Welcome to Conlanguery, the podcast about
constructed languages and the people who create them.
I'm George Corley.
And with me in Washington, we have someone who needs no introduction.
Mark Okrund, the creator of Klingon and Atlantean.
Hi.
Good to be here.
Mark?
We're, we're, we're fighting with some Internet issues, but
we're going to try to get the show going as well as we can.
But, uh, thank you so much for being on, Mark.
Um, I, you know, you are actually an inspiration for a lot of conlangers
because I think a lot of conlangers saw Klingon and that was one of the, the.
things that got them into conlanging in the first place in the, in the community.
Um, I know that one of my first languages I made
VOS specifically because I saw it in Klingon.
Um, but just wanted to have you on to, to talk to you about, you know, you were
one of the first people to create a language for a major property in Star Trek.
And I, I just, in terms of what you've seen since that time, could you talk
about like, how has that sort of scenario changed?
How has that changed in terms of like the number of properties that are putting
conlangs in and how they're seeking out conlangers and things like that?
Yeah, it's changed a lot.
Uh, cause when I did it for, for Klingon, which was
back in 1984, uh, there'd been essentially nothing.
That's not quite true.
There was a little bit before me, there was a little bit of Klingon before me.
Um, maybe six, eight lines in the, in the first Star Trek movie.
And there was, you know, one or two other movies or TV shows where they'd
done actual conlanging, made up real consistent languages and stuff, but teeny
tiny bit, but ever since Klingon, and not immediately when, when Klingon came out,
but, you know, within a number of years, maybe, maybe 10, 15 years, uh, things
changed so that now any film, it seems any, any TV show that makes use of a, uh,
a people, a civilization or something that's somehow different, it's either,
you know, outer space people or some mythological
fantasy like people or something like that.
Um, they always now seem to have their own language and it's
always conlanged by somebody who knows what they're doing.
And that's a, that's a huge change from the way it was before.
I think it's great.
I mean, for years and years and years, people making films and TV shows have
paid attention to, to one degree or another to the science and the history
to make sure that that's as accurate as it can be.
And when it came to language, everybody, you know, in American, North
American TV anyway, and movies, everybody just spoke English all the
time, no matter what, or, or spoke gobbledygook, but no longer, no longer.
Now, now when they speak something that's not the major language of the film,
it's, it's legit, it's real.
And that's terrific.
Yeah, it's, it's really great.
And it's interesting to think about, like, I've seen talks by you talking
about like the process of doing Klingon dialogue and just sort of the, the,
the general chaos of an actor does a line wrong and you being very gracious
and actually going through and just like making new Klingon words so that this
line just happens to be entirely homophonous with the other line.
Um, I think one of the, my favorite things from Klingon, and
I, I don't know if this is the way that you think about it.
You can correct me if I'm wrong about it is like, it seems
to me like you took like the canon names of, of things.
And you said, well, this is like a bad Anglicization.
It's not Klingon.
It's actually Klingon.
It's not Kronos.
It's actually Kroknos.
And just sort of made it fit the Klingon phonology and said, okay, this is what.
some Federation person heard and then turned into whatever that is.
Well, that, that's exactly right.
I decided, you know, made up the phonological rules of
Klingon and said, okay, that's the way Klingon works.
Um, people in, in the Federation, non-Klingon,
whatever, they, they don't get it quite right.
They mangle it a little bit.
So what we hear them saying, what we hear Captain Kirk saying and all of that is,
is the Anglicized or Federationized or something
version of Klingon, not, not the Klingon version.
So it was taking all those names and things that the writers had made up and,
and making, you know, giving them proper Klingon phonology.
Yeah.
And I mean, the, you know, the writers are going to do their thing.
The writers are going to want their specific pet names.
Was there anything that was particularly difficult to integrate into Klingon?
Like particular names that you looked at that
were like, no, this is just like not even Klingon?
Well, names in particular, when they made up items, you know,
names of weapons or something, that was, that wasn't so bad.
Names were tricky though, because names tended to violate the rules of Klingon
phonology, Klingon phonotactics more than other things.
I don't know why that's the case.
But you know, the most famous Klingon of all, I suppose, is Worf.
And Worf can't be a Klingon word, right?
You don't, you don't have an F at all in Klingon.
And even if you did, you wouldn't have RF at the end of a word together like that.
And other names they made up too, just don't fit.
So I thought about that because it wasn't just the
one, it was, it was a number of different names.
I had nothing to do with making up any Klingon names, right?
They made up for the films and TV shows.
They made up all the names with one exception.
I made up the name for Worf's father.
I didn't know that that's what I was doing.
They just wanted a name and I gave them some name.
Turned out to be Worf's father, who knew?
But anyway, I did "Molch".
Yeah.
What I decided for Klingon names so that all these weird names could still fit.
Cause I, the way I go, I would Klingonize them
is to still come up with pretty weird Klingon.
So Worf, for example, is Worf, which is sort of Worf.
Um, I decided that the reason that these
names are so strange from a, from a Klingon.
phonological point of view is because in Klingon culture, Klingon naming
practices happen to be that you give your kid a name in another language.
So it doesn't have to follow the Klingon way.
Oh, that works.
Yeah.
So it is very interesting that like you have the philosophy of whatever is
appearing on screen, you're going to treat as canon and then you're going to bend
Klingon around it to, to fit that even when it's like, to anyone who knows the
preexisting rules, this is like bad Klingon.
I think like, if you look at Conlanger's today, at least, you know, I see David
Peterson talking about like when there's a bad edit and
he's like, he'd just, he'd just be like, well, that's wrong.
That's not the actual Dothraki that I made or whatever.
Right.
And, but you were working within like what they did and when
they made a mistake, you just said, okay, well, that's fine.
Well, it depended on, on when and when, when it happens too.
If, if I, if I had any control over it at the time they were doing it, I could make
corrections, either, either redo it, which didn't happen very often or figure out
something so that going forward I could make it fit.
But if I didn't know about it until I saw it
on TV, I said, okay, I'm, I'm stuck with that.
They said it.
That's it.
Now, now the, the, the people who speak Klingon, because now there's a bunch of
people who do, which obviously wasn't the case when all this got started, sort of
make a distinction in their minds between, between real Klingon language and TV
Klingon language, if I haven't adapted it yet.
Oh, so they have an idea sometimes of when there's, there's
a mistake on screen that it's like not actually what was.
Yeah.
They hear some, no, no, that's just, that's, that's just something that the
actors did or the producers did or something.
Yeah.
But they'll always, then they'll come to me and say, okay, someone so said this.
What's this all about?
You know, that could be years later in the very first Next Generation episode
that had Klingons in it at that time, weren't paying any attention to it.
Uh, so years later, and there's, there's just
a few lines of, of Klingon in that episode.
So years later, people said, this guy, this Klingon guy
goes to the food replicator and he orders something.
And, but he says is gobbledygook.
Um, what does that mean?
So I figured out something, give him something
tasty that he's ordering from the thing.
What is the, the back and forth between you and like the, the Klingon language
Institute people, the Klingon speakers, uh, like I, I understand that mostly they
treat you as like the ultimate authority, but is there, do you ever draw things
from materials that they make or, or is it mostly like a one to one way?
It's a, it's a two way street, but it's, but it's,
it's, it's not like two sides of the highway.
They're two different streets.
The whole organization came into being without my even knowing about it.
I didn't know that it even existed until, um, this is now years ago.
There's 20 something years ago, 28 years ago or something.
Um, I got a call from a guy who said he was
the head of the Klingon language Institute.
And I said, what is that?
Right.
So he had to tell me all about it, even though there'd
been at that point in existence for a little while.
Uh, but since then I've gotten involved with the organization to the extent
that I know the people who, who run it and the, and the, a lot of the members
and I go to their annual meetings and things like that, and they decided.
I did not make this decision.
They decided that the ultimate source of who
can say what's right and what's wrong is me.
Uh, and also the ult, the only, only source of new vocabulary or new grammar.
rules, if there's to be such a thing is me.
So they come to me sort of all the time, but generally twice a year, because
there's a big, there's a big meeting of Klingon speakers
in, uh, usually North America in the summertime.
And there's one in Germany in November.
And ahead of these meetings, okay, here's a list of words.
What are the, we'd like to have Klingon equivalents
for, or explanations or phrases or something.
And here's some grammatical things that's that have been puzzling us.
We don't know what to do.
Um, and do it that way.
So, so that's that the requests, you know, uh, come from them.
And the answers come from me having, having said that in between times, the
ones who are really, really good speakers carry on all kinds of conversations and
write things and so forth with material that's available, they don't make anything
up in the sense they don't make up any, any new morphemes or, or any new
grammatical rules, but they make very, very clever.
And I would say correct use of what's there.
Um, to say, to say what they have to say, if there's not a
word for something, I say, okay, what, what, what can we use?
What little short little phrase can we use that means this, if there's not a
single word already in existence, uh, and some of those get incorporated into the
language in the sense that I say, yeah, that's cool.
And some of them don't, but the ones that don't are usually because I don't know
about it, I don't know everything that they're talking about.
Yeah.
That's, that's interesting.
I mean, I've, they've translated the Bible, they've translated Hamlet.
Uh, there's the, uh, uh, a Klingon opera that is actually performed.
It's, it's really interesting.
How much of like growth have you seen since, since you started back in the
eighties and, you know, you talk about the Klingon Language Institute formed
without you knowing about it, uh, to me, this sounds like this is sort of.
Because of, you know, pre Internet things.
If we had social media in the eighties, you'd probably get
tweeted about it immediately.
But like how much has like, how much has the, the community changed because of.
like the Internet and the ability to communicate
very rapidly with all kinds of people?
I would say that I wouldn't say the community wouldn't exist without the,
without the Internet, but certainly the Internet was
instrumental in getting it going and, and, and keeping it going.
Uh, because the, the, when I was working on Star Trek three, which is the first
film that had my Klingon in it, uh, I got the idea of writing a book explaining how
the language works, thinking that Star Trek
fans might think this is funny or something.
I don't know what I was thinking.
I was not thinking that people would really learn the
language and carry on discussions and translate things.
That was not in my mind at the time.
Um, and I wrote the book and it came out in 1980,
tail end of 84, beginning of 85, something like that.
And then a second edition came out around 1992
and that one sold better than the first one.
Um, for, for, for whatever you will partly was because at that point, next
generation had started and all kinds and wharf was a big deal and so on.
Um, but also that's when the Internet was really getting going.
Uh, uh, we're mutual, mutually beneficial, you know, Klingon, Klingon is
responsible for the growth of the Internet, of course.
Uh, but that's where people were able to find each
other, uh, in a way that they couldn't before.
And, you know, it wasn't just, I'm the only one who's interested in this
language is there's this other person, this other person communities formed and
eventually in-person communities formed that, you know, because people knew each
other on the Internet, but the Internet was, I think, I think really, really
critically important to getting this thing going.
People have been making up languages, you know, people doing conlang, even though
it wasn't called that for, you know, for thousands and thousands
of years, but everyone thought, gee, I'm just doing this.
No one else is doing this.
I'm the only one, or maybe my friend and that's it.
Um, it was the same thing with Klingon or would have been, I think the same thing
with Klingon had the Internet not started going now, having said that, of course
there was Star Trek conventions and things like that, where people would get
together, so maybe people would find each other, but it
certainly wouldn't, wouldn't have happened in the same way.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's, it's really interesting to see that.
Um, speaking of like the Internet changing things, like for me getting
involved in the conlang community was very much something that happened because
of Internet forums and things, and it seems that you have, um, in recent years
gotten more involved with like more broadly conlang community stuff.
Like, uh, you just gave a talk at CopyCon.
Um, uh, you appear in events with the, with other, with, well, at least with
the other movie conlangers with Paul Fromer and, and David Peterson.
Um, what has, how, what has that been like, and has it like changed anything
about like how you view what you've done with your languages and, and what is your
view of like the broader conlang community now
that you've had some involvement with that?
Yeah, well, in terms of the working with the people who have, who have done other
movies and TV shows and stuff, what that's done for me is, uh, reinforce
something that I knew all along, which is I'm not alone.
I'm not the only one doing this, you know, for years and years, if I'd meet
people, not people involved with conlanging and not, and probably not even
linguists, um, but they'd say to me, uh, Oh,
you, you made up Klingon, you made up a language.
Wow.
How unique, how strange.
And I said, it's not strange.
People have been doing this for a long, long time.
Most people don't get their languages up on a 70 millimeter screen, but people have
been making up languages forever and ever and ever.
That's not unique.
And working with the people who have, who've done similar things to what I've
done, meaning David Peterson and Paul Frommer, right.
And, and so on, who've done it for movies and TV.
So yeah, see, it's not just me.
You know, other, other people are doing it too, which is, uh, nice.
It's nice to have this little community.
It's nice to not feel that I'm all alone in
some kind of a silo doing something or other.
Um, but as a result of doing that, to go to the other part of your question, you
know, I've met people in, in the, in the more general conlanging community, which
certainly, uh, well, I wouldn't say I wouldn't have happened, but it was,
wouldn't have happened as, as, as much, uh, had, had this not happened.
Uh, and what I've found meeting these people is
how incredibly brilliant and creative they are.
The kind of stuff that they talk about and do and the languages they came up with and
the things they're concerned about and, and, and, and the back and forth cross
pollination and all is, is just, is just brilliant.
Uh, and you know, absolutely amazing.
Now among the Klingon speakers themselves,
they do the same thing, but it's just Klingon.
Right.
And they're brilliant too.
They're brilliant too.
And what they've done with Klingon is a lot more than
I would probably have done with it all by myself.
But the, the, the, the extent of the, I've used the word brilliant too many times.
with this, there's really, really smart people doing this kind of thing and the
kind of things that they're concerned about and the kind of
things they fuss about are, are, are so just so interesting.
Yeah.
I, I, I do wonder, like thinking about like, I think there's still cases of.
people coming into a conlang project with like preexisting material or, or at least
like names to fit to or something like that, but like, well, so I would say,
well, maybe, maybe you have actually experienced a difference here.
So like you all also did the language Atlantean for Disney's Atlantis.
Was that a different experience than what you did with Klingon?
Like where you brought on earlier, was there, was
there more control on your part or, or how was that?
Yeah, that was, that was very different in a number of different ways.
Um, in, in no particular order, one, one way was with Atlantean, I did not work
with any of the actors, but another difference that, that you just mentioned
is with Klingon, well, Klingon initially was just for Star
Trek three and it was only, I don't know, a dozen lines.
Well, it's probably more than that, but however many lines, 20 lines, something.
That's it.
Uh, and not very much time to do it.
I mean, you know, several months, but not gobs and gobs of time.
Um, Atlantean was a four year project.
Cause I got involved with that four years before the film came out and a lot of
ongoing discussions with the producer and the directors of that film about the
language and about the writing system, which I did not do, other people did it,
but we talked about it a lot and the jumping off points for the two were very
different, what I mean by that is for Klingon, um, first I knew about the
Klingons because I'd seen them on TV and I read about them in the script, right?
So there was some, some cultural information I had about them.
Not, not as much as we've had since then, since Next Generation came around.
They've been fleshed out a lot.
Um, so I knew a little bit about, about the people whose language, you know,
who'd be speaking this language I was going to create, right.
And there was also a teeny bit of language that, that preceded me because
there's a few lines at the very, very beginning of Star Trek, the motion
picture, uh, and the people who made that up, which is, uh, two people,
primarily is John Povil, who was one of the producers
and James Dillon, who was the actor who played Scotty.
The two of them came up with that Klingon.
Uh, we're very concerned with what it sounded like, not so much with grammar
and vocabulary and stuff like that.
But that was a start.
I had to make use of those words or phrases or whatever you want to call them.
So I wasn't starting from zero.
So I wasn't starting from zero in terms of who, who, who is the speaking
community, and it wasn't starting from zero in terms of the phonology anyway.
I was in terms of grammar and stuff.
Um, and, and went from there and also, and also knew that,
uh, I'm making up a language of people from another planet.
So there's no reason for their language to resemble a language on earth, except
for the fact that human actors are the ones who are going to say it.
So I had to make it pronounceable, even if it was weird and stuff like that.
Uh, for Atlantean, I knew very little about the Atlantean people.
I'd read the script, but there was just, you know, that that's all there was to
know, uh, didn't have any, any background from
seeing them on TV earlier or something like that.
Uh, and there's a line in, in the film, in the script, well, there's a scene in
the script, in the, in the film, uh, where the explorers, uh, get to Atlantis and
they encounter the Atlantean people and the Atlantean people are speaking
Atlantean to them, which of course the explorers don't understand.
And then the Atlantean people quickly realized that the explorers don't understand.
So they try out other languages.
The Atlanteans do, uh, and they try out, you know, I forget which one's Spanish
and French, Chinese or whatever it is.
They're, they're doing different things and very, very quickly, uh, figure out
that English is the language that they should use
and then proceed to talk English to the explorers.
And one of the characters, the explorer says to, you know,
the hero of the movie, Milo Thatch is the hero of the movie.
He's a linguist.
He's the main guy in the exploration team.
Uh, they say to him, how did they learn our language so fast?
How did they learn English so fast?
And Milo says, well, that's because their language is a root dialect.
You know, it's the language that all the languages
on earth came from or something like this.
Um, and I said to the director, they said, you
know, it doesn't, it doesn't really work like this.
There should be another reason that the, that they're speaking English.
Uh, I think I came up with two or three different explanations or something, but
the line ended up staying in the movie anyway, so I said, okay, uh, I don't
think that whatever they're speaking is really the
language that all languages of the world came from.
But I have to make up something that has characteristics such that Milo could
come to that, uh, conclusion, even if he's wrong, right?
So instead of making a language that's as different as I could from, from earth.
languages, like for Klingon, I made a language that's sort of as common as I
could, it had very, very, very common sounds, very, very common grammatical,
uh, structure for vocabulary.
If I could find a relevant word or root or something in proto-Indo-European or
proto-Sino-Tibetan or something like that, I would, I would incorporate it
into the thing as long as it didn't sound like
English, which a lot of the Indo-European things did.
Um, and if, if I couldn't find it, then I just make stuff up.
So there's, there is, there was a effort to make it earth language like in a way.
And with Klingon, there was an effort to make it not earth language like in a way,
even though I didn't fully achieve either one for either one.
Oh, okay.
Interesting.
See, I would, had been under the impression that Atlantean was like an
Indo-European language, but what you're telling me was like, okay, the, the, the
writer people have said that Milo thinks this is proto-world, which doesn't make
any sense, but we'll go with that and make something
that sounds like it could be maybe proto-world.
It sounds, sounds like something that would spark that idea in Milo's head.
Again, whether he's right or wrong, it was, it was a, Hey,
maybe this is why that, that, that might fit the facts.
Let's see.
Yeah.
That's, that's, that's interesting.
It's always interesting to have that back and forth in terms of like what the
writers think is good world building versus what the
linguist knows about how things actually work and, and that.
So, and it's also interesting that like, you're
interpreting that in a way of like, this is his statement.
This isn't actually necessarily true, but it's like a
hypothesis that he came up with based on limited exposure.
Right.
And it fits and it fix what it fits, what's been presented to us in the film.
It doesn't come out of the, from out of the blue.
Yeah.
I do wonder with having to go, going back
to Klingon with having to fit to preexisting
material, if you had been brought onto that project earlier and been able to,
help design Klingon from the beginning, do you
think you would have done it any differently?
Probably, but don't ask me what would be different.
Cause I don't know, since I didn't have to sit around and
think of, okay, we're starting from scratch, what should I do?
I never considered altered, altered, alternate forms of Klingon.
You know, I have made up languages or language fragments
for other Star Trek races, if you want to call them that.
So I have, have thought of stuff that's very UN-Klingon
and, and on English, on French, on Chinese, whatever.
But for Klingon in particular, I don't know, I
don't know what I would have done differently.
The grammar was all my own.
Right.
Cause there was, there was no, no way to figure out
from the beginning what the grammar was all about.
Right.
Um, so there was no problem.
That may or may, may or may not have been the same.
I don't know.
And the vocabulary initially, uh, was all
what was needed for the film and nothing more.
So, you know, the, the first batch of words that I made up for Klingon were those
that were needed to translate the lines in the script, period.
Right.
And they never talk in the script.
They never talk in the script.
Right.
And they never talk in the script.
They never talked about, you know, I'd like a bowl of spaghetti.
So I didn't make up a way to say bowl or spaghetti.
That's, that's super interesting.
The, just the, the difference in the process, the, the, the having to fit to
just preexisting gibberish and all of the things that you've, you've sort of
rationalized in order to make Klingon make some kind of sense and also make like
statements made about Atlantean make some kind of sense.
It's, it's a very interesting approach that you have to making these languages.
Um, do you envision yourself like doing any more of this kind of work in the future?
Like, you know, if you were contacted by Hollywood studios now, would you take on
another conlanging job or would you pass it to other conlangers you know, or, or
what would you, other linguists that you know?
Yeah.
These days, these days, if it's, if it's really starting
from scratch, uh, I'll pass it on to somebody else.
Yeah.
It's, it's, it's, it's that time for, for a lot of reasons.
Uh, if it, if it's, if it's Klingon, uh, then yeah, I'll, I'll, I'll do Klingon.
And I do that, that happens.
On the other hand, there's other people doing Klingon for Star Trek as well.
Uh, in Star Trek Discovery, that, that, that show, um, the first season, uh,
plot wise was heavy on Klingons.
There's, they, they had a strange new look, but there was Klingons all over the
place and there was Klingon language all over the place.
A lot, lot, lot more Klingon language in that than in
anything else, you know, by far, and I didn't do it.
I didn't, I didn't do any Klingon for that show.
So all of the words that were used were mine.
The grammar was all mine.
Okay.
But the actual translations were done by somebody else.
They were done by Robin Stewart, who is one
of the best Klingon speakers in the world.
And a guy called Alan Anderson, who's another
one of the best Klingon speakers in the world.
You know?
Um, uh, they were, they were the ones who did that.
And they're sort of, I think in the Star Trek
Rolodex of people to call if, if Klingon is needed.
And that's great.
That's wonderful.
I'm not, I'm not upset by that.
I'm actually pleased by that for a number of reasons.
Flattered that the, you know, that the language is such that other people can,
is that, is that a state that other people can take it and, and, and translate all
these strange things that they had to translate.
And there's other people too.
I think, you know, Star Trek in particular has like a group of, I don't
know, four or five different people that they called for the different languages.
Yeah.
I, um, I know that I've interviewed, uh, Britton Watkins and I believe he did
some, uh, some, uh, coaching for like the reboot movie, some Klingon coaching.
And I know that's really interesting.
Klingon.
Uh, yeah.
No, what I was going to say is, is in, in the, in the reboot movies, the three of
them, there's, there was Klingon in the first
two and there's none in the, in the third one.
Uh, and in the second movie, uh, they cut way back from what was originally there.
And this is not unusual at all.
I mean, in moviemaking, you're making these kinds of changes in
post-production all the time, so it's no big deal.
Uh, and Britton was on set for the second movie.
So I made up the lines, but Britton coached the actors in saying the lines.
Uh, but what ended up happening and he did
a great job and the actors did a great job.
Uh, but what ended up happening is they edited this one.
They edited so much that there was only one scene left that had Klingon language
in it and they edited it so much that the
Klingon that was left didn't make any sense.
They, they shortened it.
They took the end of one sentence and put it at the beginning of another one, or
they started a sentence in the middle of the sentence and threw away the beginning.
I forget what they did.
They just scrambled it all up.
Um, and they realized that it didn't make any sense anymore.
Um, and the pronunciation was gorgeous, but it just didn't make any sense.
And it certainly didn't mean what the, what the new subtitles were going to mean.
So they gave me a call and they told me this and they said basically that they
had three choices about what to do about this situation.
One was ignore it and just go with what they got.
And they said, you know, once upon a time they could have gotten away with that,
but not anymore because the audience is paying attention.
There's people who really speak Klingon out there
who will know that this just, this doesn't work.
That is, so we can't do that.
We have, we have to, we have to have to do it properly.
And there's two proper ways they thought of doing it.
One is shoot it over again.
And that's not going to happen at this late stage.
And the other is the one that they did.
They asked me if it were possible and then we ended up doing it, which is we, um, uh,
they played me or sent me a video of the scene and I made up Klingon, basically
Klingon gibberish, uh, that sounded like Klingon and matched the lip movements.
that were already there.
And when I say gibberish, it's not really gibberish
because I had to make it be real Klingon, right?
Um, so I could make up new vocabulary and did to, to make
all this made sense, but I couldn't make up new grammar.
So grammatically it had to fit in with, with, with what Klingon was
there, uh, had already existed.
So, uh, we did this, there was only two speakers in, in what was left.
Uh, there was Uhura, actually a non-Klingon, uh, who does most of the
talking, uh, and listened to her lines and figured out how to, how to change,
you know, this to that and make the, make the
mouth movements work for the new, the new lines.
Then there was one guy, one Klingon guy who has basically one line.
Uh, and when I listened to him, I didn't understand at all what he was saying,
you know, with, with the Uhura lines, Zoe Saldana, uh, who, who worked with Britain.
Uh, what, what, what was recorded there was, was beautiful and clear.
It's just chopped off in the middle of a sentence or something.
Um, but with this guy and Britain worked with
him too, it didn't make any sense at all.
I said, no, no, Britain was there.
Britain did a good job.
What is going on here?
This guy doesn't even sound like he's talking Klingon.
He sounds like he's talking backwards.
I said, Oh, so I looked at my notes to see what lines he might be saying.
Cause there was a bunch of lines that it might've been, but only one was left.
I said, I think it's this one.
And I wrote it out phonetically backwards and then listened to him again.
And that's exactly what it was.
So I called up the movie people and then said, is this guy talking backwards?
Are you playing the film backwards?
I know it's not film, whatever it is these days.
Um, and they said, yeah, it goes backwards.
And I said, why?
And they said, because it looks better.
And we knew we were going to replace the audio anyway.
So I had to make up new Klingon that meant what the new subtitle said and be
grammatically accurate with perhaps some new vocabulary that matched the lip
movements of some guy talking Klingon backwards.
Right.
So all the, all the great work that Britain did did not end up in the film.
Yeah.
Well, hopefully they had someone doing dialect
coaching for the ADR work they had to do later.
That was good.
Yeah.
That's that, that is always, yeah.
Yeah.
So with collaborating with the other, or I won't even say that I'll, I'll let you.
define, so when you have other people doing the dialect coaching or doing the
translation for Klingon now, like how much collaboration with you is there?
Do they, do they email you questions or do they, do they like talk to you or are
they mostly just going for, with your materials,
taking your materials and applying it?
It's the latter, you know, they're doing, they're doing it all on their own.
It's again, it's, it's my grammar and, and, and, and
vocabulary and morphology and all that kind of stuff.
Um, but they're, they're making use of that with, with extremely rare exceptions.
You know, every once in a while they, they would hit a stone wall, but it's
less like over the course of the series, two words, three words, something like that.
Now for, for another interesting thing that happened with Discovery, uh, for
the first season of Discovery, the Klingon season, um, that year Discovery
was on, uh, was streaming, I guess, in, in the U S on what's now it called
Paramount Plus, whatever it was called then.
CBS All Access it was called.
And it was on something or other in Canada.
I don't know what, but everywhere else in the world, it was on Netflix and on
Netflix for anything, not just Star Trek, but for anything, you know, you can use.
to watch subtitles in any of a number of languages.
So you could watch a German show with French subtitles and an English show
with a Spanish subtitles and the Spanish show with
German subtitles and so on, all that kind of stuff.
For Star Trek Discovery season one, you could watch
the entire season with Klingon subtitles, right?
When they're talking English, there's Klingon subtitles.
Um, and I didn't do that either.
I wasn't in, in, uh, because right.
No, no, no, no.
It's in regular Roman characters.
The, the, the, uh, the TV technology does not support PICARD.
Oh, it's it's, oh, I, it would be impossible to do.
Yeah.
No, there's a guy leaving Littar.
So they had someone translate the entire script, right?
The entire script.
Um, this guy in Germany, leaving Littar did it.
Uh, and I worked with him a little bit while he was doing it because there was a
whole lot more English to be translated into Klingon than there was Klingon to be
translated, you know, in, uh, spoken Klingon in it.
So he had a lot, a lot of questions about vocabulary, uh, that the, that the ones
doing the Klingon dialogue didn't have to deal with.
Uh, so I worked, worked with him a bit on that, but it's
all his work or, or, or virtually, uh, all his work.
Yeah.
It's interesting too, because the way it worked is, is the program was subtitled
in Klingon, meaning the whole program was subtitled
in Klingon, including when they were talking Klingon.
So the first time I saw that show, actually, I wasn't home.
I was, I was in Belgium, uh, and watching at a friend's house and the program
begins and I said, turn on, turn on the Klingon subtitles.
I want to see how the Klingon subtitles go.
So, okay.
So we turn on the Klingon subtitles and the first, I don't know, 10 minutes of
the show or something is people talking Klingon with Klingon subtitles.
And after a little while, my friend turned to me
and he said, well, this is all very interesting.
I don't have the slightest idea what anybody's saying.
Please turn on subtitles in another language.
Right.
Oh, that's, that's great.
I did not know that they did the whole thing that has to be like some kind
of landmark that your language.
Yeah.
It's just, yeah.
Just that season.
Um, yeah.
So, I mean, with all of these other people doing Klingon, do you feel like,
you know, Star Trek is not going anywhere.
I don't think it's been going for.
What, like 70 years, 60, 70 years.
Uh, do you, do you feel like in the future that you'll be just handing off
Klingon to the speakers and, and Paramount will continue
just hiring them to do all the Klingon in the future.
And do you feel confident about them carrying it forward?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, they're doing, I mean, Paramount is doing that already.
So, so certainly they'll, they'll continue to do that.
But in terms of the, the, the continued growth and development of the language,
uh, you know, one of these days it's not going to be me for sure.
Um, and it's good to these other people and it's, I'm not sure exactly how.
that's going to work itself out, but there's, there, there's incredibly.
good hands, uh, to, to put it into.
So I'm not, I'm not concerned at all.
Yeah.
Okay.
That's, that's really amazing.
You know, and more and more and more people, I would say right now, there's
more and more Klingon being done for things other than Star Trek, the Klingon
speakers are producing a lot more stuff in Klingon than, than is needed for, you
know, an episode here and there of, of a TV show or a movie or something like that.
So people are translating things and writing novels and songs and poetry.
There's, um, videos on YouTube, all kinds of stuff going
on, on in Klingon that has nothing to do with Star Trek.
So it's, it's, it's, it's going and growing.
Oh, I've seen, I've seen some Klingon music videos and I've seen it, you
know, incorporated into other properties even, and it's, it's really interesting.
Um, I would say it's, it's, it's amazing to see that this one particular language
has, has sort of transcended and even it's like there is also a Klingon culture
on earth almost because you have the opera,
you have music videos and all that stuff out.
Um, what was I, where was I going with that?
Um,
you know, that's the, from a, from a conlanging point of view that that's,
that's, that's interesting too, because, because when you make up a conlang, one
of the things you do, I think, is think about who is this conlang for?
Why, why am I doing this?
I'm going to make up a language.
Why am I going to do this?
You know, who's going to speak it or assuming it's spoken?
Um, so you have some kind of, uh, culture in mind, a fantasy world, an outer space
world, whatever it is, uh, some, some lost, uh, population on earth.
I don't know what, whatever people are going to be speaking this thing.
Uh, or you're doing it to, to test the, you know, how
far you can stretch particular grammatical things.
Um, and so on, um, so there's all kinds of different reasons to do it.
So for Klingon, the reason for doing it initially is it was the language spoken
by these outer space people doing their outer space things, and it's some planet
that's not earth and they're mean and tough and warrior-like and all that, but
they're their own society and talk about whatever it is they talk about up there.
But the people who are interested in the language happened to be people on earth
in the 20th, 21st century, and they talk about earth things.
And initially there wasn't enough vocabulary to do that in any, in any smooth way.
Uh, and the growth of the language more and more and more is, uh, vocabulary-wise
anyway, is earth, earth things, things that humans talk
about, uh, and stuff like that, not, not dilithium crystals.
Right?
It's sugar crystals that you put in your coffee.
So it's a whole, it's a whole different, whole different direction that it's going.
So it's a, it's a, you know, so who is this language for?
Who's speaking this thing?
Is it these outer space people or is it everybody here on earth?
It's just another language like Spanish, French, and
Esperanto, for example, you know, is another language.
It's a, it's an interesting thing that's going on.
Yeah.
I think that's going to be a thing for all, all, all the conlayers that do stuff
for like these, these properties is from now on thinking about the potential for
that, because I mean, I think often, I think nowadays it, it's going to always
depend on like contracts and stuff and whether like the studio allows you to do
further building or whatever, but, um, any one of these could catch on with the
audience and now you've got to think about the, the culture that you're
building this for in world.
And then you've got to think about the real world audience of the thing, which.
most conlayers are not thinking about it because we're doing it for ourselves.
But like when you're doing it for the properties
now, I think that's going to be a factor.
Um, exactly.
Yeah.
And, you know, and this is, this is not, as you say, this is, this is not unique
to Clingon, there was a very interesting gathering about
a year ago, uh, at MIT in, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Um, the, they were doing a study, they were doing brain scans on speakers of
conlangs to see if when you, when you process a conlang is the same part of
your brain firing, uh, as, as when you process whatever your, your native
languages or a natural language or something like this.
And so there was a speakers of Clingon and Navi and Esperanto and Dothraki and,
uh, and then probably something else that I'm forgetting.
Um, sort of all, all together in the same place at the same time.
And then, and the speakers talking to each other learned about the other
languages or the other language communities.
And although there are differences, there are certain commonalities.
And this, this one about making use of a, of a language that's created for one
culture, but using it for another one, uh, was kind of across the board.
So for example, uh, in, in Navi, the language from Avatar, the Navi people
don't sit down because that's something about their, their bodies or whatever.
So there's, you know, so there's no word for chair,
but of course the Navi speakers on earth do sit down.
What are they going to do for a word for chair?
And so I had to deal, deal with this, the Navi speaking community on earth
had to deal with it, the Navi speaking world in, uh, on
the, on the Pandora planet did not have to deal with it.
Yeah.
That, that's, that's interesting.
Yeah.
Because the tail would prevent them from sitting the way a human would.
Right.
Okay.
That's, that's interesting.
And it is interesting now that like, there's this cross pollination.
And that's another interesting, interesting thing too about, about,
yeah, yeah.
That it sparked another thought about, about making up a language for, for
other, other beings, other creatures is, um, you know,
typically for years and years and years up until Klingon.
And it's not because Klingon is so wonderful, but chronologically speaking,
uh, if you go traveling around outer space, encounter any kind of creature,
whatever they look like, look like sort of human, like, or look like a lizard
or look like anything, they, they talk generally,
if it's an American movie, they talk English, right?
Um, but their, their mouths don't necessarily want to do that.
If there's some kind of another, other sort of creature.
So I've, I've worked on a couple of languages where I looked at the
character, at what the character looks like, what their face looks like, what
kind of appliance they're wearing as part of a make and say, okay, you know,
making this kind of a sound would be something
that would be difficult for them to do.
So whatever their language is, wouldn't have that sound, right?
Isn't that kind of thing, paying it, paying it in the same way you're
talking about the, the, the Navi and sitting down in the tails.
Yeah.
If your lips don't go together in a certain way, maybe
you can't make rounded vowels, that kind of thing.
Oh, that's a, that's, that's a huge thing to think about.
Um, I just recently started making a language.
It's my version of the draconic language that's listed in D&D, right?
So it's for dragons, right?
And so like one of the first decisions I'm doing this on a stream and going
with over it with my audience, and we kind of decided that they would be able
to do bilabials, but, but, but, but, but, but like
their lips wouldn't be quite flexible to do rounding.
And I don't know if that's the right, like, right.
Okay.
I didn't, I didn't know that.
Cause the example I just gave.
Yeah.
Like, I mean, I don't know if that's right.
I'm not a herpetologist.
I don't know exactly how capable something with reptile lips would be of
pronouncing different things, but that was the reasoning that we had.
And you, you gotta think about if you're doing stuff for aliens that are not like
humanoids, like Klingons are, they could have
beaks, they could have like no nasal cavity.
They could have all kinds of differences that would restrict what sounds they
could do, or they could have differences that make
them able to pronounce things that humans can't.
In which case, if you want to do that, then you've got to bring in the sound
guys and teach them some linguistics, which I don't know if anybody's done.
Right.
Um, I think, I think, uh, they've taught them linguistics.
They've certainly brought them in.
Yeah.
The sound effects languages tend to just be sort of gibberish.
Um, I would say.
Not always.
I made up a language for, for discovery, uh, which, which is a language that, that
from a, from a phonological point of view, I really liked.
I really liked the way it sounded.
They actually did a great job, but when they, when they produced it, when they did
the post-production for it, they, they electronically did something or other to
it to make it echoey or different pitched or something.
So it sounded very strange to it and was effective for the television show, but you
couldn't hear the keen phonology that I made up anymore.
So.
Oh, that's unfortunate.
But, uh, yeah, it's, it's.
And then they killed the character.
So we're never going to hear it.
Oh, well.
Yeah.
Well, I guess they, they didn't, they didn't think that that was an important
part of it to preserve, but, uh, that's interesting.
Well, right.
And that's, and that's another thing to think about when, when, when working on
the films and the TV and stuff like that is, is what the writers and the producers
and the director and all those people are primarily
concerned about is what does it sound like?
Yeah.
Cause what it means is what the subtitles say, and they're not all that concerned
about, about grammar or specifics of vocabulary and stuff like that.
They are very concerned about what it sounds like.
Right.
And you just have to understand that as a, as a, as a conlanger in this field, if
there's a field, that's something that you just have to bear in mind.
And from what I've talked to other people who have worked on like these conlanging
projects, they care about what it sounds
like, but they're not very good at describing what it should sound like.
A lot of describing things as harsh or guttural and things that a linguist don't
know what that means.
Right.
Yeah.
Klingon in the script.
Exactly.
In the script for Star Trek three, it says
explicitly that Klingon is a guttural language.
All right.
What does that mean?
You have to figure that out.
So we'll stick a uvular African in.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
That's what I did.
Well, I think, I think we can wrap up.
Thank you so much for coming on, Mark.
And as a last thing.
It's been fun.
Thank you.
Do you have any like general advice to all of the conlangers out here who they may
have been inspired to get into conlanging by you or just anything, any sort of little
nugget of advice you'd like to give as a parting thought?
Yeah, do it.
Just keep doing it.
It's fun, you know, and you're going to learn so much about the language that you're
making up, but also about other languages, including natural languages.
Just an incredible field.
Yeah.
I concur with that.
I will say I started conlanging in high school
and then I ended up getting a PhD in linguistics.
So that could be the future.
See?
Yeah.
Um, well, thank you.
Thank you so much for being on Mark.
And I was very happy to have you on and, uh, and thank
you all for listening or watching as the case may be.
And I'm going to say happy conlanging.
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