Australian Cave Offers Klingon Audio Tour

schliz writes "An Australian cave system visited by 200,000 tourists a year is expanding its range of audio guides to support Klingon. Cave operators reportedly engaged the services of two 'Klingon scholars' from the US, following Star Trek's naming of a 'Sydney Class' Starship, the USS Jenolan."

Comments

That'll be popular...

[grub]

How do you say "This cave is dark and musty, just like Mom's basement!" in Klingon?

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Important question

[Vinegar Joe]

Will the tour be conducted in the Northern or Southern Klingon dialect? I find the Northern dialect to sound rather classless.

Great site

[Joey Vegetables]

I love this site which claims among other things that most of its translators are native Klingon speakers.

Klingon Tour

[Ukab the Great]

"Qapla mates and welcome to the caves. I'm Gorvok and I'll be your guide today. Gakh and bloodwine are available at the concession stand on the surface, and if you truly have the stomach of a klingon, we also have Fosters. Just like a bird of prey, the caves also don't have bathrooms so make sure to hit the loo before we start. If you happen to get lost in the caves, just remember it's a good day to die and I'll see you in Stovalkor."

Re:Klingon Tour

[$lashdot]

if you truly have the stomach of a klingon, we also have Fosters.

If they truly have the stomach of a Klingon, I'll expect them to enjoy Vegemite crumpets.

Re:Klingon Tour

[sconeu]

You offer me Vegemite??? I should kill you where you stand!

Re:But no Quenya or Sindarin?

[surmak]

Completely understandable. Elves hate going underground, so the market for tours in elvish languages is naturally limited.

Re:Dogh qoH!

[ElectricTurtle]

After a few generations of near-instant communication and transportation on the scale of 'anywhere in the world in 24 hours' I think that a planetary monoculture is inevitable. Cultural homogenization is visible throughout history and across geography. Cultural anthropologist Wade Davis among others believes that of those 6000 languages 90% will be extinct by 2050 (though I think his estimate is extreme and unscientific). In any case, the rate of language death is increasing. There were more languages going extinct in the 18th century than the 17th, more still in the 19th than the 18th, and there were almost three times as many language extinctions in the 20th as in the 19th century. With a finite number of languages and an increasing rate of extinction, it is not unreasonable that most languages will be dead in a few generations. (Especially as contemporary knowledge and commerce increasingly focus on a very limited set of languages.)

However, there is a mitigating element in the form of the advancement of computer generated translations. I remember translating pages with early versions of BabelFish and how they were still practically impossible to understand, but now when I translate pages I can actually get most of the information that they were intended to convey. If people don't necessarily "need" to learn other languages to access information and communicate cross-culturally, it may encourage them to retain and pass on more of their native language.

If I were a betting man, I would wager that in the next century or two the number of languages in common use will reduce to one or two hundred. Where things will be after a millennium or two I won't hazard to guess. I expect that in the not-to-distant future spoken and written language will be supplanted by a purely electronic communication between people via a neural interface of some kind. It's the only natural development I can imagine for the rudimentary neural interfaces currently extant.