Klingon

How do we find meaning amidst an overwhelming amount of sensory information? Are the processes by which we categorize information independent of our language? Linguistic relativism suggests that our thoughts are shaped by our language. Linguistic universalism does not necessarily contradict this notion. It is possible that, while humans may share some inherent facility that allows us to develop language and higher-level cognition, every language that develops does not necessarily share some basic set of universal concepts. Different languages classify spatial relations by different criteria, picking out distinctive features another language might otherwise ignore. The present study presents native speakers of different languages―Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish, (Persian) Farsi, and Hebrew―with animations portraying an array of different spatial relations. To control for variations in verb specificity, an artificial, constructed language (Klingon), will be used for responses. If relativists are right, participants should come up with significantly different spatial categories (emerging from the verbs they use) between groups.

In one of his many letters, Tolkien noted that Elvish was intended to be European in structure, and “specially pleasant”. Whilst the former can be achieved through the study of suitable languages, the likes of which would have been familiar to Tolkien, the latter is not predicated on a similar logic.Tolkien himself acknowledged the inherent ambiguity of his intentions having also stated that “individuals’ personal predilections, especially in the phonetic
structure of languages, varies widely” (letters: 175-76). So in the same way that Marc Okrand intended for Klingon to sound intrinsically extraterrestrial, it was Tolkien’s fundamental interest to make Elvish a beautiful language to speak and to hear. Therefore, despite the intent for creating Elvish being
incorrectly attributed to stories such as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, it would appear that Tolkien’s ambition was one rooted purely for his own pleasure...

...But what motivated Tolkien to continue developing Elvish languages over the entirety of his career? How close do they resemble the languages he chose to study? Did he give the same importance to an Elvish orthography as he did the spoken word? These are questions that have intrigued the minds of linguists,
fans and academics alike for over fifty years. It is the intention of this paper to address such questions, with reference to the influences of the Elvish language, evidenced by appropriate phonemic theory.

This book is the result of the Lecture Notes produced for the class ‘Introduction to Interlinguistics’ held at the University of Amsterdam during my first mandate as Special Chair holder there (2014-2019). This means that the intended readers are my students, who may come from the Humanities, such as English Studies or Philosophy, as well as from more formally oriented curricula, such as Logic or Artificial Intelligence.

Whilst linguistics are still being made use of to promote global harmony and international communication, suffice to say that similar efforts are becoming concentrated further towards use within the media. So to what extent does Tolkien's work, and those which followed, deviate from the earlier constructed languages? How do other artlangs compare to Elvish? And to what extent have artlangs affected people having become commonplace in modern-day media? These are questions which will be addressed in this paper, with the intention of illustrating not only how Tolkien influenced the current artlang era, but the extent of the impact that artlangs had, and continue to effect our current view of linguistics.

A majority of linguistic research concentrates on the conceptual exchange of information, and as a result the emotional aspects of language are found to be superfluous when observing the characteristics of communication. However, the prosody (or melody) within language becomes increasingly more necessary when observed as poetry or music, and one of the key aims of the present paper is to address the shared characteristics exhibited by the means of communication that exist between primitive language and music.

Are invented languages used outside their domain? Nowadays, some languages created for TV series are widely used for creating new messages by fans on the web. In this paper, two of these languages, Klingon and Dothraki, are analyzed in their use in forums and in fictions written by fans for entertainment purposes. We will argue that users of these languages may constitute what sociolinguistics call a community of practice (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1992), which seems to be a more proper label than the traditional speech community.

The much awaited book detailing the orthographies of JRR Tolkien's wonderful world of Arda. Please see other posts for content. Available to order now from Amazon;

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Elvish-Writing-Systems-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/1782808078/

A preview of the first chapter from my forthcoming book "The Elvish Writing Systems of J.R.R. Tolkien", covering Tolkien's history in writing systems, the origins of Sindarin and Quenya, the Tengwar, Cirth and Sarati, a history of Arda and Middle-earth, aesthetics of the written word and prerequisites for learning Elvish.

The author of the article discusses a special manner of existence of constructed languages created within the boundaries of science fiction. The subject matter occupies a special place in the general theory and practice of science fiction within the frames of the confrontation of languages and modification of the existing linguistic systems. The article contains a brief outline of constructed languages categorization, in the background of which selected science fiction works focused on language communication, as well as the presentation of two most popular fantasy systems – Laadan and Klingon.

Two brief round table discussions on two topics related to the Klingon language: 1) asking for an opinion and asking where to locate a physical object; 2) how to correctly refer to collective nouns.

Page 4 & 16 of HolQeD: The Journal of the Klingon Language Institute - Vol. 13, No. 3 (September 2004)

This work deals with fictional languages and their use in online communities, with particular emphasis on four languages (i.e., Klingon, Dothraki, Tolkien’s Elvish, and Na’vi). The main goal is the definition of the linguistic communities who actually use these languages: a part of actors and creators, fictional languages are actually used by fans at various levels of commitment. Thus, we argue that they are a fundamental part of an “in-group making” strategy in online communities, which, in sociolinguistic terms, could be defined as “community of practice”.
A qualitative analysis will be provided by looking at discussions in dedicated chats and forums, but also in fan-fictions (i.e., stories written by fans). Non-experts (i.e., non-conlangers, and non-linguists) discuss about grammatical features of these languages, but also about the possible sociolinguistic variation in the use of some words or syntactic structures. The example in (1) shows the typical concerns of fans using fictional languages, in this case, Dothraki:
(1) As I often ask, did I use the words right?
Zhey Irri! Zhey Jhiqui! Doreah me mesile. – Irri! Jhiqui! Doreah is pregnant.
Is it a proper use of zhey to get their attention here?
The verb is mesilat, to be pregnant. I’m not sure if the stem is mesi or mesil […]. If I assume the stem is mesi, the third person is mesie, which just sounds weird […]
This writer’s questions on Dothraki language are about both grammatical features (the ending of the verb mesilat ‘to be pregnant’) and pragmatic features (the discourse particle zhey).
In conclusion, this works is a qualitative analysis of the use of invented languages in online communities from a sociolinguistic and pragmatic perspective.

"Star Trek", série créée en 1966 par Gene Roddenberry, se déroule dans un univers utopique dans lequel une humanité unifiée dans une Fédération interplanétaire pacifique part explorer la galaxie. L’équipage de l’USS Enterprise trouve néanmoins sur son chemin les Klingons, une race de guerriers farouches qui évoquent de prime abord des clones de l’empereur Ming, némésis du héros de bande dessinée Flash Gordon. Mais, au fur et à mesure de l’évolution de l’univers "Star Trek", décliné en pas moins de cinq séries et dix films sur près de quarante années, ils adoptent des caractéristiques culturelles rappelant à la fois le Japon féodal et l’univers des Vikings hollywoodiens comme le fixe le film éponyme de Richard Fleischer (1958). Ils se rassemblent dans des banquets où l’on boit beaucoup et parle fort et ils affichent leur croyance dans un au-delà, le Sto’Vo’Kor, dans lequel les guerriers courageux vivent une éternité de combats glorieux.

Sintesi in italiano. Latino sine Flexione, Lingua Ignota, Lingua Romana, Ido, Occidental, Interlingua: il lessico, la sintassi e la morfologia di queste "lingue pianificate" indicano che è arduo intavolare l'invenzione di una lingua a vocazione universale ab ovo: i "logoteti", consciamente o meno, sistematicamente o meno, sono portati a fondare la loro "ideazione" linguistica sugli idiomi che essi già conoscono. Ciò avviene non soltanto attraverso imitazione, ma anche per opposizione: la fonetica del Klingon (una delle lingue di Star Trek), per esempio, è stata progettata per sovvertire le regolarità principali della fonetica inglese, al fine di suonare all'orecchio come particolarmente "aliena". L'articolo evidenzia gli stilemi ricorrenti e le "mosse" combinatorie tipiche attraverso cui si "inventano" la maggior parte delle lingue pianificate; cerca, inoltre, di svelare "l'ideologia semiotica" di molte di queste "invenzioni", un'ideologia secondo cui l'entropia linguistica è una tendenza socioculturale negativa, ma Babele può essere comunque rovesciata, precisamente per mezzo della pianificazione di una lingua la cui struttura principale poggi sulle caratteristiche comuni a un'intera famiglia linguistica. L'articolo enfatizza, in particolar modo, la dialettica fra tale ideologia del linguaggio e quella che, al contrario, vede Babele come una condizione naturale dell'umanità.

English abstract. Latino sine Flexione, Lingua Ignota, Lingua Romana, Ido, Occidental, Interlingua: the lexicon, syntax, and morphology of these 'planned languages' show that it is impossible to plan the invention of a language from scratch: 'planners' are doomed to consciously or unconsciously, systematically or unsystematically, base their linguistic 'invention' on the language(s) they already know. That occurs not only through imitation, but also through opposition: the phonetics of Klingon (one of the languages of Star Trek), for instance, was planned so as to contrast the main rules of English phonetics, in order to sound particularly "alien". The paper points out the main combinatorial 'moves' through which most planned languages are 'invented'; furthermore, it seeks to uncover the 'semiotic ideology' of most of these 'inventions': linguistic entropy is a negative socio-cultural trend, but Babel can be reversed, precisely through the planning of a language whose main structure relies on the common features of a whole family of languages. The dialectics between this semiotic ideology and the one which, on the opposite, sees Babel as a natural condition of humanity, are particularly emphasized. 1 Una versione in inglese del presente articolo è stata accettata per la pubblicazione nella rivista Semiotica, essendo stata presentata presso l'Università di Suzhou, Cina, il 16 gennaio 2019; ringrazio il collega Wang Jun per aver organizzato la conferenza. Ringrazio inoltre il Prof. Fabrizio Pennacchietti per aver letto e commentato una versione iniziale del testo italiano dell'articolo.

Using my Star Trek Online meme as the main character, I have once again furthered the causality of all things Klingon in the name of the Glory of their Revolution[s]. My considerations on political science and activism have expanded in that outside of the solar system thinking might actually help perpetuate our very own species.

Ovih dana slučajno mi je privukla pažnju žustra diskusija na internet forumu jedne domaće televizijske stanice. Neko je predložio urednicima serijskog programa da bi bilo „lepo da u bližoj budućnosti emituju jedan od serijala Zvezdanih staza“. Reakcije su bile različite, uglavnom negativne, da bi se jedan od učesnika diskusije na kraju zapitao: „Ko još gleda Zvezdane staze?“ U trenutku sam zastao zbunjen i iznenađen, a onda naglas odgovorio: „Ja gledam Zvezdane staze!“ I ne samo da ih gledam, nego je puno toga u mom životu obeleženo ovim čudesnim kulturnim fenomenom. Baš tako, kulturnom fenomenom, a ne tek nekom među bezbrojnim televizijskim šarenim slikama. Zvezdane staze su neizbežna polazna tačka za sve ono što danas volimo u naučnoj fantastici, a priča o njima počela je pre više od 40 godina.

A preview of the second chapter from my forthcoming book "The Elvish Writing Systems of J.R.R. Tolkien", covering Tolkien's history in writing systems, the origins of Sindarin and Quenya, the Tengwar, Cirth and Sarati, a history of Arda and Middle-earth, aesthetics of the written word and prerequisites for learning Elvish.