A language.
Want to know more? OK, read on.
In one sentence, Klingon is an artificial language that was constructed for the TV Show known as Star Trek.
Way back, when the movie Star Trek III was produced, Paramount(the company that owns Star Trek) decided that not the janitor, but a trained linguist, Marc Okrand should create the few sentences and words spoken by the alien race, The Klingons.
Okrand did not only create the sentences and words required, but also made up a grammar and a small vocabulary, probably just for the joy of it. The advantage of doing so was that in future movies, he could easily create new sentences that would HAVE to fit in(being the same language).
Also, it enabled the writers to create their own sentences without having to ask him everytime.(As it turned out, it would be better if they asked him - apparantly they´re rarely able to create something at least resembling Klingon without him)
Over the years and shows, the language grew and grew, new words were added, some points of grammer were finetuned, and so on.
Somewhere in between, Okrand decided to write a book -
The Klingon Dictionary.
The reason for doing so was probably that writers could open the book, read it, and hopefully create useful sentences(as mentioned above - it didn´t work out). Also, actors could use it as a reference as to how to pronounce Klingon words(the usual romanized characters look like the one you know, but they don´s sound like them). Again, it didn´t work.
Sometimes it´s sickening to hear actors torture the language, and everytime I ask myself - who´s to blame? The actor? Or those that didn´t tell them how to pronounce it?
Anyway.
The fans, however, DID like the book, and bought it in masses(well, it´s a book about a constructed language, so you can´t expect to sell as good as a novel), so that Okrand published a second Edition as well as several other books and cassettes on Klingon(for example
Conversional Klingon, you can find them as well as the others on the
KLI Merchandise page.)
If you want to learn more about Klingon, I suggest you visit the
links page.
