“Klingon is a sophisticated, extremely complex language that very few can master. I first came to Klingon as a linguist doing research for a book on artificial languages. My intention was to observe from a nice, distant, scientific perspective, but somehow I ended up with a little bronze pin indicating that I’d passed the first-level certification exam. The grammar offered an irresistible linguistic challenge. Klingon is difficult but not impossible, weird yet totally believable. Anyone can put on a pair of pointed ears or memorize some lines of dialogue, but learning to speak Klingon requires genuine hard work,” Arika Okrent in Slate, a linguist who specialises in studying artificial languages found that an examination of Star Trek’s Klingon language (originally structured by linguist for the films Marc Okrand) shows a seriously sophisticated structure way beyond what is usual for an invented, fictional language and yet which rarely gets the respect paid to ‘future speak’ in other fiction, such as Clockwork Orange, which uses a much simpler word substitution method. (via Boing Boing)
Mon, May 11, 2009
Film, TV and radio