Language
Hobbyists around the world have studied the Klingon language. Four Klingon translations of works of world literature have been published: ghIlghameS (Gilgamesh), Hamlet (Hamlet), paghmo' tIn mIS (Much Ado About Nothing) and pIn'a' qan paQDI'norgh (Tao Te Ching). The Shakespearian choices were inspired by a remark from High Chancellor Gorkon in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, who said, "You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon." In the bonus material on the DVD, screenwriter Nicholas Meyer and actor William Shatner both explain that this was an allusion to the German myth that Shakespeare was in fact German.
The Klingon Language Institute exists to promote the language.
Paramount Pictures owns a copyright of the official dictionary and other canonical descriptions of the language. Additionally, while the validity is disputed by legal scholars, the copyright of the Klingon language is owned by Paramount as well. While constructed languages ("conlangs") are viewed as creations with copyright protection, natural languages are not protected, excluding dictionaries and/or other works created with them. Mizuki Miyashita and Laura Moll note, "Copyrights on dictionaries are unusual because the entries in the dictionary are not copyrightable as the words themselves are facts, and facts can not be copyrighted. However, the formatting, example sentences, and instructions for dictionary use are created by the author, so they are copyrightable." Whether constructed languages can be copyrighted was tested in court in the example of Loglan and its derivative Lojban.
Even though Marc Okrand has studied the indigenous languages of the Americas, the Klingon language is not based upon any of those languages. Okrand himself has stated that a design principle of the Klingon language was dissimilarity to existing natural languages in general, and English in particular. He therefore avoided patterns that are typologically common and deliberately chose features that occur relatively infrequently in human languages. This includes above all the highly asymmetric consonant inventory and the basic word order.
The 2003–2010 version of the puzzle globe logo of Wikipedia, representing its multilingualism, contained a Klingon character. The updated logo removed the character and substituted one from the Ge'ez script.
Read more about this topic: Klingon Language
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“The language of excitement is at best picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The problems of society will also be the problems of the predominant language of that society. It is the carrier of its perceptions, its attitudes, and its goals, for through it, the speakers absorb entrenched attitudes. The guilt of English then must be recognized and appreciated before its continued use can be advocated.”
—Njabulo Ndebele (b. 1948)
“What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)