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My bad, then. But that's the trouble with trying for a parody of Comic Book Guy in a world where this exists.

(I recommend suffixing such posts with ~s or bracketing them with <ComicBookGuy> tags)

That's not even remotely plausible. You can't develop a writing system overnight.

Well not over night, but it doesn't take that long.

A Phonetic equivalence seems quite plausible, and you can whip up a phonetic equivalence chart for your private
use, or the use of a small group in a few hours.
And that might be the natural course of action for someone trying to document knowledge from an oral tradition.

That this book didn't contain the key to the symbols is also not that unusual. Maybe this scribe needed to retain
it for subsequent work.

Western letters drawn with a quill certainly speaks to the possibility of early Spanish origins deliberately trying to
encode information to be sent home such that it couldn't be used by just anyone. There may never have been more
than a dozen who knew the key or the symbology. Maybe they and the key went down with a subsequent ship,
even thought this book or perhaps a few others weren't on that boat.

The Fund is currently raising donations to endow a permanent animation scholarship at CalArts

The Klingon Language Institute also has a scholarship so fandom born scholarships are not unheard off.

Besides, there are so many to choose from.

The Feynman lectures on physics are nice because they contain more insight than actual grindstone physics. And in the long run insight wins, though you still need to know the mechancis.

The nice part for you is you understand Maths already which is really the connective tissue of physics. Most textbooks are geared toward students who are still learning math. So in your search for books aim for ones taught in first year graduate courses rather than undergrad. (e.g. Jackson for Eletcrodynamics).

I'd also reccomend reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by hunter S thompson and shakespeare in the original klingon.

Sujatlh 'e' yImev! tlhIngan maH!

today is a good day to die.

Sujatlh 'e' yImev! tlhIngan maH!

today is a good day to die.

Sujatlh 'e' yImev! tlhIngan maH!

today is a good day to die.

NuqneH? What makes you think they wouldn't have learned to speak English in the 60 years they've been studying us? (and that's 60 years that we know of, some people believe that a certain guy from Bethlehem was actually an alien spy.)

And what makes you think they would even need to? More humans speak Klingon than there are those who speak Esperanto, and we've never even been near to the planet.

[BTW, 'NuqneH' is as close a translation as Klingon has for 'Hello']

The Klingon Language Institute

http://www.kli.org/

I agree, but think of this too: it means Klingon is so well developed that it sounds like real language... I guess it might actually be one.

Isn't this what Esperanto was invented for?

It's an engineered language, in the Klingon tradition, but lots easier to learn and pronounce.

Then again, we could all just learn Klingon and wear lots of leather.

Correct. Not only is this in wikipedia, but the Klingon Language Institute's website also states this. I wonder if James Doohan helped out with this project, though?

Well, it's bad enough that Google continues to foster the lie that Shakespeare was an English playwright, instead of a true Klingon Warrior.

Next thing you know, Google will be telling everyone that Brie cheese is from America!

I can't quite put my finger on it, but there are probably reasons outside of these films, that people consider Trek fans to be ...freakish.

Wow.

I'm particularly impressed by this page.

An introduction to Klingon, written in Esperanto.

I'm always pleased when something reminds me that I'm not really that geeky.

Doohan didn't invent the Klingon Language, that was Marc Okrand.

The spoken Klingon in ST:TMP were random grunts. Okrand did the job of not only inventing a language, but backfitting it to those grunts such that people who understood the language could actually understand those grunts.

This is, of course, not to detract on Doohan's achievements - his star is very well deserved.

Yeah just like we needed a Klingon Language version of perhaps the most tragic and treacherous play ever made Hamlet. Wait maybe it was first written in Klingon and Shakespeare escaped a holodeck program during one of those Dr. Moriarty's escapes, found a copy of He'rawero'k (Hamlet) and a Klingon/English Dictionary stole a shuttlecraft than found one of the omnipresent 'time distortions' slipped through back to the 16th century killed his old self and wrote He'rawero'k as the Hamlet we know today, Plagerist Bastard!

When speaking Klingon, be sure to speak forcefully. Some of the sounds may make the person you're talking to a little wet.
This is correct and to be expected.

http://www.kli.org/tlh/sounds.html

I know what I thought when I first read this...

The serious answer is that if you are looking for fluent speakers, you will find more Esperantists. I also noticed that the Klingon Language Institute has an Esperanto introduction whereas no Klingon speakers have done a similar page for the Universala Esperanto-Asocio. That says something about the relative availability of translators for the two languages.

I don't know if the [real linguistics behind the design] can be said for those who created Klingon...
Just ask the folks at the Klingon Language Institute. Klingon as we know it was created initially (pretty much, I'm giving the short form here) by Marc Okrand, a real linguistics professor. Since then, and especially in the past ten years or so, Klingon has been taken up as a project by quite a few people with formal linguistics training as well as many enthusiaists. Enough to make possible an annual convention which at least takes a viable shot at being Klingon-only.
People write letters in Klingon, have translated Shakespeare into Klingon, IM in Klingon, and have registered a number of domains based on Klingon words.

Personally, as I have said elsewhere, it has been my experience that most of these people have a terrrrrible signal to noise ratio in terms of actually living by a Klingon philosophy, while the folks who dabble in Elvish openly admit that it's just a game. But as for the issue of the Klingon language's "legitimacy", well even aside from the query by Oregon's mental health department to have a Klingon translator available in case they ever need one, yes and getting more real by the day.

By the way, folks, let's keep in mind that modern Hebrew is also in large part a synthetic language. Back when the zionists decided to start using Hebrew as their language for daily life, it had nowhere near the vocabulary or range needed to serve that role. Ask Chachem or Interrobang or any of the other folks here on /. who have looked at the problem. There is nothing shameful about a language being synthetic. Every language started that way at some point. Maybe we can build some now that make a bit more sense.

As for the issue of studying, creating, or enhancing such languages being "wasteful", as far as I'm concerned, we are well ahead every time we get options that are NOBODY'S heritage.
Each step on that path is one away from the kind of ethnic identity pathologies that have made Bosnia, Rwanda, and so many other arbitrary hatreds viable.

Rustin

The Kronos Chronicle (ISSN 1526-7105) is a project of the Klingon Language Institute, intended for Klingon speakers. Here you can read interesting opinons and articles, but only if you can understand Klingon.

Source: http://www.kli.org/QQ/

From kli.org:

The Klingon language is something truly unique. While there have been other artificial languages, and other languages crafted for fictional beings, Klingon is one of the rare times when a trained linguist has been called upon to create a language for aliens. Add to this more than a quarter-century of the Star Trek phenomenon, a mythos that has permeated popular culture and spread around the globe. These factors begin to explain the popularity of the warrior's tongue. Klingon was invented by Marc Okrand, for use in some of the Star Trek movies. He invented not just a few words to make the Klingons sound alien, but a complete language, with its own vocabulary, grammar, and usage.

Tax-exempt status for geeky endeavors is old. The Klingon Language Institute is a registered non-profit oranization.

Am I the only one unhappy with the current Unicode? The problem is that there's just not one Unicode -- there's THREE (UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32).

No, there is just one Unicode. There are three different ways to represent Unicode data, UTF-8, -16, and -32 as you mentioned.

The Unicode organization seems pretty disciplined to me! To encode all the asian characters in active use, they needed a character space bigger than 2^16. So, they've chosen a 21-bit system that maps very easily to 16-bits for most of the characters. And UTF-8 maps the whole Unicode space down to 8-bits for most US-ASCII characters.

If a filename is encoded in UTF-8, there's still a maximum number of bytes allowed in the name, it's just that in Unicode that could be a variable number of "characters", though strictly less than the number of bytes.

Then there's always UTF-32, which just directly maps the 21-bit Unicode character number onto a longint. Easy to deal with those...

and again, UTF-16 was good enough

You mean a previous version of Unicode that was limited to a 16-bit representation? That'd be way back at Unicode version 1. Unicode version 2.0 brought with it the UTF-x encodings and the 21-bit character space. It's been that way ever since!!!

The point is, 16 bits was not enough for the world's actively used languages.

Once expanded past 16 bits, there was enough room for all the active languages, and also room for some lesser used scripts, like Linear B.

They're not even taking ALL possible scripts and languages, even if the proper channels have been used to propose them. For example, Klingon was rejected, even though it can be argued that it is a scholarly language worthy of study.

No, Unicode is a very well planned and thought out standard, and it is now THE standard for international text.

- Peter

You know, I've just had an epiphany and finally discerned the true purpose of Slashdot. Slashdot is for people who spend their days constructing scale models of the Millenium Falcon (link appears dead now), or engineering backyard roller coasters, or translating the New Testament into Klingon to congratulate themselves--and try and impress upon their associates and neighbors--that yes, indeed, there are people out there FAR geekier than themselves.

Besides, I'm sure the Klingon Language Institute needs any press around here.

But it might teach them that it was written in Latin, which is equally wrong.

Doesn't everybody know that the Bible was originally written in Klingon?

I'll wait until they translate it into the original Klingon.

> I have a question regarding your translation of the Bible into Klingon:
> are you translating from an English translation, or from the original
> Greek and Hebrew?

From the Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic when we have translators who know
these languages. For those who know only English, those of us who do know
the languages will check their work against the original.

:: Kevin A. Wilson ::
:: Department of Near Eastern Studies ::
:: The Johns Hopkins University ::

• The Klingon Language Institute
• The Klingon Dictionary: English/Klingon Klingon/English (Star Trek)
• The Klingon Hamlet

Nah, all they'd have to do is go to the Klingon Language Institute.

In all seriousness, I think this extremely interesting. From my reading of the article, it sounds like the Multonomah County Department of Human Services, by law, has to provide these services, and that means that they have to provide translation services for people who ostensibly only speak Klingon. It's like a totally bizarre collision of law and pop culture. I love it.

Hell, there's probably a research paper in it for someone, focusing on how a phenomenon like Star Trek can have such far-reaching and totally unanticipated effects.

Except of course there is no construct for "To Be" in Klingon. The linguist who designed it was a bit of a purist. Needless to say he had to do a bit of interesting work with the dialog to translate Hamlet's speach for the Undiscovered Country. LOL

In case anyone is wondering, the reason for this is that in Klingon, all adjectives are really verbs. For example, "to be big" or "to be green" are each one verb, so "the ship is big" is two words, "the ship" and "is big". I don't remember how that line was translated; I think a new verb "to be" was created, which is never used except in Shakespeare.

More general information here.

I would have said to go straight to The Klingon Language Institute before trying Google, what does that make me? :^)

The Twenty Warning Signs of Too Much Star Trek:
#14. Understanding Klingon (nuqDaq yuch Dapol)

Clearly a matter for the Klingon Language Institute. The only bunch of linguists I know whose leather creaks at their meetings.
Rustin

The Klingon Language Institute list of everyday phrases. It really says something that 'Today is a good day to die' (Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam) is an everyday phrase.

There are now more speakers of Klingon than of Navajo. That is so sad....

I did not find a lot of useful responses on the tlhIngan-Hol mailinglist of the Klingon Language Institute, but perhaps this is the right place (and time) to ask.

Please decipher my e-mail address and contact me if you're interested.

I did not find a lot of useful responses on the tlhIngan-Hol mailinglist of the Klingon Language Institute, but perhaps this is the right place (and time) to ask.

Please decipher my e-mail address and contact me if you're interested.

But then the Klingon Language Institute would have to reregister.

90% of nonprofit organizations in the U.S. cannot afford to maintain more than 15 networked computers?

That's probably true. If you think about the amount of nonprofits in the U.S. and their average sizes, you will realize that most will never have use for 15 computers at once.

Case in point: I help out once a week at a synagogue in my home town. One of the two largest in our area (the admittedly small city of Cincinnati), they have maybe 1000 families -- ranking them in the upper percentiles of all nonprofits in terms of size. They have 6 computers networked for the religious school, and in the office they have maybe 15. I don't know about the ones in the office, but the school computers are really old Cyrixes. They at the moment do not have any use for additional computers.

My point is that even a very large npo doesn't need that many computers. Take a count of one computer per employee, plus 1 misc per 20 employees, and consider that the average npo has a very few amount of employees.

Remember: Even the Klingon Language Institute is a nonprofit organization. While the larger institutions may dominate the headlines, there are more than enough very small nonprofits to make the 90% figure quite reasonable.

--

I think you haven't read up on the language closely enough. The letters used are a transliteration into the English alphabet, so of course they're going to look English! That's like saying Vietnamese is English because it uses the Latin alphabet, or Finnish or transliterated Hebrew for that matter. The sounds are another matter.

The sounds of Klingon are rather un-English. Of the 26 phonemes (admittedly English-ish in that it's the same number as letters in the English alphabet), 7 (D, gh, H, q, Q, S, tlh) don't occur in English at all, one (') is in English but not as a phoneme, and one (ng) occurs in English, but only at the ends of syllables (and not at the beginnings like it can in Klingon). Sure, we write them with English letters because it's easier to email and all, but that doesn't make the language based on English. Listen to them at http://www.kli.org/tlh/sounds.html

Moreover, even if the sounds were all common in English, that wouldn't make the language necessarily like English. Most of the sounds in Japanese occur in English (with some differences, admittedly), but that doesn't mean Japanese is English. You can even write Japanese in romaji (English letters); it doesn't change Japanese's Japaneseness. What makes a language unique to itself is mostly its grammar and partly its lexicon.

Klingon's grammar is somewhat unusual as languages go; quite unlike English, and although strange is really pretty simple compared to most languages (this is not necessarily a good thing if you're really a stickler for verisimilitude: it definitely feels like a constructed language). The word-order, yes; the way verbs conjugate for both subject and object (not unique to Klingon, certainly, but not common either); the handling of subordinate clauses, etc etc. Hey, it's fun.

As editor of the Klingon Hamlet, I can tell you that there are places where the Klingon text really sparkles... it's just too bad so few people can appreciate it. Ah well.

The 2000-word lexicon is not as big a deal as you might think--though yes, I do sometimes find myself wishing for a word I don't have. But that figure doesn't include the formations possible with Klingon's very productive suffixes, and also compounds. We translated Hamlet without inventing any new words; what we had sufficed for that. And I've been able to write and chat about all kinds of subjects in Klingon. You'd be surprised what you can do with a small vocabulary and productive ways of increasing it.

Anyway, looking like English isn't a bad thing in itself anyway, but either way, that's one thing Klingon isn't guilty of.

Yes, I'm the Assistant Director of the Klingon Language Institute.

English, due to it's "odd" structure is probably not all that well-suited to speech input. It seems likely that Klingon, being a synthetic language (and far more successful than Esperanto as an international language) may be better suited to computer-based recognition.

If this puppy does work, well, that's just one more reason to learn it (though the "alphabet" of characters may not be all that trivial to learn).

So we'll have a whole BIG bunch of kids who understand this...

Hmmmm...

See: Klingon Language Institute

Various things like this have been tried. You might try looking at Lojban. Even if you don't think anything will work as an international language but English, or that anything will work as an international language at all, learn Lojban. It's a fascinating language and can really make you think and help you get a grip on some of the trickier aspects of language in general.

Lojban's grammar (not its semantics!) is unambiguous and computer-parseable. We (I'm also on the Lojban board, as well as being Assistant Director of the Klingon Language Institute; I get around) have a YACC-based parser that really will parse Lojban sentences, if they conform to the baselined grammar. Lojban's not strictly LALR(1), but is with a little pre-processing. Anyway, so its grammar is computer-understandable, and even the ambiguities in its semantics are at least well-understood. By which I mean that you (or a computer) can know where the ambiguities lie, and what's more you have ways of asking clearly for further clarification of them. Lojban even has a set of exclamations that just express emotion, so something like "Ouch!" translates without relying on someone else knowing how English speakers express pain.

There are some less well-known (to me and probably also to others, since I do try to keep up on these things) attempts in this vein. There are languages that were based on cataloguing all the various concepts to be expressed in a sort of Dewey Decimal System on steroids, with the hope that you could compartmentalize thought into neat nesting categories, and join them up with some mathematical glue. This goes all the way back to Francis Lodowyck's "Common Writing", published in 1647. There was one called... Lincos I think? I can't find my copy. I think that was it. It's more recent, very big on numbers and sets and mathematical notation and such.

In short, your idea isn't new... not necessarily bad, but not untried either.

Basic English is a headache and a half. It's about as tough as English, for a non-English-speaker: it has just about all the irregularities and plenty opaque idioms from English. And it's a pain for English-speakers too, who have to remember that 90% of their vocabulary is missing. So it's unnatural for them as well, when they have to remember they can't say "selfish" but must instead say "having no thought for others."

Basically, it suffers from just about all the deficiencies of English (as perceived by non-native speakers), including English's famously arcane spelling system, and also is a pain for the native-speakers!

Maybe that's good, at least it's fair... but if that's your logic, you might as well be fair and pick a language that's not native to anyone (or hardly anyone), like Lojban, Esperanto, Klingon, etc...