Philosophy Our primary goal with this project is to create a language that is easy to use and understand. We want the average Elder Scrolls player to be able to review the language for a few minutes and then jump right in and use it. At the same time, we want to give Ta'agra a few unique elements that make it more than just a word-replacement language for English. What we are specifically avoiding is creating a highly complex language with numerous cases and tenses and moods that a native English speaker would have difficulty understanding or implementing. We would prefer having a more accessible language over a more complex one. Methodology How did we go about doing this? Once we decided to embark on this journey, we gathered up all the resources we could find for any existing samples of official, canon Ta'agra. Once we had that, we decided on a basic alphabet for the language and how things should be spelled. With that established, we thoroughly examined what we had, broke the language down into its fundamental sounds and syllables, and built a set of tables from those. We also examined the number of syllables words contained and the frequency with which vowel and consonant groups occurred (CV, VC, CVC). Using this information, we were able to generate new words that sounded like the existing Ta'agra language
I don’t know if Marc will remember this or not. It was about 18 years ago. I unknowingly had dinner and a beer with Marc back in 2004. I was a part of a small short movie back in 2003-4 called First Session. After we premiered it at a theatre in Washington DC, the cast, crew and friends all went out to a restaurant for food and drinks. I sat down next to a guy and it just happened to be Marc Okrand. He was a friend of someone in the movie (Scot McKenzie I believe) and was invited. Even being a Trekkie and liking Klingon I didn’t know his name immediately, but once we talked for a little bit, it clicked and I realized who I was sitting next to. I knew a few phrases and think I might’ve even surprised him a little with a Klingon question outside of Star Trek. I later saw a play that had small “Klingon opera” segment that Marc was a part of. Never know who you may randomly meet. 😊
It is interesting to see how this fictional language evolves. I think Christopher Lloyd messing up on the grammar when he was supposed to order one of the Federation prisoners be executed is a good example. Going back to real-life languages, this sort of 'hiccups' may help to explain why the known languages contain irregular features and the most common expressions tend to contain more irregular features.
True. Folk etymologies are one way in which languages change. People hear words and make up their own reasons for why they are the way they are, often relating it to other words they know. In my language (Afrikaans) there are quite a few, mostly based around loan words. The English "pineapple" was misunderstood as "pain-apple" and so became "pynappel." Afrikaans had no word for "melon," and for comical historical reasons, called it "Spanish bacon" ("spanspek"). So when the word "watermelon" came along, nobody knew what to do with it, and changed it to "waat-" (which means nothing) plus "-lemoen" (which means "orange," as in the fruit), ending with "waatlemoen." Many early Afrikaans speakers were French, and so transferred their phrases across. One which made it into Afrikaans was "fait accompli," but since the French themselves forgot how to speak French after a few generations, they didn't know what the sounds meant, so in time it became the closest seemingly sensible Afrikaans sentence, "feit soos 'n koei" ("a fact like a cow"), which means "something which is indisputable." Some existing words got confused also. For example, "present" (as in a gift) and "persent" (percent) used to be separate words, but have now ended up as the same, so both "gift" and "percent" is now "persent." Afrikaans formally has separate words for "to taste" ("proe") and "to taste like" ("smaak"), but the latter has mostly fallen away in everyday usage (sort of like if English dropped the word "teach" and used "learn" for both teaching and learning, instead).
@@wolfieinu your language sounds just like the Newcastle regional dialect in England when I heard a guy speak Afrikaans I thought he was a Geordie(person from Newcastle)
@@Paulthompson9942 Interesting! Well, I suppose Afrikaans and English are both roughly equidistant from Frisian. For that matter, some Afrikaans sentences are written identically to English sentences that mean roughly the same. The go-to examples are "my pen was in my hand" and "my hand is in warm water." Apart from the fact that "warm" in Afrikaans means "hot," the sentences mean exactly the same. Say the English sentences with enough of a northern brogue and they'll sound more or less the way they sound in Afrikaans, I'd imagine.
Supposedly he wrote The Hobbit for his kids, but I had read that he had started the idea for his world building solely for the purpose of having an excuse to finish creating his Elven languages.
I’ve had the Klingon Dictionary book for many years (25?) but never got around to diving into it. Recently, I discovered that Duolingo offers Klingon and my learning really took off. It’s a lot of fun!
I just got mine over the summer! I was so so excited! The book is older than me lol. Since school started again I haven't been able to read it much so I occasionally study with videos.
@@altorhys ...and they were allies for decades to the point that Romulans exchanged technology for Klingon battlecruisers and probably warpdrive and apparently gave the Klingons the plans for their improved cloaking devices.
I could listen to him talk about this for many long hours and would be happy to just listen to his knowledge and passion in languages & their creation. Linguists are so underappreciated! 😇💕
A fascinating language. Some of its features remind me of Basque, Arabic, and Turkish, whereas the monosyllables are of course reminiscent of Sino-Tibetan languages.
This is very interesting. Good job mark. One other movie conLang this guy made, Atlantian from the Disney film “Atlantis the lost Empire “ also Leonard Nemoy played the king.
So many klingon nerds here and noone of these noticed the Hamlet-Translation is typed wrong? "....Daja'taHvIS, HIDA, ....." HIDA is written with caps only (seems smo. held the shift-button too long^^), but there is no sound transcribed as "A" .... hope he was not himself the editor of this video :X
Tamil language and Klingon language, what was similar-( wa ,Yi -hoh = Wa, Yi - hoh= < iba _இப்ப= now , kol- கொல் = kill >,, ) that means, - come and now kill, ; ( by Tamil Translation), may be there were different you can find out, my idea was this words what he spoken,
Interesting video. I suggest that with the new national census approaching, masses of people list Klingon (or another ConLang) as the primary language spoken at home.
According to the wikipedia entry on Word Order: The overwhelming majority of the world's languages are either SVO or SOV, with a much smaller but still significant portion using VSO word order. The remaining three arrangements are exceptionally rare, with VOS being slightly more common than OSV, and OVS being significantly more rare than the two preceding orders.
This is a linguist's, writer's, actor's dream. "It suddenly hit me - I just taught Mr. Spock to speak Vulcan." made a shiver run down my spine. Mr. Okrand, if you had any say in "Discovery" Vulcan please, please... do us all a favor and let us know. What, is the English translation for what Spock said to Mykal in Discovery?? I'm a hobby, Star Trek writer I need Vulcan. I need a lot of it and I've done some work with that as you had the wonderful experience of doing with Klingon. I'd listened to all the tiny bits out there and then went to the most recent available - the final sentence Spock says, in Vulcan - to his sister about to blast into the future with the Discovery - leaving him behind. It is a VERY poignant moment and he has just told her that if it weren't for her, he never would have come to any understanding of himself. They have no idea if this isn't their final, absolute goodbye. It very well could be, and he says..... "Nether lochren sich." I must have repeated it 100times because I wanted to get it right. I read lips - I have a bit of a hearing problem and sort of depend on it a little. So I heard it, I saw it - it's done in a near-up. THAT IS WHAT HE SAID. I don't care what the script said he should say. The only fan site out there has written down something not even remotely close. Here's the bitch. "Nether lochren sich." means something. I was hoping it wasn't going to but I already knew before verifying that it did. First of all it contains the "ch" like in German, Yiddish or Hebrew... a MUCH softer, gentler "ch" than found in the CH or KH of Klingon but... same basic. Okay, my Vulcan will feature it. I can work with that easily and it helped me make some of those "you couldn't pronounce it" words Spock was talking about when asked his family name. I, OF COURSE - CAN pronounce them and with practice so can everyone. Vulcans, after all have the same skull and vocal apparatus Humans do so... BACK TO nether lochren sich. It means, "don't hole yourself" literally, and formally. "Nether" is "do not, or never"....in really old Germanic English. A Loch or Lochren means hole in the ground or lake (water filled hole in the ground) and could easily mean a black hole, which she is in immediate danger of doing to herself. Sich is just German for "you" or "yourself" said in a formal and serious way. Whoever made this line up is having a little laugh at those hearing it? She replies, "I love you too, Spock." and it sounds for all the world like she does realize that what he just said IS an expression of love. It is how he said it too. However, if you give it a little thought it is improbable that the Vulcan language has a 3 word expression of deep, abiding, committed, affection. It's not how they talk about feelings. You can be damned sure they don't even like the English, "love". After all, we can say - "I'd love to jab a knife in you." out of one side of our mouths and, "I love you so much it hurts." We can say, "I love hotdogs" and "I love my mother." In my writing notes I have this: “Sanskrit has 96 words for love, ancient Persia 80, Greek 3 and English Only 1." So, "Nether lochren sich." is NOT "I love you." in Vulcan. Whatever he said - the way he said it communicates the love. Not vocabulary. So.... Mr. Okrand, if you had any say in "Discovery" Vulcan please, please... do us all a favor and let us know. What, is the English translation for what Spock said to Mykal in Discovery?? We take a respectful bow...
I watched an interview with Marc Okrand recently where he did talk about working on the Vulcan for Discovery. You can see it here: ua-cam.com/video/Gi5hpwefdUQ/v-deo.html
Hello, I realise this is an odd question but my dad wants to start his speech at my brothers wedding in Klingon. Are you able to help me translate this to Klingon? 'Thank you everyone for joining us today to celebrate Mark and Vicky's wedding.' Any help or guidance is very welcome, thank you from Claire
How do I contact this guy? I've recently become very obsessed with trying to make Cybertronian Script an actual language rather than an english font, along with Autobot Cybertronix and Decepticon Cybertronix as new coded languages for the factions, but honestly I'm not a linguist, I don't know jack about making languages, I can only make up shapes for the letters because my expertise lies with arts.
On the contrary, a print-to-order book called "The Vulcan Language" is available on lulu.com Also, in the Enterprise episode "Strange New World", T'Pol and Hoshi have a long conversation in Vulcan.
There is a Vulcan language, created by fans and based on the words in the movies and series; it just has no official support. But if they ever want to put some corporate muscle behind it, it's there.
developing a language of my own, i see that I am doing it a bit like this linguist did... I started by making a few senteces, than I made a Word base (That language uses verbs and nouns as the same words and has a very funny plural rule (changing vocals) wich allows multiple plurals that can mean bigger versions (Village->Town) or different Words (Silver->Gold) ) The only thing this language lacks is a certain word order rule, but it also does not really need an order because it is marking the object with a silible and can be spoken in the order prefered. If you want to pinpoint the Object of the sentence or think it is very important you could just put it at the beginning of the sentence, but you always need to put the verbal nouns directly behind the subject (because the subject is the doing it). I have no Idea how "good" it is though... Gh'Shzaer'fd zzemn pazaza Abaan ao tirtanr... (the language is good I can hope = I can just hope that this language is good)
I'm a native speaker of Hungarian... I started laughing about the so called SVO sequences... We have all six of them in Hungarian, all is used every time colouring the original meaning of the original SVO sequence... :). And needless to say, that every other "smart trick" invented to Klingon can also be found and widely used in Hungarian...
Anyone know what Worf said in the episode "All good things" when he flung everything off his desk in a fury while exclaiming "Do-jo-ka!" I assume I am not spelling that right, but does anyone else remember this moment, and what does it mean?
I did some digging. Aparently it's "dor'sho'gha ", a Klingon curse from the novel Excelsior: Forged in Fire. Unfortunately this doesn't align with any of Okrand's Klingon that I could find. However, following Klingon lettering rules, it'd look like this: DorSogha
The issue with movie alien languages is that they all assume human anatomy to you end up with just a bunch of human sounds thrown together. Is like to hear a non human sound alien language. District 9 had such an attempt.
This is a great video! Very interesting. Though I had a question: He says that, of the 6 subject/verb/object mutations, the OSV and OVS are the least common in human language... but aren't the VSO and VOS the least common? Maybe I lack the understanding of what makes something an object and a subject, but it was my understanding that SVO and SOV were the most common, then OSV and OVS, and finally, the least common, was VSO and VOS. Am I wrong?
Yet another item on my "bucket list." To become conversational in Klingon. I've spent more time studying Klingon culture than the language. The concepts of personal and family honor have sadly died out in human society. Probably the deadliest insult in Klingon translates as "If I used spit to clean your father's honor, it would only dirty the spit." And that lack of honor is what separates "good cops" from the scumbags who beat helpless suspects and assault women. pagh quv lughaj.
I don't think honor has died out, I think it's more fallen dormant among a lot of people. But I don't think we could even talk about a lack of honor if the concept wasn't there in the first place to recognize when it is missing. So that's some hope, right? If people have forgotten what honor means, maybe they can learn it remember it again.
You think of Honor too simplistic, and Family Honor. Hah. Let's just say that 'Family Honor' is not something that's spoken about in any kind of positive regards in these times when people go around killing their children claiming it was a stain on their family honor. So I won't touch that one. But Honor in general can be seen as Internal Honor, and External Honor. External Honor is the one given to you by your peers and other people. If you are one who is known to never lie and always uphold integrity about yourself and your opinions, yet willing to hear others out, others will mention that you are a person of great integrity. Likewise if you are someone who would defend your friend if someone picked a fight, or even rush to the aid of a stranger who is in danger, then people will say that you are someone who would do what is right. Conversely, if you are someone who lies a lot and deceives, people will look down upon you for that, stating " _That person has no sense of right and wrong._ " ergo, you'd be without honor. These are all forms of External Honor. The Internal Honor, is the fact that you actually *are* a person of great integrity and you don't lie and you will do what is right when the time calls for it. The Internal Honor is something that no one can take away from you. If you want to live your life according to the ancient rules of Chivalry, or perhaps the fictional version from Dragonheart ( _admittedly a really good way of living in my honest opinion_ ), or even Bushido, or even write your own moral code of living life like some have done, then you should but you need to hold yourself to that level of standard to uphold your honor of that way. As we've seen, many have failed in this regard ( _great example would be Chuck Norris who did write a code of how to live and yet still failed at it because of his opinions contradicting his code_ ) which just means you have to always be onguard to ensure that you live according to it. I'm phrasing this really badly but the keypoint here is the different concepts of honor, the different ways of honor. It's not as easy to say " _it's died out_ ", it's rather the fact that it became irrelevant in life as we progressed. I'd say that in modern times, it's more important than ever to focus on internal honor for personal growth in order to be the kind of person you want others to see you as. Never let external honor rule you, because that will be peer pressure, and that is bad. I'll stop typing here because my mind is in a foggy mist. But I hope you understand, what I sorta mean, and I'd recommend googling it more. SFDebris has an excellent talk about this in his review for DS9 _Way of the Warrior_ I think it was, if not some other episode review regarding Worf and his honor.
Klingons compose music as well and their standard scale is the locrian mode. This mode is the rarest of all seven modes and sounds unsettled-good for Klingons.
See the Enterprise episode "Strange New World" for a long chat on the bridge in Vulcan between Hoshi and T'Pol. A Vulcan Language book is available to buy on lulu.com And as for Romulan, in the TNG episode "Contagion" there was a computer countdown: Setha-tri par trukatha. Setha-ki par trukatha. Setha-mille par trukatha. And in the Enterprise episode "Minefield": Uhn kan'aganna! Tehca zuhn ruga'noktan! Uhn Kan'aganna! Tehca zuhn! Neemasta kan'aganna uckwazta! Kuhn'ukchtacht zuhn vockwadai! Bar'ak t'stu annankana There was also a dedicated Romulan language website, now only available on Wayback Machine: web.archive.org/web/20111206000128/www.pfrpg.org:80/RH/
Wait, I made a bad. Nevermind! I translated his sentence (from Star Trek 3) completely wrong. You are right. It's engine, obviously. It's the subtitles in the movie that screws it up. The line "qamapu! jonta' neH!" is once translated as "I wanted prisoners!" while it's meant to be "Idiot! I said engines only!".
I know it's way too late now, but does the OVS word order really fit the Klingons' culture? Aren't they aggressive, action-based, self-motivated? If so, why would they wait until the end of a sentence to mention the subject/actor, which is often the Klingon himself doing the action? Horta would maybe fit OVS ("No Kill I"), because they're "gentle" and "intelligent" (according to Spock) but not Klingons...This hypothesis might work for Sapir but not for Worf ( ha ha get it?). Anyway the way he describes the prefixes which combine the subject with the object, it doesn't really seem like OVS as much as something like (O/S)V?
hey the Sapir-Worf thing was a joke (obviously?) but I still think SVO would be more action-based and aggressive. "No [Humans] Kill I" is definitely OVS.
I wish this was longer. I could listen to him speaking about Klingon forever.
Khajiit Lynx Honestly, I absolutely love how he talks and explains and this topic is just very interesting as well
Khajiit Lynx jer pur ta'agra?
Philosophy
Our primary goal with this project is to create a language that is easy to use and understand. We want the average Elder Scrolls player to be able to review the language for a few minutes and then jump right in and use it. At the same time, we want to give Ta'agra a few unique elements that make it more than just a word-replacement language for English. What we are specifically avoiding is creating a highly complex language with numerous cases and tenses and moods that a native English speaker would have difficulty understanding or implementing. We would prefer having a more accessible language over a more complex one.
Methodology
How did we go about doing this? Once we decided to embark on this journey, we gathered up all the resources we could find for any existing samples of official, canon Ta'agra. Once we had that, we decided on a basic alphabet for the language and how things should be spelled. With that established, we thoroughly examined what we had, broke the language down into its fundamental sounds and syllables, and built a set of tables from those. We also examined the number of syllables words contained and the frequency with which vowel and consonant groups occurred (CV, VC, CVC). Using this information, we were able to generate new words that sounded like the existing Ta'agra language
Brittany Hollander that's literally strait of the ta'agra website
I love hearing Klingon
I don’t know if Marc will remember this or not. It was about 18 years ago.
I unknowingly had dinner and a beer with Marc back in 2004.
I was a part of a small short movie back in 2003-4 called First Session. After we premiered it at a theatre in Washington DC, the cast, crew and friends all went out to a restaurant for food and drinks.
I sat down next to a guy and it just happened to be Marc Okrand. He was a friend of someone in the movie (Scot McKenzie I believe) and was invited.
Even being a Trekkie and liking Klingon I didn’t know his name immediately, but once we talked for a little bit, it clicked and I realized who I was sitting next to.
I knew a few phrases and think I might’ve even surprised him a little with a Klingon question outside of Star Trek.
I later saw a play that had small “Klingon opera” segment that Marc was a part of.
Never know who you may randomly meet. 😊
He's adorable :D So passionate about his creation and Star Trek.
Gotta love a nerdy boy
Or nerdy girl ;)
Klingon should be in google translate
Zoso It is in duolingo
Without a doubt!
Well how often do you face to technical docs on klingon?
@@DariaZ-a-b9x Google Translate is for everything, not just technical docs.
@@CsabaTothMr ok, but how often do you face to some.. books on klingon? Or at least some sentences))
Thanks Marc for your massive contribution to the Star Trek universe!
Yes
This man has much honor in him.
It is interesting to see how this fictional language evolves. I think Christopher Lloyd messing up on the grammar when he was supposed to order one of the Federation prisoners be executed is a good example. Going back to real-life languages, this sort of 'hiccups' may help to explain why the known languages contain irregular features and the most common expressions tend to contain more irregular features.
True. Folk etymologies are one way in which languages change. People hear words and make up their own reasons for why they are the way they are, often relating it to other words they know.
In my language (Afrikaans) there are quite a few, mostly based around loan words. The English "pineapple" was misunderstood as "pain-apple" and so became "pynappel." Afrikaans had no word for "melon," and for comical historical reasons, called it "Spanish bacon" ("spanspek"). So when the word "watermelon" came along, nobody knew what to do with it, and changed it to "waat-" (which means nothing) plus "-lemoen" (which means "orange," as in the fruit), ending with "waatlemoen."
Many early Afrikaans speakers were French, and so transferred their phrases across. One which made it into Afrikaans was "fait accompli," but since the French themselves forgot how to speak French after a few generations, they didn't know what the sounds meant, so in time it became the closest seemingly sensible Afrikaans sentence, "feit soos 'n koei" ("a fact like a cow"), which means "something which is indisputable."
Some existing words got confused also. For example, "present" (as in a gift) and "persent" (percent) used to be separate words, but have now ended up as the same, so both "gift" and "percent" is now "persent." Afrikaans formally has separate words for "to taste" ("proe") and "to taste like" ("smaak"), but the latter has mostly fallen away in everyday usage (sort of like if English dropped the word "teach" and used "learn" for both teaching and learning, instead).
@@wolfieinu your language sounds just like the Newcastle regional dialect in England when I heard a guy speak Afrikaans I thought he was a Geordie(person from Newcastle)
@@Paulthompson9942 Interesting! Well, I suppose Afrikaans and English are both roughly equidistant from Frisian.
For that matter, some Afrikaans sentences are written identically to English sentences that mean roughly the same. The go-to examples are "my pen was in my hand" and "my hand is in warm water." Apart from the fact that "warm" in Afrikaans means "hot," the sentences mean exactly the same. Say the English sentences with enough of a northern brogue and they'll sound more or less the way they sound in Afrikaans, I'd imagine.
@Barfieman362 Klein wêreld ne :D
linguistics and philology is what Tolkein loved and was the basis for his writings
Supposedly he wrote The Hobbit for his kids, but I had read that he had started the idea for his world building solely for the purpose of having an excuse to finish creating his Elven languages.
Yep. He was in fact a philologist; he didn't just love philology.
@@numinous4789 ew that's gross
@@OokamiKageGinGetsu And also to give the British its own mythology.
@@mattheww797 ????
I’ve had the Klingon Dictionary book for many years (25?) but never got around to diving into it. Recently, I discovered that Duolingo offers Klingon and my learning really took off. It’s a lot of fun!
I just got mine over the summer! I was so so excited! The book is older than me lol. Since school started again I haven't been able to read it much so I occasionally study with videos.
He is so adorable and nerdy. >.
That was genuinely interesting, insightful and entertaining. Good upload.
I wish I could be creative like this man. Incredible video.
Why would anyone dislike this?
Romulans obviously
They are xenophobic
... they have met Klingons.....
Because people can have opinions
@@altorhys ...and they were allies for decades to the point that Romulans exchanged technology for Klingon battlecruisers and probably warpdrive and apparently gave the Klingons the plans for their improved cloaking devices.
Fun Fact: all the sounds Klingons make, is used in the Dutch language (from the Netherlands).
😂😂
@Bee Sixteen Klingon Q is just a K, like Qapla = Kapla. And you think Dutch is without a D? Come on.
I could listen to him talk about this for many long hours and would be happy to just listen to his knowledge and passion in languages & their creation. Linguists are so underappreciated! 😇💕
This guy is freaking brilliant. Thanks for uploading this. I'm off to study Klingon.
This is the kind of video I was looking for
To Be or Not to be... ... you could not say that in KLINGON ,,,, BUT HE DID!!!! AWESOME!!!!!
I saw this video many years ago and now, with more experience, I appreciate him all the more.
This is awesome. You can see genius at work here.
Excellent video. I wish we had more about how he created Klingon, and the grammar and vocabulary.
I wish I could like this a dozen time. Love the enthusiasm he had for the gig. Really makes you admire the guy. :p
This video rocks. Seriously. I feel my geekdom has increased just watching it.
it was 1993 and met him. He was very nice.
cool
WOW!! What an incredible adventure!!
Thanks for sharing!
A fascinating language. Some of its features remind me of Basque, Arabic, and Turkish, whereas the monosyllables are of course reminiscent of Sino-Tibetan languages.
This is very interesting. Good job mark.
One other movie conLang this guy made, Atlantian from the Disney film “Atlantis the lost Empire “ also Leonard Nemoy played the king.
So many klingon nerds here and noone of these noticed the Hamlet-Translation is typed wrong? "....Daja'taHvIS, HIDA, ....." HIDA is written with caps only (seems smo. held the shift-button too long^^), but there is no sound transcribed as "A" .... hope he was not himself the editor of this video :X
Ten thumbs up!
This guy rules.
All of my profs were this excited about stuff all the time.
Is there more of this?
Tamil language and Klingon language, what was similar-( wa ,Yi -hoh = Wa, Yi - hoh= < iba _இப்ப= now , kol- கொல் = kill >,, ) that means, - come and now kill, ; ( by Tamil Translation), may be there were different you can find out, my idea was this words what he spoken,
Interesting video. I suggest that with the new national census approaching, masses of people list Klingon (or another ConLang) as the primary language spoken at home.
According to the wikipedia entry on Word Order:
The overwhelming majority of the world's languages are either SVO or SOV, with a much smaller but still significant portion using VSO word order. The remaining three arrangements are exceptionally rare, with VOS being slightly more common than OSV, and OVS being significantly more rare than the two preceding orders.
'Fish' in Klingon is _ghotI'._ So which one came first, the Klingon word or the meme?
"Ghoti" goes back to 1855, which precedes Klingon by some time
According to "Word_order" on Wikipedia:
SOV - 45% (e.g. Japanese, Latin, Tamil)
SVO - 42% (e.g. English, Mandarin, Russian)
VSO - 9% (e.g. Hebrew, Irish, Zapotec)
VOS - 3% (e.g. Malagasy, Baure)
OVS - 1% (e.g. Apalai?, Hixkaryana?)
OSV - 0% (e.g. Warao)
This is a linguist's, writer's, actor's dream. "It suddenly hit me - I just taught Mr. Spock to speak Vulcan." made a shiver run down my spine. Mr. Okrand, if you had any say in "Discovery" Vulcan please, please... do us all a favor and let us know. What, is the English translation for what Spock said to Mykal in Discovery?? I'm a hobby, Star Trek writer I need Vulcan. I need a lot of it and I've done some work with that as you had the wonderful experience of doing with Klingon. I'd listened to all the tiny bits out there and then went to the most recent available - the final sentence Spock says, in Vulcan - to his sister about to blast into the future with the Discovery - leaving him behind. It is a VERY poignant moment and he has just told her that if it weren't for her, he never would have come to any understanding of himself. They have no idea if this isn't their final, absolute goodbye. It very well could be, and he says..... "Nether lochren sich." I must have repeated it 100times because I wanted to get it right. I read lips - I have a bit of a hearing problem and sort of depend on it a little. So I heard it, I saw it - it's done in a near-up. THAT IS WHAT HE SAID. I don't care what the script said he should say. The only fan site out there has written down something not even remotely close. Here's the bitch. "Nether lochren sich." means something. I was hoping it wasn't going to but I already knew before verifying that it did. First of all it contains the "ch" like in German, Yiddish or Hebrew... a MUCH softer, gentler "ch" than found in the CH or KH of Klingon but... same basic. Okay, my Vulcan will feature it. I can work with that easily and it helped me make some of those "you couldn't pronounce it" words Spock was talking about when asked his family name. I, OF COURSE - CAN pronounce them and with practice so can everyone. Vulcans, after all have the same skull and vocal apparatus Humans do so... BACK TO nether lochren sich. It means, "don't hole yourself" literally, and formally. "Nether" is "do not, or never"....in really old Germanic English. A Loch or Lochren means hole in the ground or lake (water filled hole in the ground) and could easily mean a black hole, which she is in immediate danger of doing to herself. Sich is just German for "you" or "yourself" said in a formal and serious way. Whoever made this line up is having a little laugh at those hearing it? She replies, "I love you too, Spock." and it sounds for all the world like she does realize that what he just said IS an expression of love. It is how he said it too. However, if you give it a little thought it is improbable that the Vulcan language has a 3 word expression of deep, abiding, committed, affection. It's not how they talk about feelings. You can be damned sure they don't even like the English, "love". After all, we can say - "I'd love to jab a knife in you." out of one side of our mouths and, "I love you so much it hurts." We can say, "I love hotdogs" and "I love my mother." In my writing notes I have this: “Sanskrit has 96 words for love, ancient Persia 80, Greek 3 and English Only 1." So, "Nether lochren sich." is NOT "I love you." in Vulcan. Whatever he said - the way he said it communicates the love. Not vocabulary. So.... Mr. Okrand, if you had any say in "Discovery" Vulcan please, please... do us all a favor and let us know. What, is the English translation for what Spock said to Mykal in Discovery?? We take a respectful bow...
I watched an interview with Marc Okrand recently where he did talk about working on the Vulcan for Discovery. You can see it here: ua-cam.com/video/Gi5hpwefdUQ/v-deo.html
Hello,
I realise this is an odd question but my dad wants to start his speech at my brothers wedding in Klingon. Are you able to help me translate this to Klingon? 'Thank you everyone for joining us today to celebrate Mark and Vicky's wedding.' Any help or guidance is very welcome, thank you from Claire
+Claire Hilton I think it's 'Hoch qatlho' SoH DaHjaj maHvaD muv tlhoghDaj pablu'DI' vicky 'ej lop.'
How did it go?
did they do it? How was the wedding?
was that a frasier reference
Fascinating.
The klingons are probably the best race to ever grace star trek, along with the ferengi.
Them klingons are so funny.
Ferengi 4 lyfe!
Volcans are awesome too.
+Shadow_Link I agree but I also liked the jem'hadar, cardassians, and vulcans quite a big. The borg were always fun as was Q.
great upload! Reading Marc's Klingon/English dictionary right now!
How do I contact this guy? I've recently become very obsessed with trying to make Cybertronian Script an actual language rather than an english font, along with Autobot Cybertronix and Decepticon Cybertronix as new coded languages for the factions, but honestly I'm not a linguist, I don't know jack about making languages, I can only make up shapes for the letters because my expertise lies with arts.
I remember this guy from the special features of Atlantis the lost empire
Does Mr. Okrand have a youTube Channel?
Qapla!
I know nothing of Star Trek or Klingon, but I found this absolutely fascinating.
I'm surprised there is no functional Vulcan language. I guess only Klingons have that honour
They should adapt Lojban to Vulcan. A logical language for a logical people.
On the contrary, a print-to-order book called "The Vulcan Language" is available on lulu.com
Also, in the Enterprise episode "Strange New World", T'Pol and Hoshi have a long conversation in Vulcan.
There is a Vulcan language, created by fans and based on the words in the movies and series; it just has no official support. But if they ever want to put some corporate muscle behind it, it's there.
developing a language of my own, i see that I am doing it a bit like this linguist did... I started by making a few senteces, than I made a Word base (That language uses verbs and nouns as the same words and has a very funny plural rule (changing vocals) wich allows multiple plurals that can mean bigger versions (Village->Town) or different Words (Silver->Gold) ) The only thing this language lacks is a certain word order rule, but it also does not really need an order because it is marking the object with a silible and can be spoken in the order prefered. If you want to pinpoint the Object of the sentence or think it is very important you could just put it at the beginning of the sentence, but you always need to put the verbal nouns directly behind the subject (because the subject is the doing it).
I have no Idea how "good" it is though...
Gh'Shzaer'fd zzemn pazaza Abaan ao tirtanr...
(the language is good I can hope = I can just hope that this language is good)
I'm a native speaker of Hungarian... I started laughing about the so called SVO sequences... We have all six of them in Hungarian, all is used every time colouring the original meaning of the original SVO sequence... :). And needless to say, that every other "smart trick" invented to Klingon can also be found and widely used in Hungarian...
Hungarian is an aggulamenative language with pronomial prefixes, optional plurals, and no tense?
What is the original source of this video? Who was the interview with, what date and where did it take place?
Anyone know when this was recorded and who did the interview?
I believe this was recorded as part of the release of the original Star Trek 3 DVD release, around 2002.
Your brilliant dude!!!!!!!!!!!!
This guy is really enthusiastic :-) Qapla'!
This has to be an Old video. He looks young here. He was born in 1948.
Such attention to detail.
And now we have _Discovery_
How far have we fallen...
Anyone know what Worf said in the episode "All good things" when he flung everything off his desk in a fury while exclaiming "Do-jo-ka!" I assume I am not spelling that right, but does anyone else remember this moment, and what does it mean?
I did some digging. Aparently it's "dor'sho'gha ", a Klingon curse from the novel Excelsior: Forged in Fire. Unfortunately this doesn't align with any of Okrand's Klingon that I could find. However, following Klingon lettering rules, it'd look like this: DorSogha
I'm trying to learn Klingon on Duolingo but I have a lot of difficulty with the pronunciation. The guttural noises are very hard to recreate
Wondering what is the language of the borg
The issue with movie alien languages is that they all assume human anatomy to you end up with just a bunch of human sounds thrown together. Is like to hear a non human sound alien language. District 9 had such an attempt.
Someday I want to hire this guy to make a fictional language for me.
I'd be happy just to get beyond high school French
I guess im the 22,858th trekkie in the world
Mark Okrand ,Author of The Klingon Dictionary
He's so adorable.
This was fun.
It sounds a little like Yiddish. This is still fascinating.
wow, so so so inspiring
If I met him, it would be my duty to buy him a beer.
This is a great video! Very interesting. Though I had a question: He says that, of the 6 subject/verb/object mutations, the OSV and OVS are the least common in human language... but aren't the VSO and VOS the least common? Maybe I lack the understanding of what makes something an object and a subject, but it was my understanding that SVO and SOV were the most common, then OSV and OVS, and finally, the least common, was VSO and VOS. Am I wrong?
For example German and Dutch uses VSO.
This guy is a genius
frickin brilliant
Vulcan Language is Awesome and Rare, It Sounds Like Saavik calls Kirk Common
They sure picked the right guy for this job.
I wonder if Mr Okrand has ever studied the Shawnee language.
This called an agile thinking 😃
I'm currently trying to learn high Valyrian, so Klingon will have to wait.
Is this video hosted officially somewhere or only on your youtube channel?
Gosh, it looks so hard!
Awesome and very interesting about the Klingon language lol. :)
Yet another item on my "bucket list." To become conversational in Klingon. I've spent more time studying Klingon culture than the language. The concepts of personal and family honor have sadly died out in human society. Probably the deadliest insult in Klingon translates as "If I used spit to clean your father's honor, it would only dirty the spit." And that lack of honor is what separates "good cops" from the scumbags who beat helpless suspects and assault women. pagh quv lughaj.
***** ¿Otros idiomas? Tengo un poquito de Español y menos Alemán. Estoy estudiando Latín, pero no muy duro. Quiero aprender algún día Griega Antigua.
I don't think honor has died out, I think it's more fallen dormant among a lot of people. But I don't think we could even talk about a lack of honor if the concept wasn't there in the first place to recognize when it is missing. So that's some hope, right? If people have forgotten what honor means, maybe they can learn it remember it again.
You think of Honor too simplistic, and Family Honor. Hah. Let's just say that 'Family Honor' is not something that's spoken about in any kind of positive regards in these times when people go around killing their children claiming it was a stain on their family honor. So I won't touch that one.
But Honor in general can be seen as Internal Honor, and External Honor.
External Honor is the one given to you by your peers and other people. If you are one who is known to never lie and always uphold integrity about yourself and your opinions, yet willing to hear others out, others will mention that you are a person of great integrity. Likewise if you are someone who would defend your friend if someone picked a fight, or even rush to the aid of a stranger who is in danger, then people will say that you are someone who would do what is right. Conversely, if you are someone who lies a lot and deceives, people will look down upon you for that, stating " _That person has no sense of right and wrong._ " ergo, you'd be without honor. These are all forms of External Honor.
The Internal Honor, is the fact that you actually *are* a person of great integrity and you don't lie and you will do what is right when the time calls for it. The Internal Honor is something that no one can take away from you. If you want to live your life according to the ancient rules of Chivalry, or perhaps the fictional version from Dragonheart ( _admittedly a really good way of living in my honest opinion_ ), or even Bushido, or even write your own moral code of living life like some have done, then you should but you need to hold yourself to that level of standard to uphold your honor of that way. As we've seen, many have failed in this regard ( _great example would be Chuck Norris who did write a code of how to live and yet still failed at it because of his opinions contradicting his code_ ) which just means you have to always be onguard to ensure that you live according to it.
I'm phrasing this really badly but the keypoint here is the different concepts of honor, the different ways of honor. It's not as easy to say " _it's died out_ ", it's rather the fact that it became irrelevant in life as we progressed. I'd say that in modern times, it's more important than ever to focus on internal honor for personal growth in order to be the kind of person you want others to see you as. Never let external honor rule you, because that will be peer pressure, and that is bad.
I'll stop typing here because my mind is in a foggy mist. But I hope you understand, what I sorta mean, and I'd recommend googling it more.
SFDebris has an excellent talk about this in his review for DS9 _Way of the Warrior_ I think it was, if not some other episode review regarding Worf and his honor.
Klingons compose music as well and their standard scale is the locrian mode. This mode is the rarest of all seven modes and sounds unsettled-good for Klingons.
If there's no F sound in Klingon, then what kind of name is Worf?
Probably developed over time when Klingons started to communicate with other cultures
Worf is the Federation standard approximation of his tlhIngan Hol name.
In Klingon his name is wo'rIv
Do we still only have those four lines of Vulcan? And I know there's some Romulan in canon novels, but why never in TNG??
See the Enterprise episode "Strange New World" for a long chat on the bridge in Vulcan between Hoshi and T'Pol. A Vulcan Language book is available to buy on lulu.com
And as for Romulan, in the TNG episode "Contagion" there was a computer countdown:
Setha-tri par trukatha.
Setha-ki par trukatha.
Setha-mille par trukatha.
And in the Enterprise episode "Minefield":
Uhn kan'aganna! Tehca zuhn ruga'noktan!
Uhn Kan'aganna! Tehca zuhn! Neemasta kan'aganna uckwazta!
Kuhn'ukchtacht zuhn vockwadai!
Bar'ak t'stu annankana
There was also a dedicated Romulan language website, now only available on Wayback Machine:
web.archive.org/web/20111206000128/www.pfrpg.org:80/RH/
There is some Vulcan spoken in STE
T'Pol speaks Vulcan with her mother in the episode Home.
Fantastic!
How do you say "Great Scott!" in Klingon? 😂
Sqot'a'
Which - NO LIFES - put thumbs down on this?... why would you even a waste a heart beat to do that .....get a life
27 Hurq watched this..
Where is this video from?
Why is this on napflix ?!
Interesting that he says "jonta' "means "engine". Everywhere I've read, AND in the movie script, "jonta' " is "prisoners".
Well, my Klingon-German dictionary does translate jonta' with engine.
Wait, I made a bad. Nevermind! I translated his sentence (from Star Trek 3) completely wrong. You are right. It's engine, obviously. It's the subtitles in the movie that screws it up. The line "qamapu! jonta' neH!" is once translated as "I wanted prisoners!" while it's meant to be "Idiot! I said engines only!".
Didnt know klingon was actually hebrew....
I heard some Yiddish too.
Aidiera I heard a touch of Romulan in their too
Qapla' ✊🏻
This man is me, but smart
I thought be' means woman in Klingon?
depends on placement. Its how you can get interesting sentences like " yIt'be 'be. bIqet." The woman does not walk. She runs.
Is that why we say 'bae'?
Is the d dental, retroflex, post alveolar?
It's pronounced with the tip of the tongue placed on the roof of the mouth halfway between the teeth and the soft palette.
I would seriously like to speak and learn klingon and vulcan :).
I know it's way too late now, but does the OVS word order really fit the Klingons' culture? Aren't they aggressive, action-based, self-motivated? If so, why would they
wait until the end of a sentence to mention the subject/actor, which is often the Klingon himself doing the action? Horta would maybe fit OVS ("No Kill I"), because they're "gentle" and "intelligent" (according to Spock) but not Klingons...This hypothesis might
work for Sapir but not for Worf ( ha ha get it?).
Anyway the way he describes the prefixes which combine the subject with the object, it doesn't really seem like OVS as much as something like (O/S)V?
Because strong Sapir-Whorf is bullshit
And it's still OVS, because the verbal prefix isn't the subjec; that's given apart from the verb.
hey the Sapir-Worf thing was a joke (obviously?)
but I still think SVO would be more action-based and aggressive.
"No [Humans] Kill I" is definitely OVS.
Brilliant
In the Cherokee language Tsa-la-gi means Cherokee A-ni-tsa-la-gi is the plural of Cherokee. Tsa-la-gi-s your are asking if they are cherokee.
And Klingon is still NOT on Google translate!
Bing translate has it though.
Klingon is Tough to Learn, and Speak