by Arika Okrent
Unless, like me, you never met a mnemonic you didn’t like. In order to memorize five hundred words in three days, I spun my mind into a frenzy of associative madness: waq—“shoe,” shoes are for walking; Qob—“danger,” cobras are dangerous; wIgh—“genius,” Einstein’s hair looked like a wig; rur—“resemble,” the first letter resembles the last letter; ngeD—“easy,” ironic because “ng” and “D” are some of the harder sounds to pronounce. But careful not to get it mixed up with Qatlh—“difficult” (not ironic) because “Q” and “tlh” are the most difficult to pronounce.
Flip, flip, flip. The flash cards flashed. In my room at night, while everyone else hung out at the pool, I sorted them into piles of ten, only moving on to the next pile when I had one fully memorized. In the lobby, after the sing-along and before Klingon Pictionary, I had people quiz me. At the Old Spaghetti Factory, while we waited for a table for eighteen, I badgered Louise, who, frankly, didn’t seem to be studying hard enough, into reciting my intra-Klingon word associations with me (“wIv, tIv, yIv”—“choose, enjoy, chew”—I choose to enjoy to chew).
By the afternoon of the test, I was feeling burned-out. My head was swimming with what were essentially useless nonsense words. And some of the Klingons were getting on my nerves. Did they have to be so weird? Did they have to be so weird in public’? At a small Thai restaurant that we practically took over during the lunch rush, I shrank in my seat as an exceptionally polite waitress patiently guessed at what my costumed tablemates were pointing to when they insisted on giving their orders in Klingon. I wanted to meet her gaze and apologize with my eyes, but she was too rattled by the experience to look my way. Later, as the group made its rubber-foreheaded, vinyl-gloved, wool-caped, guttural-Klingon-speaking way toward the door (with me ineffectively hiding behind my hair), I saw a table of cute teenage girls mouthing a silent chorus of “Oh … my … God!” I have to say, it stung.
Marc Okrand didn’t make it to the qep’d that year. Scott wouldn’t get his dictionary signed. But the greater disappointment was that no new words would be handed down. At previous qep’a's Okrand had come through with new vocabulary. Some words he created in response to lists of requests. (“You can’t ask for anything impolite,” my guide, Mark Shoulson, told me, “but one year we did get the word for ‘snot.’”) Others were created on the spot—one year during the Klingon “Hokey Pokey,” when it came to Okrand’s turn, he said, “You put your Sa’Hut in …” Everyone stopped for a mental dictionary scan, thinking, “Do I know this word?” Finally they looked to Okrand, and he turned and stuck his backside in. And that’s how Klingon got the word for “tush” (Sa’Hut, incidentally, is tuchis backward).
Klingonists are strict about language authority. They have been especially strict since the early 1990s, when arguments about the KLI’s translation projects for Hamlet (since completed) and the Bible (still ongoing) led to the formation of a splinter group called the ILS (Interstellar Language School, no longer active). No one but Okrand can introduce new vocabulary. And no dispute about grammar or usage is considered settled until Okrand has spoken. He handles this responsibility cleverly, especially in light of the fact that he himself is not a very good speaker of his own language. The conceit he uses is that he has sole access to a native Klingon speaker, a prisoner named Maltz (and let’s just be clear that everyone realizes it’s a conceit). When questions arise about the correct way to tell time in Klingon, or the proper use of prefixes to indicate indirect objects, Okrand can claim that the matter requires further research. Sometimes he will publish an answer (on Internet newsgroups or in the journal HolQeD), but he has the luxury of waiting to do so until the expert Klingonists have fully debated the possibilities. “I have to be careful what I say, because if I make a mistake it will be noticed,” Okrand told me. He made a big mistake when for the instructional audiotape Power Klingon (published by Simon & Schuster), he put the subject before, rather than after, the verb in the toast “May your blood scream” ('IwlIj jachjaj—“blood-your scream-may-it”). He later explained that in the formalized domain of toast giving, the word-order rule is object-subject-verb rather than object-verb-subject. This modification rings true; it is often the case that ceremonial domains bend the rules in natural languages. (When but in toasts do we begin English sentences with “May your …”?) Okrand is a skilled back-fitter.
Part of what allows him to deal with accidental inconsistencies in such a natural way is that a realistic amount of wiggle room was built into the language from the beginning. In the introduction to the first edition of his dictionary, he discusses some “dialect differences” in Klingon vocabulary and pronunciation. (The notion of dialect difference has been important, he told me, “considering the difficulty in getting the actors on the show to say things right.”) He also allows for exceptions to the grammatical rules. For example, as stated in the chapter on nouns, the plural suffix -mey “cannot be used with body parts. It should be noted, however, that Klingon poets often violate this grammatical rule in order to evoke particular moods in their poetry. Thus, forms such as tlhonmey nostrils scattered all about do occur.” The language is just messy enough to be credible, and this messiness, built into the design from the very beginning, sets Klingon apart in the history of language invention. Klingon has no bone to pick with natural language; it is rather a respectful homage to the strange and interesting things that languages can do.
Another quality that makes Klingon stand out from the vast graveyard (for the most part) of previous inventions is that it has no purpose. It is interesting to note that in terms of the attraction of real, live speakers, Klingon is second only to the invented language with perhaps the most purpose—Esperanto. Esperantists are motivated by the goal of fostering peace by bridging language barriers. While they enjoy their language, and indeed often revel in it, the language itself is considered secondary to this goal. Learning a language takes work. It doesn’t make sense to do the work if you have no reason to do it. After I attended the qep’a', I talked with a prominent Esperantist about my experiences among the Klingon speakers. He shook his head with confused dismay and asked me, “But what are they doing? Really, what are they doing)?”
My Esperantist friend poses a good question. What are they doing? If Klingon has no purpose, and you get nothing but a withering dose of ridicule from the entire world in return for the time you put into it, why ever would you bother?
Klingon is a type of puzzle that appeals to a type of person. It is difficult, but not impossible, formed from the stuff of real languages, just strange enough, just believable enough, small enough that you can know every word, the entire canon, but flexible enough to lend itself to the challenge of translation. The boundaries are set and the game is on. “How far can we take this?” is the collective call of the Klingon community. Could we translate Hamlet, under the given constraints? They could and they did, and what the translation lacks in elegance, it makes up for in the fact of its existing at all. Does Klingon have a poetic potential of its own? Let’s see! (A phrase that came up in the improvisation game I witnessed: “QI’lop lopmo' qI’Qo' qoH”—“The fool won’t sign the treaty, because he is celebrating warrior day.”) Are there puns, holorimes, palindromes to be discovered? You bet! (The winner of the HolQeD palindrome contest: “tlhab oS 'Iw HoHwI So' batlh”—“Blood represents freedom; honor hides the killer.”) What are Klingon speakers doing? They are engaging in intellectually stimulating language play. They are enjoying themselves. They are doing language for language’s sake, art for art’s sake. And like all committed artists, they will do their thing, critics be damned.
The Secret Vice
Klingon is the solution to an artistic problem, not a linguistic one. Okrand set out to create a believable language for a fictional culture, a language about which fans could say, “If Klingons existed, there is no question that this is what they would speak,” a language with the mysterious quality of having just the right feel.
And that urge, to create
a language that captures an artistic vision, is the motivation for a new generation of language inventors. Their languages are designed for creativity’s sake, not to shape thought or change the world, or even to be spoken by anyone, but to satisfy the urge that J. R. R. Tolkien called his “secret vice.” For his Lord of the Rings trilogy, Tolkien crafted an entire family of languages, along with a realistic and extremely detailed explanation of the “historical” derivation processes through which the languages were related. Actually, it is more accurate to say that he crafted The Lord of the Rings for his languages. By the time the books were published in the mid-1950s, he had been working on his languages for over forty years. The creation of these languages consumed him almost against his will. At twenty-four years old he wrote of his obsession, “I often long to work at it and don’t let myself 'cause though I love it so it does seem such a mad hobby!” He later claimed that he wrote The Lord of the Rings to legitimize his madness: “Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real. But it is true.”
As a boy, Tolkien had become enchanted with the Welsh words he saw printed on the freight cars that stopped at the train station behind his home. He loved the way the words looked and later, when he began to study the language, found he loved their sound even more. He explained his feeling for Welsh in the following way: “Most English-speaking people, for instance, will admit that cellar door is ‘beautiful,’ especially if dissociated from its sense (and its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful. Well then, in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent.”
When he discovered Finnish as a student at Oxford, he said, “It was like discovering a wine-cellar filled with bottles of amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me.” He began to construct his own language around the aspects of Finnish that inspired him, and as he worked on it, he began to develop a history and mythology for the language as well. His method of language construction was less a process of premeditated invention than a discovery. He would try out sounds and words until they seemed “right,” and to know what was right, he felt the need to know something about the hypothetical people who spoke the language. His Finnish-inspired language would later evolve into Quenya, one of the languages of the Elves in The Lord of the Rings. Part of his construction of the history for the language involved the back-engineering of an ancestor language from which it could realistically have been derived. That ancestor language became “Primitive Quendian,” from which a “contemporary” of Quenya, the Welsh-inspired Sindarin, spoken by a different community of Elves, was also derived. On the way to Sindarin (or rather the various dialects of Sindarin), Tolkien worked out aspects of Old Sindarin, Middle Sindarin, and a variety of other stages in the life of the language.
Plenty of other authors throughout history have provided fictional languages for their imagined lands. The citizens in Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) have a Utopian language that looks very much like Latin. The inhabitants of the moon in Francis Godwin’s Man in the Moone (1638) speak a musical language. The people in Terre australe connue (1676) by Gabriel de Foigny speak a philosophical language like that designed by Wilkins and his contemporaries. From the strange cries of Swift’s Lilliputians in Gulliver’s Travels to Orwell’s Newspeak to the street slang of Burgess’s ruffians in A Clockwork Orange to the x- and z-filled jabber of countless works of science fiction, language creation has always been practiced for artistic purposes. However, these creations usually aren’t languages so much as they are ideas, a bit of vocabulary, a few phrases. They don’t invite further examination. They serve the story, never the other way around.
For Tolkien, language creation was an art all its own, enhanced and enriched by the stories, but still valuable even without them. He knew that others practiced the art as well. Once, while his attention wandered during a dreary presentation when he was in army training, he heard a fellow soldier suddenly say to himself, “Yes, I think I shall express the accusative case by a prefix!” He later recalled how, as these words were spoken,
the little man’s smile was full of a great delight, as of a poet or painter seeing suddenly the solution of a hitherto clumsy passage. Yet he proved as close as an oyster. I never gathered any further details of his secret grammar; and military arrangements soon separated us never to meet again (up to now at any rate). But I gathered that this queer creature—ever afterwards a little bashful after inadvertently revealing his secret—cheered and comforted himself in the tedium and squalors of “training under canvas” by composing a language, a personal system and symphony that no else was to study or to hear.
Tolkien told this story during a speech given in the early 1930s (before the publication of his fiction), which he introduced as being on the subject of “nothing less embarrassing than the unveiling in public of a secret vice.” After issuing a sort of apologia and explanation for what he was up to, he presented some examples of poetry in his own languages, thereby opening his secret to scrutiny in the name of the advancement of the art form whose “development to perfection must… certainly be prevented by its solitariness, the lack of interchange, open rivalry, study or imitation of others' technique.”
Things are different now. In an increasing number of online “artlang” or “conlang” (constructed language) forums, the formerly closeted (this is the word they use) practitioners of the no-longer-secret vice share the details of their languages with each other looking only for feedback and appreciation, and for the satisfaction of giving concrete linguistic shape to their personal aesthetic. The creator of ’x00E1;ãokxáã incorporated influences from Mohawk, Swahili, and Japanese in creating a language with “an emphasis on emotion, touch, and action” in order to reflect his “philosophical views (existentialism, idealism, absurdism, etc.)-” Toki Pona, a language of simple syllables that uses only positive words, is intended to promote positive thinking, to be “fun and cute … one could almost imagine a race of little cartoon creatures speaking in Toki Pona.” Brithenig was designed as “the language of an alternate history, being the Romance language that might have evolved if Latin speakers had displaced Celtic speakers in Britain.” Nunihongo is an “attempt to answer what Japanese might look like if half its vocabulary were derived from English.” The Azak language was inspired by the inventor’s “discovery of agglutinative languages and ergativity” (grammatical types common in the world’s languages, but exotic with respect to English) and is meant to “take those features and push them to their limits.”
The urge to push features to their limits is also found in languages like Aeo, which uses only vowels, and (the self-describing) AllNoun. Other projects push the idea of language itself to its limits. Ilish is the language of a hypothetical sea creature that communicates by electrical shocks representing points in a Cartesian coordinate system. Meaning is completely carried by pronouns, which contain information about “attitude (beneficial, threatening, neutral), location (x, y, and z coordinates) and context (seen at that location now, expected to be at that location now, at that location in the past).” Rikchik is the language of octopus-like aliens that use seven tentacles to form combinations of shapes to make utterances.
In this atmosphere of lively exchange and discussion, some critical standards have emerged. Languages that are too Englishy are frowned upon, as are “kitchen sink” languages or “Frankenlangs,” which just throw together every cool feature the author can think of but don’t make sense as a whole. First timers often make the mistake of excitedly trumpeting a great new idea for marking pronouns, or negating sentences, or indicating tense, only to be patiently referred to the hundreds of natural languages that already do it that way. It is much harder to come up with something original than one might think. And while originality is appreciated, it must be backed up by complexity and depth. The most respected languages in the conlang community often have years of
work behind them, and may even be attached to whole “conworlds” or “concultures” that help give them coherence and a model “literature.”
It is clear that the upper-echelon active conlangers have a lot of knowledge about a wide range of natural languages. Many critiques of proposed conlang features branch off into lengthy dis-cussions about exotic Australian languages or the sound-change rules of ancient Greek. In the summer of 2007, I attended the second annual Language Creation Conference in Berkeley, where about forty conlangers gathered to give presentations, participate in workshops, and socialize. The technical level of the discussions was sometimes incredibly high; people really knew their stuff. When one presenter began by playing some sound files and asking the audience to guess which languages they were, someone guessed right every time—Breton, Finnish, Navajo.
For these language inventors, language was not an enemy to be tamed or reformed but a muse. And they bowed down before her. Jeff Burke, a tall man who seemed nervous and shy at the podium, explained how he had been inspired to build his own family of “Central Mountain” languages by the incredible beauty he found in Mohawk when he took a course on it in college. He said the language “did something to me,” and he began to dig into the history of the language, becoming a self-taught expert in the development of Mohawk from Proto-Iroquoian. He was also fascinated by Cheyenne and wanted to capture “the spirit of its sounds,” so he studied the development of the language from Proto-Algonquian. His talk didn’t focus so much on his own creation as on the real languages that inspired it. He wanted us to understand where his artistic vision had come from. As he went over the complicated details of the Mohawk pronominal system, he spoke softly, but with such love and wonder in his voice that I thought he might burst into tears.
