past tense, and eventually the past tense of most verbs was formed by adding -ed. But the old pattern was preserved in verbs like “eat/ate,” “give/gave,” “take/ took,” “get/got”—verbs that are used very often, and so are more entrenched as a linguistic habit (the very frequently used “was/ were” is a holdover from an even older pattern). They became irregular because the world changed around them.
Nobody means for words to become irregular. Some things are well reinforced by the habits of the language users, and other things give way to change. One day someone comes along and asks, “Hey, why doesn’t this one fit the pattern?” and the answer has to be, “Well, 'cause that’s the way we say it.” One day, newcomers to Esperanto may ask the same thing about saluton and dankon. They will also probably want to know why people say stas for “is” (a shortened pronunciation that many young Esperanto speakers use today) instead of estas, or ĝis for “goodbye” (the colloquial rendering of ĝis la revido, “until we see each other a
gain”).
They already have to just learn the idiomatic meanings of certain expressions like ne jukas min (it doesn’t itch me—“I don’t care”) and jam temp' esta’ (a reference to a line of an old Zamenhof poem that modern speakers use—instead of the proper jam la tempo estas—to mean “the time has come”), and many other phrases you can’t figure out with a dictionary or list of affixes alone. Esperanto is still pretty regular, and still pretty easy to learn, but it’s governed by the way people use it—not by some perfect mathematical system or universal standard of meaning. Our languages have inconsistencies and irregularities because they are run by us, and not by some perfect rule book or grand philosophy. I don’t know about you, but the story of invented languages only convinces me that I wouldn’t have it any other way.
The transmission of customs and conventions, linguistic or otherwise, from one generation to the next is never perfect. Over multiple generations, any sign, symbol, or picture that once conveyed meaning may become completely unrecognizable. This is a problem that was addressed by the semiotician Thomas Sebeok when, in the early 1980s, he was asked by the Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation to prepare a report on how best to encode a warning message on sites where nuclear waste had been buried. To ensure the safety of future generations, the message had to be interpretable for ten thousand years. He recommended extreme redundancy of encoding: the message should be printed in all known languages; there should be pictures, icons, and other relevant symbols; repositories around the world should store technical messages written in mathematical formulas (or perhaps, he suggests, in something like Lincos, Freudenthal’s self-teaching logical language). But even all of this redundancy, he noted, might prove worthless in ten thousand years.
The best way to make sure the message would get through to the future, he proposed, was to include a second “metamessage,” with a “plea and a warning” that every 250 years or so the information (including the “metamessage” itself) be re-encoded into whatever languages, symbols, and unknown-as-of-yet communicative devices were current at that time. Still the possibility would exist that the people of the future would ignore the plea, or forget to comply, so as added insurance he suggests the creation of a sort of folklore, perpetuated through rituals and legends, that would promote the development of a superstition or taboo about the dangerous sites. An “atomic priesthood,” a group of scientists entrusted with the true reasons for the danger, “would be charged with the added responsibility of seeing to it that our behest, as embodied in the cumulative sequence of metamessages, is to be heeded … with perhaps the veiled threat that to ignore the mandate would be tantamount to inviting some sort of supernatural retribution.” Even if the “priesthood” should forget the original reason for its existence, it is hoped that whatever kind of entity it should evolve into would maintain some sort of authority and sense of responsibility toward passing on the folklore.
According to Sebeok’s analysis, the best chance for transmitting meaning ten thousand years into the future was not to find some optimal, stable, universal way to encode that meaning, because there is none. Meaning resides not in the symbol or the image or the language in which it is encoded but in the society that interprets it. New generations are born, societies change, and, with them, the interpretation of meaning. The best shot we had at getting our message across was to try to influence the society of the future—either by entreating it to adapt the encoding of the message to its times or by planting an aura of danger in a broad social tradition.
Though language inventors may have set their sights on issues a little more immediate than the ten-thousand-year communication problem, too many of them have made the mistake of believing that if they just worked hard enough, they could come up with a language that would transcend society. But it is society that creates meaning, and therefore language. The best hope a language inventor has for the survival of his or her project is to find a group of people who will use it, and then hand it over and let them ruin its perfection.
Though there have been successes in the story of invented languages, they have been qualified ones. Some languages have gotten attention or praise or even communities of speakers, but none of them have fulfilled their original missions. We still don’t have a worldwide international auxiliary language or a proven cure for all the supposed inadequacies of language. And so ambitious inventor types are still working on it. Every year still sees a few more proposals for a new world language, an improved Esperanto, or a perfect system of mathematical concept formation. I recently purchased a book, self-published by John Yench in 2003, on Idirl, “a universal language for all mankind, with none of the inconsistencies and awkward irregularities of existing natural languages, a self-consistent language where a word’s sequence of sounds alone tell you its meaning, without needing a dictionary.” Mr. Yench is a bit behind the times in his method of spreading the word about his language. These days, language inventors no longer scrape together their savings in order to print books and mail them out to the libraries and government offices of the world. Instead, they set up Web sites. The language inventors, like most everyone else, have taken their ideas and their products to the Internet.
And, like most everyone else, they are able to find some kind of audience this way. Well-established languages like Esperanto and Lojban, by providing forums where people can use and learn the languages without having to travel or wait for feedback, have attracted a good number of converts every year, and even old projects like Volapük, Ido, and Interlingua have picked up some new life online. But so much easy access to information about so many projects makes the competition that much fiercer. As many languages as there are on the Web, there are more angry flame wars and long manifestos about why this language is more logical, more systematic, more international, more likely to be adopted by the UN, less biased toward Europeans, less difficult to learn, less ambiguous, less likely to be abused by politicians …
All this fighting stems from the illusion that people choose to learn a language for rational reasons, that they are looking for the language that has the most useful features, the best agenda. But no one is out there comparison shopping for an artificial language. They find what they like, and there’s no accounting for taste. There are Esperanto types, and there are Lojban types, and there are even a few proudly defiant Volapük types.
As it turns out, it is possible for an invented language to succeed even if it has no useful features at all. One of the most successful languages of the current era is neither free from irregularities nor easy to learn. It has no mission: it wasn’t intended to unite mankind or improve the mind or even be spoken by people in the real world. But it suited the personal taste of a certain group of people so well that as soon as they saw it, they fell in love, clamored for more, and formed a community that brought it to life.
And so we come back to the story of Klingon.
The Go-To Linguist
When the Klingons first appeared on the original Star Trek television show, which ended in 1969, they were little more than grunting belligerents in greasepaint. They developed their trademark ridged foreheads for the first Star Trek movie in 1979, but it wasn’t until the second incarnation of the television series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, which began in 1987, that Klingons were portrayed as complex members of a richly articulated alien culture.
In that series and subsequent Star Trek movies, audiences learned that Klingons are rough, crude, loyal, violent, and honorable—a sort of Viking-Spartan-samurai motorcycle gang. They eat qagh (live serpent worms), drink strong alcohol, and sleep on hard surfaces. They have a rite of passage (a youth is ceremoniously beaten with something called a painstik) and a creation myth (the first Klingon and his mate destroyed the gods who created them and burned down the heavens). Cursing is an esteemed art form, one of the most offensive insults being “Hab SoSlI' Quch” (Your mother has a smooth forehead). Their mating practices involve the hurling of heavy objects and often result in injury. They are fond of re
citing their numerous proverbs, which express their values: “quv Hutlh HoHbogh tlhIngan ach qabDaj 'angbe’bogh” (The Klingon who kills without showing his face has no honor); “Dubotchugh yIpummoH” (If it is in your way, knock it down); “bIjatlh 'e’yImev, yItlhutlh” (Stop talking and drink!); and my personal favorite, “bortaS nIvqu 'oH bortaS’e'” (Revenge is the best revenge).
Klingon is indeed difficult to pronounce, but at least it uses phonetic spelling—once you know what sound each letter represents, you can pronounce any Klingon word. The vowels are easy—a as in “father,” e as in “ten,” I as in “give,” o as in “phone,” u as in “tune.” The consonants are more difficult. The H is pronounced as the “ch” sound in Yiddish words like “chutzpah” or the German exclamation ach! The Klingon D is pronounced as someone from India might pronounce a d—place the tip of your tongue at the middle of the roof of your mouth rather than the ridge behind your teeth. The S is similar to the English “sh,” but also with the tongue tip at the roof of the mouth. If you say the word SoD (flood) properly, it will feel bunched up and sluggish in your mouth. The q is pronounced like a k but farther back in the throat, as if you are choking. The Q is pronounced like the q, but more forcefully. If you’re the adventurous type, try saying the word for the verb “to mutiny”—qIQ. If some saliva flies out, great job. If your lunch flies out, try again later.
The other Klingon spellings requiring explanation are ng (the same as in English, but it can also occur at the beginning of a word, as in ngav—“writer’s cramp”), gh (the same sound as Klingon H, but with the vocal cords vibrating, as if you were gargling), tlh (begins like t, but leave the tip of your tongue in position while you lower the sides to let the air through), j (the j of “job,” not of “hallelujah”), and finally, the glottal stop', indicating a complete closure of the glottis, as performed before “oh” in the phrase “uh-oh.” Now go back to the previous page and try a proverb, if you dare.
