The thing is that a lot of the aliens in the Star Trek universe are basically humans with funny facial features, so I guess it makes sense that Klingon is basically a human language with funny language features. I say this as someone who was heavily into Klingon when it first came out.
Also, like they had to make sure the language could be pronounced by...actors...who are surprisingly human underneath those prothesis. I think jan made a bit of a mistake looking at each element separately and saying "well yes, this language has this. this other language has this. etc. etc." and should've really looked at if certain combinations of features were common with eachother. Also, a phonemic writing system isn't like...bad. It's not particularly inventive, but it isn't bad. I think the one thing I can agree with jan on about Klingon is that the romanization is absolutely stupid as hell.
@@Xnoob545 I don’t think Isedge knows what Toki Pona is. Really only the people who know a little bit of Toki Pona know that Jan (pronounced like Yan) means person in Toki Pona.
I'm late here, but this is the third time I've had to point it out. Klingon does *NOT* have a base-10 numbering system... natively. It has an adapted base-10 numbering system for dealing with other species, Klingon has a base **FOUR** numbering system.
It’s not really base 4. It technically has 4 digits counting 0, but the 0 can only ever mean the value 0. It is not used as a placeholder and does not appear in any other numbers. Other than that it’s all ternary, because the place values are powers of 3. It just uses the digits 1-3 instead of 0-2, so counting looks odd to us: 0, 1, 2, 3, 11, 12, 13, 21, 22, 23, 31, 32, 33, 111, etc. This ep's number is 23 in that system, which works out in ternary; 2x3+3=9. Is it weird that you can have the base as a digit value? Yes. But that doesn’t change the base. :)
@@markjreed I read this once and didn't get it at all. Now after reading it again on a different day it makes sense, and is oddly cool. Really, it's like if 10 was represented by some eleventh digit that meant ten, and that was used instead of 1 one space higher and a placeholder zero.
@@markjreed Klingon has a base 3 bijective system, which is different form a base 3 positional system. Base 3 bijective has digits 1-3, and counts just like you did. In bijective, you can't count zero, because there's no digit for it, so it's perfectly valid that a null/zero symbol has been adapted, but is considered "outside" the numbering system. - Buuut, it really feels like ths base 3 bijective system was made up after the fact, when people said how a base 10 positional system was uncreative. Unless this was an early idea.
@@Liggliluff it's as old as the language itself, described in the first edition of The Klingon Dictionary from 1985, the same year the movie the language was created for (Star Trek III: The Search for Spock) came out. But it's also in-universe backstory; by the time of the movie's "present", Klingons have adopted a positional decimal system due to influence from other civilizations, repurposing the previously singleton 0 as a placeholder digit and borrowing names for the digits 4-9 from their musical notation.
Gotta remember that Okrand was given Klingon sentences and their translations before he started making the language. So he had to make those previous random sentences intelligible with the new dialogue he was going to make. Put him in a weird position to begin with
One of my favorite parts of the whole video was when Jan said, "Oh look, it doesn't even have articles." and the screen read "Mandarin: over a billion speakers".
The romanization was created to make it easier for actors to tell which sounds aren't standard English. He could only make it alien to a point, because actors still had to learn to say these sounds without having to spend time learning the whole language. I have a video on my channel that has Okrand explaining why he picked the sounds he did, and why he wrote it the way he did.
No, that was part of my point. The Romanization system was designed to remind actors of how to say the sounds, not to look alien. When it was created it was not intended to be used in Universe. It only gets used that way in Star Trek VI, on a computer panel, and all the actors in the scene are pretending it's not there (us viewers only got to see it when a HD versions of STVI were released and we could finally see what was behind Uhura but this was the fault of the set designers not removing it). TNG/DS9/VOY/Ent ignored it, and the new shows are using pIqaD to write it. The fiction in The Klingon Dictionary explains it was created by English speaking Federation scientists so they could write Klingon at a time they didn't understand pIqaD. When Star Trek III was created, the Federation was still supposed to have little information about the Klingons.
"Tlh" in particular makes a lot of sense for explaining to native English speakers how to make that particular sound - I'm actually shocked that sort of thing isn't used more often in language classes to help explain sounds not present in the student's native language
I just remembered that one time they had to alter the entire language's subject-verb agreement, ENTIRELY BECAUSE Christopher Lloyd flubbed one of his lines.
In all fairness, you are judging by number of speakers, while Marc was going by number of langusges. If it was less common in languages, he went that route.
An alien language would be one spoken by aliens. As aliens will almost for sure not have any single anatomical similarity to humans (no hands no arms no head and no throat to speak with) it will be certainly unpronounceable for humans. So an alien language would be one that uses the sounds of clashing and rubbing crystals or the sound of droplets falling down different lengths of pipe to name some examples. That's only if they even use sound to communicate.
@@sunflower_ace that's true here on earth, cause most intelligent species follow the same body plan they inherited: two arms two legs two eyes, left/right simetry, they have an up side, a down side a front and a back.... There's just no reason for an alien lifeform to follow this body plan For all we know they could have radial (circular) simetry, or pentameral simetry (five sided) or they could be amorphous There's no reason to think they even use sound to communicate They certainly wouldn't have DNA (something which bothers me in science fiction) DNA is an earth thing They might have some sort of equivalent with a different genetic code and different molecules for nitrogen bases, but if they use the same genetic code and nitrogen bases, they're from earth Something alien would absolutely not have the same kind of DNA as earth life. They might not even be carbon based, they could just be based on silicon or other material entirely. There's this interesting proposal by Schröddinger I believe, where he proposes a sort of alien life that takes the form of a mineral that can grow and reduce in size which reproduces and communicates and performs all life functions but has absolutely no genetic information/DNA and isn't squishy like most life on earth What I mean is no, there's no reason for alien life to follow any body structure similar to life on earth, not even in the molecular lever
I understand it being your least favorite of the artlangs thus far, but really, what do you expect? It was a language constructed for a tv series and movie franchise. They didn't have to impress, they just had to create a language that sounded abrasive and foreign to a predominantly English-speaking audience. They created a language that did just that, so I give them credit there. Also, if we're going to go totally sci-fi, the only way to create a convincingly extraterrestrial conlang is to create entirely new sounds that can't be mapped on the IPA. Not to mention an entirely unique writing system to accommodate it.
You could argue that a truly alien language would stand a high chance of being unspeakable/incomprehensible to any human speaker, even theoretically. Not like, difficult to speak, no, outright impossible. If it contains linguistically significant sounds outside of the human vocal range, or worse, outside the range of human hearing, it will ultimately be impossible for a human to speak. For rather obvious reasons this is not viable if you ever expect to encounter this language in any kind of media where someone could actually have to attempt to speak or interpret it's spoken form. (You might be able to fake it perhaps, but that would be... Difficult.)
@@KuraIthys Since Klingons are an anthropomorphic race, I think it is reasonable to say they are able to produce similar sounds as humans. Therefore I have no problems with human sounding sounds. And since no one ever met an alien race before, I don't see how to distinguish what sounds Alien and what not. In conclusion Klingon could be a perfect representation of a alien language or completly false representation. If we now consider that approximately 1.58 billion intelligent species have ever existed in the Milky Way (if the Drake equaton is correct) there is a good chance that a fraction of them communicate via spoken language and that some of these languages could resemble human languages. I still think Klingon is boring because it is so close to english but I do understand it is most likely to help the actors to learn it quickly.
@@Wishuponapancake its not necessarily that it makes the language immune to critique, rather that not all the critique offered is actually as relevant as it seems. klingon does have a need to be easily spoken and readable enough by enough actors to be usable in star trek. that being said there are definitely some valid criticisms in the video, and it does feel like a pretty minimalist attempt at an artlang in comparison to others covered (that being said the idea that any given linguistic trait must be completely unknown among languages to feel even vaguely otherworldly for the unknowable extraterrestrial race of Guys with Bumps On Their Head is kind of misguided). how much of that was actually on the fault of okrand, how much was the result of production, and how much is a misjudgement on jan's part is up for debate
I think you're being unnecessarily harsh on Marc Okrand here. Firstly he created Klingon at a time when conlanging had not taken off, so there was not the wealth of other 'langs to compare with and be inspired by. The ante has been considerably upped since his time in the 80s, and the existence of interconnected conlang communities full of creators all critiquing each other, building an ever-growing litter pile of supposedly 'bad conlangs' plus a supposed canon of 'best practice' was not a factor. Secondly he created this language under contract for a specific context of utility. It's an artlang, but while most examples of that supercategory are "a priori languages for a fictional people not actually written about in a formal story", this is an language expanded from nonsense noises made in a film that was a spin-off of a TV series from over ten years earlier. Rather than the creator having free rein to shape the phonology and grammar any way he wanted, he had to work with the material that had already been created, a fictional race he didn't create with established qualities, the demands of the studio and writers, the needs of the actors, and the expectations of fans. It's true he was trying to make it seem alien, where it could have been made a lot more alien, but it's not necessarily true that he could have made it a lot more alien in way that would have been acceptable to everyone involved at the time. Basically you're judging it out of context, which is not really fair. The fact that expectations and achievements in conlanging have expanded beyond where Marc was in the 80s is no reflection on his creativity at the time. Instead Klingon should be seen for what it is - a groundbreaking artlang that opened millions up to the idea of learning and exploring a fictional language and helped pave the way for the explosion of artlanging that has now rendered it kind of vintage. I actually think Klingon is a rare example of a kind of ficlang that barely exists compared to the main types. They are: 1) Sketchy examples of a language presented in fictions where what's presented is pretty much all there is. Examples of this go right back to Jonathan Swift and beyond. I call these 'surfacelangs' because the surface of the language is not only all you can see, it's all there is. They remind me of those frontages of buildings in Western movies that had nothing behind them. 2) Fully fleshed out languages that are then used in fictions. Tolkien created this type, and without him it might not have existed. Famously among conlangers he only really wrote the books to show off the langs. This is a case of building a whole old Wild West town and later shooting some films to show off your handiwork. 3) Languages imagined as belonging to fictional people/situations, which are not then (at least substantially) used in fictions. This is the opposite of the surfacelang. It may well be the largest group of conlangs in the world today. Countless geofictional, conworld, alien etc. languages that are created with a culture attached including extensive idiom. Continuing the metaphor, this is someone building a model Wild West town purely for their own amusement. Klingon (and Dothraki and High Valyrian actually) are examples of a fourth type: 4) Languages that started out as surfacelangs (a few utterances of nonsense words in a Star Trek film, the few sentences George R.R. Martin included in the books) which were then expanded to become fully-fleshed languages (in these cases by a different creator). They start as sketchy in the original fictions like type 1, and unlike type 2 they were not fleshed out for the original fictions. But they are fleshed out anyway, like type 2, and unlike type 1. This is like a set of movie-prop building fronts for Westerns which are taken by someone and have fully-functioning buildings tacked onto the back of them. For this reason Klingon is a member of a rare type of conlang, and that for me makes it interesting.
the reason of the use of capital letters was to help the actors remember how to pronunciate certain sounds. The word order (OVS) was chosen by Okrand because is the least frequent in human languages (there are six possible combinations), not because it is just "english backwards".
I think what it boils down to is: An "artlang" for a movie/series has to incorporate made-up bits from earlier episodes; plus, it has to be so similar that actors can get a "feel" for that - what good is an ergative language with click sounds if actors make it sound like "Druselsteinian"? Okrand may be one of the "conlang pioneers", "new" conlangs have 30 years of experience post-klingon. Orkrand had to go for success, so he kept it simple. 2000, AFAIK it was him constructing "Atlantean" for an unremarkable Disney movie, and Atlantean is one of THE most interesting "ArtLangs". In a modern test between a Ford Model T, Saab "wing" and Tesla, of course the Ford and Saab would suck; but in their times, they WERE innovative and ground-breaking.
But how does a capital i stick out from a lower case l. Then him saying it's just English backwards is because it basically fails its purpose: to be as un-earth like/un-english like as possible. Its has a phonetic inventory that could be in a real language. Its different from english... At face value. But it works basically the same as English, except backwards No offence though, still sounds awesome in practice
The thing is, yeah, it's go a lot of features that are common in human languages. But they're very rarely seen together. The phonology was the thing that was the most difficult to decide on. On the one hand you want to pick alien-like sounds on the other hand, your human actors need to be able to pronounce. This is 1983 we're talking about, the movie studios were going to pay an enormous amount of money to make the Klingons sound like they had two sets of vocal chords like do today on Star Trek: Discovery.
@François Miville As someone who's a native speaker of Hindi and has learned a little Sanskrit, those languages have SOV order, not OVS. They're both verb-final languages. Since Sanskrit has free word order, you might find OVS occasionally, but that's far from the norm.
This video was made before Star Trek: Discovery. In Discovery they lean in heavily to Klingon; and portray the aristocratic elite s dialect, a different dialect than what we have previously heard. I think its exquisite. It really makes me take second notice of Klingon.
In Klingon's defense, it was Marc Okrand's first conlang. He literally made the language then got involved with the conlang community. He was told it had to be guttural and for some reason, back of the throat means guttural. It also had to match the words made by James Doohan and the original Klingon names from the original series. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if he would do it differently if given the chance to go back and change it.
Ken MacMillan That's what guttural is, it describes sounds pronounced anywhere from the velum to the glottis, and indeed, Klingon has a lot of those. Not enough as Ubykh, though, which, if I remember correctly, has TWENTY UVULAR PHONEMES. That's seems like overkill, and that was a real natural language...
Raising a child to be a native speaker would be a lot easier if the parents speaking the language actually liked star trek and watched it with their kid. Also, the lexicon is a lot larger today than it was back then. It's kinda hard when you have words for phaser and tractor beam but not bottle, diaper, or light switch.
More issues is that in some episodes and some films featuring Klingon speech, it is just gibberish to sound like the Klingon language, and not actual proper words or grammar. Next is how the actors don't always pronounce the sounds correctly. So even if this child would be speaking Klingon natively, the actors would basically be speaking a different language.
Apparently one tumblr users parents met at a convention, but neither of them could speak eachothers language But they did both speak Klingon, so fit the first six ish months of their relationship, they could only speak Klingon to eachother
I refuse to believe that particular urban legend before speaking to the two people it's about. Until about ten years ago, everybody who spoke Klingon well enough to use it in conversation would have learned it from sources written in English. Until about two years ago, the Klingon-speaking community would have been aware of anybody with that level of skill (Duolingo has "grown" a number of speakers in the meantime who aren't necessarily in contact with anyone else).
Uh...I'm a native spanish speaker and I never pronounce or heard someone pronounce ga, go or gu as "agresive" as you did, also, I think you got mixed with [x]
Late to the party. There's definitely problems, but... things you got wrong: The capitals are indeed to signal the actors the letter is "weird" and to take care. The problem is it wasn't done consistently. "D" is capitalised to remind that it's a retroflex [ɖ], and not a voiceless pair of the alveolar "t" [tʰ]. "S" is capitalised for the same reason: it is also retroflex [ʂ] (as you note correctly in your reworked chart), and not [s~ʃ] (as you quote incorrectly in your first one). "I" is silly, it is capitalised to look like IPA [ɪ], in order to distinguish it from [i], but short [i] is not even in English, so that's a miss. The velar "H" [x], again, to distinguish it from the usual glottal [h]. "Q" is certainly noteworthy, as the uvular affricate. However, "tlh", "gh" and "q" are certainly not pronounced naturally as they would be in English, so... I don't like it, but it is definitely not only "to look slightly more alien". "gh" is often written as [ɣ] in IPA descriptions. I don't have "The Klingon Language" with me, but Klingon Wiki lists it as 'a gargling G with a humming sound, think of "grr"', and I always pronounced it as uvular, [ʁ] or [ʀ]. It is definitely not "g" in Spanish "amigo", which is an approximant, not a fricative. pIqaD is indeed boring and not very alien because it was not done by a conlanger, but by graphics design team. (I seem to even remember inscriptions, a long time ago, where "tlh" was inscribed using three distinct glyphs, so that's a megafail.)
First of all, [i] actually IS in English(e.g. "seat"). Otherwise, your point stands, though they could've just used the IPA or something. I personally dislike mixed case, so I would've used "qx" or perhaps "qh" instead of "Q". "tlh" definitely could've been better done. Also, why the heck does Klingon have [tɬ] but not [ɬ], and [t̠ʃ] and [d̠ʒ] but not [ʃ]? Just wondering.
@@allisond.46 To answer your last question, Spanish has /ʧ/ but not /ʃ/, and Nahuatl has /tɬ/ but not /ɬ/. It's possible for a language to have affricates but not their corresponding fricatives.
Literate Anglophones learn early on that in "foreign" words, almost always represents [i], or what we think of as "long e" or "the ee sound". The capitalization in Klingon was to remind actors that no, it's really the short vowel, just like you would expect in a native English word. Probably could have capitalized , too, so that the actors wouldn't read its as the French fricative instead of the English affricate. The word "punishment" should sound like the English word "bridge" without the /r/, but in the Klingon VHS game, the actor pronounces it like the start of "bijou".
The whole idea of making a language sound "guttural" as a way to reflect an aggressive/warrior society has no roots in natural human languages. It's just a stereotype by English speaking authors and movie producers who think that any language that has throaty sounds is considered to be unpleasant. Even Tolkien fell for this stereotype when he made his Elvish languages very "melodic and breathy", while Orcish and Black Speech had many consonant clusters and "guttural" words and names like Grishnakh. In reality, if you look at our history, you'll see that the empires that conquered the world spoke "pleasantly sounding" languages like English, Spanish, and Latin, which means the way your language sounds has nothing to do with your culture's traditions. Moreover, any language regardless of its phonological inventory can spoken softly or harshly depending on who you're talking to, and whether you're in a good mood or in a bad mood.
Anglo countries have a history of antagonizing cultures with "throaty" languages. First German, then Russian, then Arabic. If you grew up in the anglosphere, you tend to see those languages as evil. (I'm not saying nazis, soviets and islamists never did anything wrong, just that it has nothing to do with the languages.)
Tbf, I think there is a basis for believing in sound symbolism. Some sounds seem to cause synesthesia in a way that isn't just learned. For instance, the vowel /i/ sounds "childlike" and "funny", while /o/ sounds "dark" and "serious", likely because /i/ is more naturally pronounced at a higher pitch than /o/. And we associate higher pitches with children. The Italian nursery rhyme "Garibaldi fu ferito" is an example of how different vowel have a different "personality". Likewise, fricatives in general sound "softer" than stops, because in the former there is less air resistance, while the latter is more percussive. Maybe music theory could help understand the psychology of sounds. However I have no idea why people think that "guttural" sounds sound unpleasant given that /h/, perhaps the "softest" sound one can produce, is guttural. PS: I'd love to see a "warrior" artlang that really uses those principles, like minimising fricatives in favour of lots of plosives, only back and rounded vowels, and syllabic consonants!
I think you totally underrated and misunderstood the phonology. Your rediscription of it as a natural language is simply editing out the irregularity of the phonology to force it to match norms of human languages. It's extremely unusual for a language to have uvulars but no velars except fot voiced fricatives (though that is a somewhat logical exception), even though you can say uvulars are just a slightly different kind of velar. It's also really odd for the voiced and unvoiced coronal stops to randomly have different places of articulation. It's also very odd for the one sibilant to be retroflex. I know a lot of these things are somewhat attested individual but they do mean that it's phonology, if pronounced as described, is extraordinarily odd. I think the idea behind this is that it leads to the idea that maybe Klingons have slightly different mouth shapes. They're humanoid aliens (obviously a ridiculous trope), and their anatomy seems to be close enough that they would the same basic type of phonology as human languages, but the details sound kind of odd because the phonology described for humans is actually just a way of imitating the sound of what would be a perfectly normal phonology in a Klingon mouth.
hmm when I look this up on wikipedia it showed a few retroflex consonants. also the sounds where first made by scotty's actor so when the language started getting a grammar they already a set of sounds.
The Aztec tl (not calling it by it's scientific name cause screw that) is written with tlh because a digraph of tl where it's the normal t and the normal l put together is entirely possible. Basically it's to distinguish the two.
Well, I think Klingon turned out fairly well, considering it was designed to sound alien while being able to be easily spoken by English-speaking actors (the romanization system being also designed for said English-speaking actors, though I am among those who think "I" really should have been written "i"), and that it had to be made fast so they could write the movie script. As well as quite a few other limitations, like pre-existing words, and pre-existing ideas of how it should sound. I certainly have more respect for it than for, say, Minion. (I'd suggest you critique Minion, but I'm not sure it even counts as a conlang...)
Since I'm in the process of writing one (or more) stories involving alien species, I suppose I'll comment that when it comes to constructing alien languages you've got a bit of a dilemma. There is no meaningful reason for an alien to be using linguistic logic familiar to humans unless you're assuming something about language is so fundamental it couldn't be any other way. Even then, let's say the fundamental logic of language is the same, and it's even composed of sound waves. The vocal and auditory capabilities of an alien species may not be fully or even partially compatible with human capabilities. Imagine for instance a species that can hear into the ultrasonic range (let's say 80 kilohertz to pick an arbitrary value - we have animals on earth with hearing that can get into that range by the way, so you could substitute 'alien' for 'animal' and run into the same questions). Now let's assume that because of this, they also have a vocal organ of some kind capable of producing ultrasonic frequencies. Now imagine what happens if there are critical aspects of the language that depend on the production and hearing of ultrasonic frequencies, or even entire sounds that are purely ultrasonic. To human understanding, we'd be incapable of producing, nor even hearing some fundamental elements of how this alien species communicates. And in the case of pure ultrasonic sounds, we wouldn't even hear anything at all, yet this would have meaning. Obviously, for an alien language that has to be spoken by human actors, this is a no-go. And even as a purely hypothetical constructed language, you are by definition creating something nobody could ever speak or understand. Yes, it would indeed be alien, but it would also be incomprehensible. Thus, it follows that in practice, constructed alien languages, if they have any hope of being used in even a fictional context, have to obey a set of rules that at least in theory make a human being capable of speaking such a language. In light of this it shouldn't really be a surprise that an 'alien' language isn't as alien as it first appears.
Can you do Phyrexian please? It's a language of human-machine hybrids called "Phyrexians" from the world of Magic: The Gathering, and I think it does a much better job at sounding out of this world. It even has sounds that can only be produced by colliding metal pieces inside of Phyrexian's throats.
@@allisond.46 It also doesn't have any South Asain languages outside of Hindi, including Bengali, which is the 5th most spoken language in the world by native speakers
The thing with "What do you want?" as "Hello" is… I came up with the same in one of my conlangs, but coming from the direction of it being way more positive in that it mostly signifies that the one asking *cares* about the needs of the one they're talking to. In that way, "What do you want?" being taken to be indicative of the… uhm… rudeness of Klingons kind of is an artifact of Klingon being created by English-speaking people.
Klingon was supposed to be _aesthetically_ alien, harsh, and aggressive-sounding at a cursory glance but still mechanically familiar enough that it wouldn't be a nightmare to learn or translate into, I suspect. It definitely was not intended to be _truly_ alien, and that wouldn't even make any _sense_ given the fact that, well... have you _seen_ Klingons? They're vaguely brownish, human-like people with odd bony bits in their foreheads, and their internal physiology, behavior, and way of thinking are not so "alien" either - at least not in the _space alien_ sense. If their global language is something like a naturalistic (but un-placeable) human language with a few odd features, that's a _good_ thing.
You also totally missed the extremely good explanation for why Klingon uses mixed case. Klingon's romanization is not designed for Klingon speakers, or even very much for an international audience; it's designed for English speakers who want to dabble a little bit and pronounce Klingon words. Every single capital letter in Klingon orthography is there to signal a sound that is significantly different than what an English speaker would expect. The digraphs and trigraphs work the similarly, providing the spelling that is most comprehensible to English speakers. There are a few are where maybe it could have been done better, but overall, the romanization's usd of mixed case and letter combinations makes it extremely easy for English speakers to learn how to read, much easier than it would have been if it hadn't used them.
I do hate Klingon as a language but that doesn't mean that one of my life goals isn't to become a writer on Star Trek so I can make an actor say vengHommeyqoqchajDaq, which is the example word demonstrating Klingon agglutination on its Wikipedia page.
What the, how did I never realize that sought is basically just Dutch 'zocht' with an s and no /x/? They mean the exact same thing, tense and everything!
TBH my least favorite thing about Klingon is that Marc Okrand had a bunch of sample words from which to derive the phonology and then just didn't do that. One of the few named Klingons in the Original Series is named Koloth, so you'd think that he would've had to include dental fricatives, but oops, I guess not.
Even though the show's over, I hope you'll do an episode on Lang Belta, as the fandom (and hence those that speak the conlang) is very much alive, and there may yet be a continuation of the series (or movies?) some day in the future since three of the books in the series have yet to be covered.
It just needed to sound alien enough for the show. Heck, most shows don't even try to make a consistent language with a different grammar. Only the uber-nerds will even attempt to learn the language and most of them aren't serious linguists anyway. Heck, if they give the language too many unfamiliar phonemes, it would be a nightmare to teach actors how to pronounce their lines. All your aliens apparently have a very strong American accent when trying to speak their native language. Essentially, the language is as alien as the Klingons themselves: Not particularly alien, but different enough to sell the story.
I know I'm hella late but your uvular trill sounded like a uvular fricative with some extra phlegm 😂 but this is definitely not serious I love your channel!
Klingons were originally described as “dark skinned and oriental”, iirc, but were later redesigned (for a movie, I think) to seem less racist. They made them look less human, so they weren’t just dark skinned people with Asian looking beards, and took the parts of Asian cultures that we considered dope and warriory. Pretty sure lots from Japan. Also, iirc, Klingons and humans are just different subspecies. It seems as though Star Trek’s universe has undergone many waves of life seeding, so “alien” may be a bit of a strong word. I’m now realizing that I know more about Star Trek than any non-Trekkie should.
I actually don't mind tlh, it makes sense as a way to get English speakers to make approximately the right sounds, and the romanization was designed to get actors to pronounce it more or less correctly. The handful of capitalized letters (besides q and Q I guess, though those could just be k and q) shoulda been dropped for the publicly released dictionary though.
In later star trek shows, they hired an actual linguist to make alien conlangs for them and they had to fire him because he made them way too weird for the actors to pronounce
3:17 Are you implying Arabic conjugates verbs based on the subject AND object? I don't think thats true. they just conjugate for the subject I think. That wouldn't even make sense conjugating it for both.
That writing-system looks bizarre. I mean, how would you write, and with what shape of writing-tool, that glyphs naturally come out looking like those? What do you think of the way the vocabulary, and the grammar of particular words, where appropriate, were retro-fitted to Klingon lines in the script?
1:17 Believe me, With what I've seen, This is pretty tame. Hell, The archaic version of my own language had pretty much this phonemic inventory (Ancient Hebrew). In the Caucasus there are much more hectic ones, With ejective sounds, Much dirtier consonants, This is more human than actually human.
petition to make Misalian romanization the new standard for writing Klingon like for real though, "bortas bir jablu'di' reh qaqku' nay'" is way easier to look at than "bortaS bIr jablu'DI' reH QaQqu' nay'" and it doesn't even look that different
It's no surprise that the Klingon language is not very alien when the Klingons, and indeed nearly all of the alien peoples in Star Trek, are themselves not very alien.
What a dumb take. You know “alien” doesn’t mean “sounds that aren’t common”, right? Of course you’ll find all of these sounds in real languages, but you would never find THIS combination. I guess this guy just wanted a bunch of weird stuff. Guess the actual linguist who made the language so that it could be relatively easy for actors to learn should have added some non-pulmonics and ergativity, oooooooo. How weird!
/γ/ is more like Dutch "goed" /γut/ then like Spanish amigo /amigo/ since that isn't with a fucking fricative. The G is sometimes pronounced /x/ in words like (Mexican) "gente" /'xεnte/.
To stick up for klingon, it also needed to be something that humans could deal with, in particular, actors and writers. Many years ago, a "Klingon" alphabet was created and it was not good. But I would have liked it if it have been put into the service of this language. You could have had a way where sounds had been merged. That would have been fun.
I probably would've romanised the coronal fricative as "sh", the voiceless palatal affricate as "ch", the voiceless and voiced velar fricatives as "kh" and "gh", the uvular stop as "q", and the uvular affricate as "qh", but that's just me personally.
I am really enjoying that series that I just discovered, I was wondering if one day it would be possible for some persons to propose you their own conlangs, even if they might seen normal, boring or ugly ?
That would be really nice sir, even if I know that you don't have time because you're working on the other episodes, I prefer to wait to avoid to add another pressure on you... I'm wondering too about the requirements a language need for your critic, for the personal conlangs
3:21 I interpret this section as meaning the languages on screen are coming up as their features are being mentioned in speech, but that can't be the case. There are 4 languages on screen, but only 3 features mentioned in speech. They're also out of order. Georgian is the only language on the list that I know has conjugation based on the subject and object. I'm pretty sure Arabic doesn't have that feature.
the only reason that guy failed to raise his kid as a native Klingon speaker, is because he wasn't dedicated enough. Also he didn't show the kid Star Trek, that alone makes me judge his parenting
If you aren't familiar for the language, But are familiar with star trek. The best episode to start with. Because you'll have some understanding of the source material, Some of the things he says I'll make more sense.
What you call Mexican Spanish is really just a Nahuatl loan word, as it's not really used in Mexican Spanish other than place names that originated in Nahuatl.
I agree that the romanization is not very good. The capitalization on the retroflex consonants (while their alveolar forms don't even exist here) is blatantly ridiculous. But when it comes to the lateral affricate, it's kind of impossible to meaningfully represent it without using a trigraph. when I see I think [tl], not [tɬ].
Yeah, it might be an alien language but you're not taking to account how human-like the Klingon's themselves are. It's not weird for them to use human like articulation
Think about this logically. The Klingon are obviously somewhat humanoid, so why wouldn't their language be somewhat earthly? Forcing Klingon to be as inhuman as possible would just make no sense, and make it painfully obvious that the language was constructed. I don't think Klingon is perfect, but you're not giving it enough credit.
The thing is that a lot of the aliens in the Star Trek universe are basically humans with funny facial features, so I guess it makes sense that Klingon is basically a human language with funny language features. I say this as someone who was heavily into Klingon when it first came out.
So basically, the Klingons are really space Mongolians in this case.
Also, like they had to make sure the language could be pronounced by...actors...who are surprisingly human underneath those prothesis.
I think jan made a bit of a mistake looking at each element separately and saying "well yes, this language has this. this other language has this. etc. etc." and should've really looked at if certain combinations of features were common with eachother.
Also, a phonemic writing system isn't like...bad. It's not particularly inventive, but it isn't bad.
I think the one thing I can agree with jan on about Klingon is that the romanization is absolutely stupid as hell.
@@lsedge7280 "with jan"
Ye, there even is an in universe explanation on why most of the aliens in Star Trek look so similar. I think it was in an episode of TNG.
@@Xnoob545
I don’t think Isedge knows what Toki Pona is. Really only the people who know a little bit of Toki Pona know that Jan (pronounced like Yan) means person in Toki Pona.
im just mad that klingon doesn't conjugate by subject magnitude relative to that of a breadbox
Honestly it’s so disappointing that every language doesn’t do that it really should be a requirement
The three things that all language needs:
Nouns
Verbs
Conjugations of verbs by subject magnitude relative to that of a breadbox.
Kay(f)bop(t) refence
me to. we need more languages that conjugate by subject magnitude relative to that of a bread box.
tally hall reference baked into the language
I'm late here, but this is the third time I've had to point it out.
Klingon does *NOT* have a base-10 numbering system... natively. It has an adapted base-10 numbering system for dealing with other species, Klingon has a base **FOUR** numbering system.
It’s not really base 4. It technically has 4 digits counting 0, but the 0 can only ever mean the value 0. It is not used as a placeholder and does not appear in any other numbers. Other than that it’s all ternary, because the place values are powers of 3. It just uses the digits 1-3 instead of 0-2, so counting looks odd to us: 0, 1, 2, 3, 11, 12, 13, 21, 22, 23, 31, 32, 33, 111, etc. This ep's number is 23 in that system, which works out in ternary; 2x3+3=9. Is it weird that you can have the base as a digit value? Yes. But that doesn’t change the base. :)
Mark Reed bijective
@@markjreed I read this once and didn't get it at all. Now after reading it again on a different day it makes sense, and is oddly cool. Really, it's like if 10 was represented by some eleventh digit that meant ten, and that was used instead of 1 one space higher and a placeholder zero.
@@markjreed Klingon has a base 3 bijective system, which is different form a base 3 positional system. Base 3 bijective has digits 1-3, and counts just like you did. In bijective, you can't count zero, because there's no digit for it, so it's perfectly valid that a null/zero symbol has been adapted, but is considered "outside" the numbering system. - Buuut, it really feels like ths base 3 bijective system was made up after the fact, when people said how a base 10 positional system was uncreative. Unless this was an early idea.
@@Liggliluff it's as old as the language itself, described in the first edition of The Klingon Dictionary from 1985, the same year the movie the language was created for (Star Trek III: The Search for Spock) came out. But it's also in-universe backstory; by the time of the movie's "present", Klingons have adopted a positional decimal system due to influence from other civilizations, repurposing the previously singleton 0 as a placeholder digit and borrowing names for the digits 4-9 from their musical notation.
Gotta remember that Okrand was given Klingon sentences and their translations before he started making the language. So he had to make those previous random sentences intelligible with the new dialogue he was going to make. Put him in a weird position to begin with
One of my favorite parts of the whole video was when Jan said, "Oh look, it doesn't even have articles." and the screen read "Mandarin: over a billion speakers".
I dont even know what an article is, but I liked your comment anyway
@@Apple-mg6jr "a", "an", and "the" are articles
Yeah, I'd really say that it's languages that have articles who are the odd ones out...
His name is Misali not jan, jan is just the toki pona word for person and precedes every name
I mean hey, based on the opinions of an average person in the USA, Mandarin speakers probably are aliens to them.
The romanization was created to make it easier for actors to tell which sounds aren't standard English. He could only make it alien to a point, because actors still had to learn to say these sounds without having to spend time learning the whole language.
I have a video on my channel that has Okrand explaining why he picked the sounds he did, and why he wrote it the way he did.
qurgh lungqIj then again, this is also the romanization in universe.
His point was that the romanization had no reason to be alien *at all.*
this is the exact opposite of his point though
No, that was part of my point. The Romanization system was designed to remind actors of how to say the sounds, not to look alien. When it was created it was not intended to be used in Universe. It only gets used that way in Star Trek VI, on a computer panel, and all the actors in the scene are pretending it's not there (us viewers only got to see it when a HD versions of STVI were released and we could finally see what was behind Uhura but this was the fault of the set designers not removing it). TNG/DS9/VOY/Ent ignored it, and the new shows are using pIqaD to write it.
The fiction in The Klingon Dictionary explains it was created by English speaking Federation scientists so they could write Klingon at a time they didn't understand pIqaD. When Star Trek III was created, the Federation was still supposed to have little information about the Klingons.
"Tlh" in particular makes a lot of sense for explaining to native English speakers how to make that particular sound - I'm actually shocked that sort of thing isn't used more often in language classes to help explain sounds not present in the student's native language
It just occurred to me that "Láadan" literally sounds like you're saying "spicy egg" in mandarin
辣蛋? Used google translate. I don't know any mandarin. lol
Oh my god, the tones even seem to approximate it...
JayFolipurba na’vi.
I’m sure there’s a word for that in Láadan.
I can't unhear this now
I just remembered that one time they had to alter the entire language's subject-verb agreement, ENTIRELY BECAUSE Christopher Lloyd flubbed one of his lines.
They could have also put it down to that particular Klingon speaking weird, and kept it.
At least the change was for the better, even if it was by mistake.
In all fairness, you are judging by number of speakers, while Marc was going by number of langusges. If it was less common in languages, he went that route.
I'd love to see your take on what a better alien language would be like!
I dunno if this is an "alien" language, but he liked Na'vi.
He just wanted weirder stuff. It’s not a very sophisticated take.
An alien language would be one spoken by aliens. As aliens will almost for sure not have any single anatomical similarity to humans (no hands no arms no head and no throat to speak with) it will be certainly unpronounceable for humans.
So an alien language would be one that uses the sounds of clashing and rubbing crystals or the sound of droplets falling down different lengths of pipe to name some examples. That's only if they even use sound to communicate.
@@norielsylvire4097 Mouths are pretty common among intelligent animals. Even cats can make some sort of vowel sound.
@@sunflower_ace that's true here on earth, cause most intelligent species follow the same body plan they inherited: two arms two legs two eyes, left/right simetry, they have an up side, a down side a front and a back....
There's just no reason for an alien lifeform to follow this body plan
For all we know they could have radial (circular) simetry, or pentameral simetry (five sided) or they could be amorphous
There's no reason to think they even use sound to communicate
They certainly wouldn't have DNA (something which bothers me in science fiction)
DNA is an earth thing
They might have some sort of equivalent with a different genetic code and different molecules for nitrogen bases, but if they use the same genetic code and nitrogen bases, they're from earth
Something alien would absolutely not have the same kind of DNA as earth life.
They might not even be carbon based, they could just be based on silicon or other material entirely.
There's this interesting proposal by Schröddinger I believe, where he proposes a sort of alien life that takes the form of a mineral that can grow and reduce in size which reproduces and communicates and performs all life functions but has absolutely no genetic information/DNA and isn't squishy like most life on earth
What I mean is no, there's no reason for alien life to follow any body structure similar to life on earth, not even in the molecular lever
I feel like Klingon could've felt more alien if it had gotten rid of the nasals
Or had /ɲ/ and /ɱ/ instead.
and had linguolabials
linguolabials but no velars sounds great
Or maybe prenasalised consonants!
No /ptk/
I understand it being your least favorite of the artlangs thus far, but really, what do you expect? It was a language constructed for a tv series and movie franchise. They didn't have to impress, they just had to create a language that sounded abrasive and foreign to a predominantly English-speaking audience. They created a language that did just that, so I give them credit there.
Also, if we're going to go totally sci-fi, the only way to create a convincingly extraterrestrial conlang is to create entirely new sounds that can't be mapped on the IPA. Not to mention an entirely unique writing system to accommodate it.
They did (up to a point). See Arrival (watch a bit of background at ruclips.net/video/8N6HT8hzUCA/видео.html).
You could argue that a truly alien language would stand a high chance of being unspeakable/incomprehensible to any human speaker, even theoretically.
Not like, difficult to speak, no, outright impossible.
If it contains linguistically significant sounds outside of the human vocal range, or worse, outside the range of human hearing, it will ultimately be impossible for a human to speak.
For rather obvious reasons this is not viable if you ever expect to encounter this language in any kind of media where someone could actually have to attempt to speak or interpret it's spoken form.
(You might be able to fake it perhaps, but that would be... Difficult.)
@@KuraIthys Since Klingons are an anthropomorphic race, I think it is reasonable to say they are able to produce similar sounds as humans. Therefore I have no problems with human sounding sounds. And since no one ever met an alien race before, I don't see how to distinguish what sounds Alien and what not. In conclusion Klingon could be a perfect representation of a alien language or completly false representation. If we now consider that approximately 1.58 billion intelligent species have ever existed in the Milky Way (if the Drake equaton is correct) there is a good chance that a fraction of them communicate via spoken language and that some of these languages could resemble human languages.
I still think Klingon is boring because it is so close to english but I do understand it is most likely to help the actors to learn it quickly.
Why does this make the language immune to critique?
@@Wishuponapancake its not necessarily that it makes the language immune to critique, rather that not all the critique offered is actually as relevant as it seems. klingon does have a need to be easily spoken and readable enough by enough actors to be usable in star trek. that being said there are definitely some valid criticisms in the video, and it does feel like a pretty minimalist attempt at an artlang in comparison to others covered (that being said the idea that any given linguistic trait must be completely unknown among languages to feel even vaguely otherworldly for the unknowable extraterrestrial race of Guys with Bumps On Their Head is kind of misguided). how much of that was actually on the fault of okrand, how much was the result of production, and how much is a misjudgement on jan's part is up for debate
I think you're being unnecessarily harsh on Marc Okrand here. Firstly he created Klingon at a time when conlanging had not taken off, so there was not the wealth of other 'langs to compare with and be inspired by. The ante has been considerably upped since his time in the 80s, and the existence of interconnected conlang communities full of creators all critiquing each other, building an ever-growing litter pile of supposedly 'bad conlangs' plus a supposed canon of 'best practice' was not a factor.
Secondly he created this language under contract for a specific context of utility. It's an artlang, but while most examples of that supercategory are "a priori languages for a fictional people not actually written about in a formal story", this is an language expanded from nonsense noises made in a film that was a spin-off of a TV series from over ten years earlier. Rather than the creator having free rein to shape the phonology and grammar any way he wanted, he had to work with the material that had already been created, a fictional race he didn't create with established qualities, the demands of the studio and writers, the needs of the actors, and the expectations of fans. It's true he was trying to make it seem alien, where it could have been made a lot more alien, but it's not necessarily true that he could have made it a lot more alien in way that would have been acceptable to everyone involved at the time.
Basically you're judging it out of context, which is not really fair. The fact that expectations and achievements in conlanging have expanded beyond where Marc was in the 80s is no reflection on his creativity at the time. Instead Klingon should be seen for what it is - a groundbreaking artlang that opened millions up to the idea of learning and exploring a fictional language and helped pave the way for the explosion of artlanging that has now rendered it kind of vintage.
I actually think Klingon is a rare example of a kind of ficlang that barely exists compared to the main types. They are:
1) Sketchy examples of a language presented in fictions where what's presented is pretty much all there is.
Examples of this go right back to Jonathan Swift and beyond. I call these 'surfacelangs' because the surface of the language is not only all you can see, it's all there is. They remind me of those frontages of buildings in Western movies that had nothing behind them.
2) Fully fleshed out languages that are then used in fictions.
Tolkien created this type, and without him it might not have existed. Famously among conlangers he only really wrote the books to show off the langs. This is a case of building a whole old Wild West town and later shooting some films to show off your handiwork.
3) Languages imagined as belonging to fictional people/situations, which are not then (at least substantially) used in fictions.
This is the opposite of the surfacelang. It may well be the largest group of conlangs in the world today. Countless geofictional, conworld, alien etc. languages that are created with a culture attached including extensive idiom. Continuing the metaphor, this is someone building a model Wild West town purely for their own amusement.
Klingon (and Dothraki and High Valyrian actually) are examples of a fourth type:
4) Languages that started out as surfacelangs (a few utterances of nonsense words in a Star Trek film, the few sentences George R.R. Martin included in the books) which were then expanded to become fully-fleshed languages (in these cases by a different creator).
They start as sketchy in the original fictions like type 1, and unlike type 2 they were not fleshed out for the original fictions. But they are fleshed out anyway, like type 2, and unlike type 1. This is like a set of movie-prop building fronts for Westerns which are taken by someone and have fully-functioning buildings tacked onto the back of them.
For this reason Klingon is a member of a rare type of conlang, and that for me makes it interesting.
the reason of the use of capital letters was to help the actors remember how to pronunciate certain sounds. The word order (OVS) was chosen by Okrand because is the least frequent in human languages (there are six possible combinations), not because it is just "english backwards".
I think what it boils down to is:
An "artlang" for a movie/series has to incorporate made-up bits from earlier episodes; plus, it has to be so similar that actors can get a "feel" for that - what good is an ergative language with click sounds if actors make it sound like "Druselsteinian"?
Okrand may be one of the "conlang pioneers", "new" conlangs have 30 years of experience post-klingon. Orkrand had to go for success, so he kept it simple. 2000, AFAIK it was him constructing "Atlantean" for an unremarkable Disney movie, and Atlantean is one of THE most interesting "ArtLangs".
In a modern test between a Ford Model T, Saab "wing" and Tesla, of course the Ford and Saab would suck; but in their times, they WERE innovative and ground-breaking.
They should have gone with OSV. It is extremely rare.
But how does a capital i stick out from a lower case l. Then him saying it's just English backwards is because it basically fails its purpose: to be as un-earth like/un-english like as possible. Its has a phonetic inventory that could be in a real language. Its different from english... At face value. But it works basically the same as English, except backwards
No offence though, still sounds awesome in practice
The thing is, yeah, it's go a lot of features that are common in human languages. But they're very rarely seen together. The phonology was the thing that was the most difficult to decide on. On the one hand you want to pick alien-like sounds on the other hand, your human actors need to be able to pronounce. This is 1983 we're talking about, the movie studios were going to pay an enormous amount of money to make the Klingons sound like they had two sets of vocal chords like do today on Star Trek: Discovery.
@François Miville As someone who's a native speaker of Hindi and has learned a little Sanskrit, those languages have SOV order, not OVS. They're both verb-final languages. Since Sanskrit has free word order, you might find OVS occasionally, but that's far from the norm.
This video was made before Star Trek: Discovery. In Discovery they lean in heavily to Klingon; and portray the aristocratic elite s dialect, a different dialect than what we have previously heard. I think its exquisite. It really makes me take second notice of Klingon.
In Klingon's defense, it was Marc Okrand's first conlang. He literally made the language then got involved with the conlang community. He was told it had to be guttural and for some reason, back of the throat means guttural. It also had to match the words made by James Doohan and the original Klingon names from the original series. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if he would do it differently if given the chance to go back and change it.
Ken MacMillan That's what guttural is, it describes sounds pronounced anywhere from the velum to the glottis, and indeed, Klingon has a lot of those. Not enough as Ubykh, though, which, if I remember correctly, has TWENTY UVULAR PHONEMES. That's seems like overkill, and that was a real natural language...
Right well, the point is that some of those decisions were made for him.
Raising a child to be a native speaker would be a lot easier if the parents speaking the language actually liked star trek and watched it with their kid. Also, the lexicon is a lot larger today than it was back then. It's kinda hard when you have words for phaser and tractor beam but not bottle, diaper, or light switch.
Also, the kid didn't wanna learn it because nobody but his father spoke it.
Yeah, once he realized his father spoke english it was all over.
That's true. I find it a little disappointing that the worst star trek, discovery, has the best spoken Klingon in it.
Ken MacMillan I actually enjoyed discovery more than TOS/TAS anyway
More issues is that in some episodes and some films featuring Klingon speech, it is just gibberish to sound like the Klingon language, and not actual proper words or grammar. Next is how the actors don't always pronounce the sounds correctly. So even if this child would be speaking Klingon natively, the actors would basically be speaking a different language.
3:50 ghotI'?
Are you serious?
Excuse me as I laugh my face off.
Ghoti....
What's the joke?
look up "ghoti"
@@HBMmaster Oh God. oh fr*ck!
Man I got both jokes.
Lol, yeah exactly, Klingon romanization is the most stupid i have ever seen.
That's from an old sound notation system they used to use before computers, back when you had to pop a cartridge out of a typewriter.
Apparently one tumblr users parents met at a convention, but neither of them could speak eachothers language
But they did both speak Klingon, so fit the first six ish months of their relationship, they could only speak Klingon to eachother
I refuse to believe that particular urban legend before speaking to the two people it's about. Until about ten years ago, everybody who spoke Klingon well enough to use it in conversation would have learned it from sources written in English. Until about two years ago, the Klingon-speaking community would have been aware of anybody with that level of skill (Duolingo has "grown" a number of speakers in the meantime who aren't necessarily in contact with anyone else).
Uh...I'm a native spanish speaker and I never pronounce or heard someone pronounce ga, go or gu as "agresive" as you did, also, I think you got mixed with [x]
Late to the party. There's definitely problems, but... things you got wrong: The capitals are indeed to signal the actors the letter is "weird" and to take care. The problem is it wasn't done consistently. "D" is capitalised to remind that it's a retroflex [ɖ], and not a voiceless pair of the alveolar "t" [tʰ]. "S" is capitalised for the same reason: it is also retroflex [ʂ] (as you note correctly in your reworked chart), and not [s~ʃ] (as you quote incorrectly in your first one). "I" is silly, it is capitalised to look like IPA [ɪ], in order to distinguish it from [i], but short [i] is not even in English, so that's a miss. The velar "H" [x], again, to distinguish it from the usual glottal [h]. "Q" is certainly noteworthy, as the uvular affricate. However, "tlh", "gh" and "q" are certainly not pronounced naturally as they would be in English, so... I don't like it, but it is definitely not only "to look slightly more alien". "gh" is often written as [ɣ] in IPA descriptions. I don't have "The Klingon Language" with me, but Klingon Wiki lists it as 'a gargling G with a humming sound, think of "grr"', and I always pronounced it as uvular, [ʁ] or [ʀ]. It is definitely not "g" in Spanish "amigo", which is an approximant, not a fricative. pIqaD is indeed boring and not very alien because it was not done by a conlanger, but by graphics design team. (I seem to even remember inscriptions, a long time ago, where "tlh" was inscribed using three distinct glyphs, so that's a megafail.)
First of all, [i] actually IS in English(e.g. "seat"). Otherwise, your point stands, though they could've just used the IPA or something. I personally dislike mixed case, so I would've used "qx" or perhaps "qh" instead of "Q". "tlh" definitely could've been better done. Also, why the heck does Klingon have [tɬ] but not [ɬ], and [t̠ʃ] and [d̠ʒ] but not [ʃ]? Just wondering.
@@allisond.46 To answer your last question, Spanish has /ʧ/ but not /ʃ/, and Nahuatl has /tɬ/ but not /ɬ/. It's possible for a language to have affricates but not their corresponding fricatives.
Literate Anglophones learn early on that in "foreign" words, almost always represents [i], or what we think of as "long e" or "the ee sound". The capitalization in Klingon was to remind actors that no, it's really the short vowel, just like you would expect in a native English word. Probably could have capitalized , too, so that the actors wouldn't read its as the French fricative instead of the English affricate. The word "punishment" should sound like the English word "bridge" without the /r/, but in the Klingon VHS game, the actor pronounces it like the start of "bijou".
The whole idea of making a language sound "guttural" as a way to reflect an aggressive/warrior society has no roots in natural human languages. It's just a stereotype by English speaking authors and movie producers who think that any language that has throaty sounds is considered to be unpleasant. Even Tolkien fell for this stereotype when he made his Elvish languages very "melodic and breathy", while Orcish and Black Speech had many consonant clusters and "guttural" words and names like Grishnakh.
In reality, if you look at our history, you'll see that the empires that conquered the world spoke "pleasantly sounding" languages like English, Spanish, and Latin, which means the way your language sounds has nothing to do with your culture's traditions. Moreover, any language regardless of its phonological inventory can spoken softly or harshly depending on who you're talking to, and whether you're in a good mood or in a bad mood.
Anglo countries have a history of antagonizing cultures with "throaty" languages. First German, then Russian, then Arabic.
If you grew up in the anglosphere, you tend to see those languages as evil.
(I'm not saying nazis, soviets and islamists never did anything wrong, just that it has nothing to do with the languages.)
As in Star Trek, where the Federation's softer speakers are more diplomatic and more effective leaders than the Klingon brutalists.
Tbf, I think there is a basis for believing in sound symbolism. Some sounds seem to cause synesthesia in a way that isn't just learned.
For instance, the vowel /i/ sounds "childlike" and "funny", while /o/ sounds "dark" and "serious", likely because /i/ is more naturally pronounced at a higher pitch than /o/. And we associate higher pitches with children. The Italian nursery rhyme "Garibaldi fu ferito" is an example of how different vowel have a different "personality".
Likewise, fricatives in general sound "softer" than stops, because in the former there is less air resistance, while the latter is more percussive.
Maybe music theory could help understand the psychology of sounds.
However I have no idea why people think that "guttural" sounds sound unpleasant given that /h/, perhaps the "softest" sound one can produce, is guttural.
PS: I'd love to see a "warrior" artlang that really uses those principles, like minimising fricatives in favour of lots of plosives, only back and rounded vowels, and syllabic consonants!
@@cutecommie I get it when you say Arabic and German, but where's the guttural sounds in Russian?
Bear in mind that Klingon is made to be pretend-alien got TV, and not actually a fully incomprehensible lang.
I think you totally underrated and misunderstood the phonology.
Your rediscription of it as a natural language is simply editing out the irregularity of the phonology to force it to match norms of human languages. It's extremely unusual for a language to have uvulars but no velars except fot voiced fricatives (though that is a somewhat logical exception), even though you can say uvulars are just a slightly different kind of velar. It's also really odd for the voiced and unvoiced coronal stops to randomly have different places of articulation. It's also very odd for the one sibilant to be retroflex.
I know a lot of these things are somewhat attested individual but they do mean that it's phonology, if pronounced as described, is extraordinarily odd.
I think the idea behind this is that it leads to the idea that maybe Klingons have slightly different mouth shapes. They're humanoid aliens (obviously a ridiculous trope), and their anatomy seems to be close enough that they would the same basic type of phonology as human languages, but the details sound kind of odd because the phonology described for humans is actually just a way of imitating the sound of what would be a perfectly normal phonology in a Klingon mouth.
hmm when I look this up on wikipedia it showed a few retroflex consonants. also the sounds where first made by scotty's actor so when the language started getting a grammar they already a set of sounds.
The Aztec tl (not calling it by it's scientific name cause screw that) is written with tlh because a digraph of tl where it's the normal t and the normal l put together is entirely possible. Basically it's to distinguish the two.
lateral affricate
Well, I think Klingon turned out fairly well, considering it was designed to sound alien while being able to be easily spoken by English-speaking actors (the romanization system being also designed for said English-speaking actors, though I am among those who think "I" really should have been written "i"), and that it had to be made fast so they could write the movie script. As well as quite a few other limitations, like pre-existing words, and pre-existing ideas of how it should sound. I certainly have more respect for it than for, say, Minion. (I'd suggest you critique Minion, but I'm not sure it even counts as a conlang...)
I'll heccing do it???
just updated the Big List.
One day, when I've forgotten about this comment, it'll be uploaded. With my memory, that could be next week.
Since I'm in the process of writing one (or more) stories involving alien species, I suppose I'll comment that when it comes to constructing alien languages you've got a bit of a dilemma.
There is no meaningful reason for an alien to be using linguistic logic familiar to humans unless you're assuming something about language is so fundamental it couldn't be any other way.
Even then, let's say the fundamental logic of language is the same, and it's even composed of sound waves.
The vocal and auditory capabilities of an alien species may not be fully or even partially compatible with human capabilities.
Imagine for instance a species that can hear into the ultrasonic range (let's say 80 kilohertz to pick an arbitrary value - we have animals on earth with hearing that can get into that range by the way, so you could substitute 'alien' for 'animal' and run into the same questions).
Now let's assume that because of this, they also have a vocal organ of some kind capable of producing ultrasonic frequencies.
Now imagine what happens if there are critical aspects of the language that depend on the production and hearing of ultrasonic frequencies, or even entire sounds that are purely ultrasonic.
To human understanding, we'd be incapable of producing, nor even hearing some fundamental elements of how this alien species communicates. And in the case of pure ultrasonic sounds, we wouldn't even hear anything at all, yet this would have meaning.
Obviously, for an alien language that has to be spoken by human actors, this is a no-go.
And even as a purely hypothetical constructed language, you are by definition creating something nobody could ever speak or understand.
Yes, it would indeed be alien, but it would also be incomprehensible.
Thus, it follows that in practice, constructed alien languages, if they have any hope of being used in even a fictional context, have to obey a set of rules that at least in theory make a human being capable of speaking such a language.
In light of this it shouldn't really be a surprise that an 'alien' language isn't as alien as it first appears.
Can you do Phyrexian please? It's a language of human-machine hybrids called "Phyrexians" from the world of Magic: The Gathering, and I think it does a much better job at sounding out of this world. It even has sounds that can only be produced by colliding metal pieces inside of Phyrexian's throats.
you
can
learn
klingon
in
duolingo
not
even
lying
OMG HAX Yes. What's your point? It has 450,000 People studying Klingon.
And yet, you can’t learn Xhosa, which has over 10 million speakers(I’m not one of them).
@@allisond.46 It also doesn't have any South Asain languages outside of Hindi, including Bengali, which is the 5th most spoken language in the world by native speakers
@@archdukefranzferdinand567 I know you died, but can you fix that?
@@allisond.46 They need volunteers to create courses, there was demand + people willing to create the klingon course but not for Xhosa. So that's why
The thing with "What do you want?" as "Hello" is…
I came up with the same in one of my conlangs, but coming from the direction of it being way more positive in that it mostly signifies that the one asking *cares* about the needs of the one they're talking to.
In that way, "What do you want?" being taken to be indicative of the… uhm… rudeness of Klingons kind of is an artifact of Klingon being created by English-speaking people.
Thanks to this, I finally understand that line from the song White and Nerdy which goes, "I'm fluent in JavaScript as well as Klingon."
Klingon was supposed to be _aesthetically_ alien, harsh, and aggressive-sounding at a cursory glance but still mechanically familiar enough that it wouldn't be a nightmare to learn or translate into, I suspect. It definitely was not intended to be _truly_ alien, and that wouldn't even make any _sense_ given the fact that, well... have you _seen_ Klingons? They're vaguely brownish, human-like people with odd bony bits in their foreheads, and their internal physiology, behavior, and way of thinking are not so "alien" either - at least not in the _space alien_ sense. If their global language is something like a naturalistic (but un-placeable) human language with a few odd features, that's a _good_ thing.
Would you do videos on languages from LoTR?
You also totally missed the extremely good explanation for why Klingon uses mixed case. Klingon's romanization is not designed for Klingon speakers, or even very much for an international audience; it's designed for English speakers who want to dabble a little bit and pronounce Klingon words. Every single capital letter in Klingon orthography is there to signal a sound that is significantly different than what an English speaker would expect. The digraphs and trigraphs work the similarly, providing the spelling that is most comprehensible to English speakers. There are a few are where maybe it could have been done better, but overall, the romanization's usd of mixed case and letter combinations makes it extremely easy for English speakers to learn how to read, much easier than it would have been if it hadn't used them.
yess I love this series so much!
I do hate Klingon as a language but that doesn't mean that one of my life goals isn't to become a writer on Star Trek so I can make an actor say vengHommeyqoqchajDaq, which is the example word demonstrating Klingon agglutination on its Wikipedia page.
You should do an episode on High Valyrian!
Okrand pointed out that the _gaps_ in the phonological chart are atypical among natural human languages.
The /x/ morpheme used to be in english, taught fought naught sought, its that wierd gh you see in words
If we really wanted to, we could bring it back
Gh represented the voiced equivalent /ɤ/
@@maxiapalucci2511 true, but in Old English it represents /x/ because g represented that sound or /g/ depending on phonetic environment
What the, how did I never realize that sought is basically just Dutch 'zocht' with an s and no /x/? They mean the exact same thing, tense and everything!
3:48 g h o t l '
TBH my least favorite thing about Klingon is that Marc Okrand had a bunch of sample words from which to derive the phonology and then just didn't do that. One of the few named Klingons in the Original Series is named Koloth, so you'd think that he would've had to include dental fricatives, but oops, I guess not.
Even though the show's over, I hope you'll do an episode on Lang Belta, as the fandom (and hence those that speak the conlang) is very much alive, and there may yet be a continuation of the series (or movies?) some day in the future since three of the books in the series have yet to be covered.
1:33 actually that isn't Mexican Spanish, it's Nāhuatl, the language spoken by the aztecs before the arrival of the spaniards to Mexico
It just needed to sound alien enough for the show. Heck, most shows don't even try to make a consistent language with a different grammar. Only the uber-nerds will even attempt to learn the language and most of them aren't serious linguists anyway. Heck, if they give the language too many unfamiliar phonemes, it would be a nightmare to teach actors how to pronounce their lines. All your aliens apparently have a very strong American accent when trying to speak their native language.
Essentially, the language is as alien as the Klingons themselves: Not particularly alien, but different enough to sell the story.
/ɤ/ is a voiced velar fricative but you describe me it as a voiceless uvular trill
I know I'm hella late but your uvular trill sounded like a uvular fricative with some extra phlegm 😂 but this is definitely not serious I love your channel!
Klingons were originally described as “dark skinned and oriental”, iirc, but were later redesigned (for a movie, I think) to seem less racist. They made them look less human, so they weren’t just dark skinned people with Asian looking beards, and took the parts of Asian cultures that we considered dope and warriory. Pretty sure lots from Japan. Also, iirc, Klingons and humans are just different subspecies. It seems as though Star Trek’s universe has undergone many waves of life seeding, so “alien” may be a bit of a strong word.
I’m now realizing that I know more about Star Trek than any non-Trekkie should.
I actually don't mind tlh, it makes sense as a way to get English speakers to make approximately the right sounds, and the romanization was designed to get actors to pronounce it more or less correctly. The handful of capitalized letters (besides q and Q I guess, though those could just be k and q) shoulda been dropped for the publicly released dictionary though.
:D
next, can you do afrihili?
In later star trek shows, they hired an actual linguist to make alien conlangs for them and they had to fire him because he made them way too weird for the actors to pronounce
finally, somoeone who doesn't like klingon
Reading the Klingon consonants sounds like beatboxing in a Minecraft village
3:17 Are you implying Arabic conjugates verbs based on the subject AND object? I don't think thats true. they just conjugate for the subject I think. That wouldn't even make sense conjugating it for both.
That writing-system looks bizarre. I mean, how would you write, and with what shape of writing-tool, that glyphs naturally come out looking like those?
What do you think of the way the vocabulary, and the grammar of particular words, where appropriate, were retro-fitted to Klingon lines in the script?
1:17 Believe me, With what I've seen, This is pretty tame. Hell, The archaic version of my own language had pretty much this phonemic inventory (Ancient Hebrew). In the Caucasus there are much more hectic ones, With ejective sounds, Much dirtier consonants, This is more human than actually human.
tons of languages have a agent noun suffix i would hardly call that blatantly englishy
petition to make Misalian romanization the new standard for writing Klingon
like for real though, "bortas bir jablu'di' reh qaqku' nay'" is way easier to look at than "bortaS bIr jablu'DI' reH QaQqu' nay'" and it doesn't even look that different
"tl" in Xóchitl actually comes from Nahuatl (Na-wat) and it is a "Saltillo" sound. Look for it in Omniglot.
Galileo Rocha Cuevas but some times it is the (insert Klingon tlh sound)
It's no surprise that the Klingon language is not very alien when the Klingons, and indeed nearly all of the alien peoples in Star Trek, are themselves not very alien.
What a dumb take. You know “alien” doesn’t mean “sounds that aren’t common”, right? Of course you’ll find all of these sounds in real languages, but you would never find THIS combination. I guess this guy just wanted a bunch of weird stuff. Guess the actual linguist who made the language so that it could be relatively easy for actors to learn should have added some non-pulmonics and ergativity, oooooooo. How weird!
What about the fan-constructed language of vulcan? Oa
500th liker woo
nuqneH isn’t really hello, it’s more that greetings aren’t required and that’s the closest thing to one
For some unknown reason I started singing "na'vi is where he keeps his apple sauce, na'vi is where he keeps his apple sauce" at the end
How do you make these charts?
/γ/ is more like Dutch "goed" /γut/ then like Spanish amigo /amigo/ since that isn't with a fucking fricative. The G is sometimes pronounced /x/ in words like (Mexican) "gente" /'xεnte/.
3:18 it is not an arabic feature. polipersonal agreement is а really rare phenomenon
To stick up for klingon, it also needed to be something that humans could deal with, in particular, actors and writers.
Many years ago, a "Klingon" alphabet was created and it was not good. But I would have liked it if it have been put into the service of this language. You could have had a way where sounds had been merged. That would have been fun.
Nostalgia!
It's a good effort for an old ass TV show, I think.
Can you do an episode on the dragon language from elder scrolls?
Would you please do the Star Wars conlang sometime in the future? I think it's called "Galactic Standard"... maybe
just updated the Big List.
i always assumed klingon had clicks in it but i guess i was wrong
I probably would've romanised the coronal fricative as "sh", the voiceless palatal affricate as "ch", the voiceless and voiced velar fricatives as "kh" and "gh", the uvular stop as "q", and the uvular affricate as "qh", but that's just me personally.
qh for the uvular affricate is questionable.
Would teaching your child Klingon prove the Sapphire Worf hypothesis?
sapphire worf.........
Must've been the show Invader Zim used this language for Klingon! (Actually, Zim's language was english and the conlang for this is Irken)
I am really enjoying that series that I just discovered, I was wondering if one day it would be possible for some persons to propose you their own conlangs, even if they might seen normal, boring or ugly ?
I take all requests into equal consideration for future episodes, no matter how unnotable a language may be.
That would be really nice sir, even if I know that you don't have time because you're working on the other episodes, I prefer to wait to avoid to add another pressure on you...
I'm wondering too about the requirements a language need for your critic, for the personal conlangs
the only requirement is that information about it must be publically available online.
I DONT WANT TO WATCH THIS SERIES, RUclips. STOP RECOMMENDING IT.
May I request D'ni old boy?!?
Jan misali pronouncing /qχ/ just sounds like him evaporating
3:21 I interpret this section as meaning the languages on screen are coming up as their features are being mentioned in speech, but that can't be the case. There are 4 languages on screen, but only 3 features mentioned in speech. They're also out of order. Georgian is the only language on the list that I know has conjugation based on the subject and object. I'm pretty sure Arabic doesn't have that feature.
I think the humanness it's for the poor actors who unfortunately have human articulators. 😂
the only reason that guy failed to raise his kid as a native Klingon speaker, is because he wasn't dedicated enough. Also he didn't show the kid Star Trek, that alone makes me judge his parenting
If you aren't familiar for the language, But are familiar with star trek. The best episode to start with. Because you'll have some understanding of the source material, Some of the things he says I'll make more sense.
What you call Mexican Spanish is really just a Nahuatl loan word, as it's not really used in Mexican Spanish other than place names that originated in Nahuatl.
I agree that the romanization is not very good. The capitalization on the retroflex consonants (while their alveolar forms don't even exist here) is blatantly ridiculous. But when it comes to the lateral affricate, it's kind of impossible to meaningfully represent it without using a trigraph. when I see I think [tl], not [tɬ].
Klingon is Qechuan love letter
Yeah, it might be an alien language but you're not taking to account how human-like the Klingon's themselves are. It's not weird for them to use human like articulation
The real alien language is Ithkuil
fun fact: klingon is in minecraft
my first conlang has weird grammar and also doesn't have articles
0:55 silverfish when you kill them be like
“It’s been a while since I’ve done a big name language...” What was the other big name language? Or other big name languages?
12
CORRECTION the glottal stop appears in many words in english en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottal_stop
hey! try Demlang!
for more info about it, search it in Facebook. search "Democratic Conlang" group.
Think about this logically. The Klingon are obviously somewhat humanoid, so why wouldn't their language be somewhat earthly? Forcing Klingon to be as inhuman as possible would just make no sense, and make it painfully obvious that the language was constructed. I don't think Klingon is perfect, but you're not giving it enough credit.