artificial languages
Conlangs are pretty fascinating.
Did you know that Klingon is the fastest-growing artificial language?
Here's an except from the Wired article i read years ago-
"...when a few lines of Klingon dialog were needed for the first Star Trek movie, in 1979, James Doohan (who plays engineer Scott) leapt at the chance. He spat a few lines of aggressive nonsense into a tape recorder and told an actor playing a Klingon to go memorize it. Five years later, on Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, the producers wanted to be able to have large chunks of Klingon dialog. So they recruited Marc Okrand, a linguist working at the National Captioning Institute, who had come up with a few lines of Vulcan as a favor to friends working on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. He remembers of that experience, "I drove away from the studio thinking, 'My God, I just taught Mr. Spock how to speak Vulcan.'"
Extrapolating from Doohan's sounds, Okrand invented a vocabulary and grammar and translated every line of dialog spoken by a Klingon in Star Trek III. He then stayed on the set to correct mistakes - and to incorporate new coinages. Okrand reasoned that since the Klingons were warriors rather than philosophers, their language would emphasize action, and therefore verbs. Klingon has three official parts of speech: nouns, verbs, and everything else. Adjectives don't exist per se: there is no word meaning simply "greedy," although there is a verb "to be greedy" (qur). And most adverbs are agglutinative; that is, limitless strings of suffixes can be attached to a verb to modify its meaning.
Okrand made the language as alien as possible. Sentence structure is object-verb-subject, a virtually nonexistent combination in human linguistics
"
The full article can be found at-
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.08/es.languages.html
Did you know that Klingon is the fastest-growing artificial language?
Here's an except from the Wired article i read years ago-
"...when a few lines of Klingon dialog were needed for the first Star Trek movie, in 1979, James Doohan (who plays engineer Scott) leapt at the chance. He spat a few lines of aggressive nonsense into a tape recorder and told an actor playing a Klingon to go memorize it. Five years later, on Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, the producers wanted to be able to have large chunks of Klingon dialog. So they recruited Marc Okrand, a linguist working at the National Captioning Institute, who had come up with a few lines of Vulcan as a favor to friends working on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. He remembers of that experience, "I drove away from the studio thinking, 'My God, I just taught Mr. Spock how to speak Vulcan.'"
Extrapolating from Doohan's sounds, Okrand invented a vocabulary and grammar and translated every line of dialog spoken by a Klingon in Star Trek III. He then stayed on the set to correct mistakes - and to incorporate new coinages. Okrand reasoned that since the Klingons were warriors rather than philosophers, their language would emphasize action, and therefore verbs. Klingon has three official parts of speech: nouns, verbs, and everything else. Adjectives don't exist per se: there is no word meaning simply "greedy," although there is a verb "to be greedy" (qur). And most adverbs are agglutinative; that is, limitless strings of suffixes can be attached to a verb to modify its meaning.
Okrand made the language as alien as possible. Sentence structure is object-verb-subject, a virtually nonexistent combination in human linguistics
"
The full article can be found at-
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.08/es.languages.html
posted by mufflevski at 7/04/2005
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