Current mood:	geeky
Entry tags:	english, klingon

When the inventor of Klingon came to Leipzig
LeipzigDaq ghaHpu' Marc Okrand'e', tlhIngan Hol 'oghwI', 'ej nItebHa' 'uQ wISoppu'! :)
In English, this means: "Marc Okrand, the inventor of the Klingon language was in Leipzig, and we had dinner together!"

About two weeks ago, Tina told me that Sabine Fiedler – an Anglistics professor who is also well-known for her work on Esperanto and in Interlinguistics in general – invited Marc Okrand to Leipzig. Marc Okrand is the inventor of the Klingon language and himself a linguist. So on Tuesday last week he came to Leipzig to have a little talk titled "Linguistics and Science Fiction: An Introduction to Klingon" at the Dresdner Bank.
Of course I was there, and so were Tina, Helen, Mrs. Fiedler, Sven S., Conny, Raik, Jan W., Thogo and many more people. The room was full, so I guess we must've been about 50 to 60 people, one was dressed up in a Starfleet uniform (ST8 style).
And there he came! He was introduced by Mrs. Fiedler and looks very nervous at first, having shaky hands. His talk was great, very informative and really funny. He didn't talk about the language itself that much, but instead explained how he was called up by Paramount Pictures one day and how he subsequently created the Klingon language and how it changed over time and all the hardships he had to go through in the process of devising phonology, grammar and vocabulary for this language who had to sound alien and guttural. Before his career with constructed languages (he also created dialogs for the Vulcan in ST3 and also invented the Atlantean language for that Disney movie), he worked on Amerindian languages of California, specifically on Mutsun, an extinct dialect of Southern Ohlone (Penutian language family). Nowadays, he works for a closed captioning company, mainly on subtitles for the hearing impaired.
But back to Klingon. I took notes of the most interesting and surprising facts he talked about:

• He intented to make the language alien and strange, so he intentionally violated some language universals and made the language appear quite untypical for this very planet (aka Earth).


• The instruction in the script said, it had to sound guttural. Okrand avoided the phonemes /s/ and /k/, as they are stereotypically associated with the bad guys in various Sci-Fi movies... he's absolutely right, think about it! Klingon names themselves often start with a <K> in their English transcription: Kahless, Kahlest, Kang, Koloth, Kor, K'mpec, "Klingon" itself... — he chose to have a voiceless aspirated uvular plosive (/qʰ/) for those names, plus, a voiceless alveolo-lateral affricate (/tɬ/) for the words starting with <kl>.


• The reason for the capital letters was not to make it look more alien, but – indeed as I was always thinking – to mark the sounds which are foreign to English or pronounced differently than the Standard Average American™ might expect.


• The language actually evolved! Whenever an actor made a mistake which still was within the limits of the Klingon phonotactics, Mark Okrand changed what he had written down instead of telling the actor to repeat it correctly. Sometimes, he changed the meaning of entire sentences, when the studios suddenly decided that something Klingon had to mean something else. Really weird. I wish Chinese would adapt to my mistakes!


• Quite often in the movies, Klingons were recorded saying things like "Animal!", where the producers later decided that they should be speaking Klingon and not English! Easy thing. Okrand just made up a translation that matched the lip movements and had that particular scene dubbed by the actor. In this case, animal became "Ha'DIbaH".


• From ST5 on, the book was already produced and then he had to follow his own book. Otherwise fans owning the Klingon Dictionary (like me) might've pointed out errors easily.


• Some guy named D'Armond Spears once raised his child bilingually in English and Klingon, the latter of which the child ceased to speak later on. The baby's first word in Klingon was, according to Mark Okrand, "Qo'!", in English: "No." By the way, he's 13 or 14 years old and he's fine!


• Raik asked him if he'd ever grow tired of talking about Klingon or being asked to translate this and that for the show or attending Star Trek conventions. "No, never!" was his answer.

After his talk and after some of us got autographs and photos with Mr. Okrand, Raik invited him and some of us to a café nearby. There we had some drinks, some food and talked about a lot of things related to linguistics, Mark Okrand, Leipzig, America, food. It was such a great evening! And, to prove my encounter with the great Mark Okrand, here's the photo of us two:


By the way, the autograph he wrote into my dictionary, was:
"To André — tlhIngan wo' jupna'. not yIjegh. Qapla'! Marc Okrand" :D