Shapiro, Klingon

The ascendency of pan-English makes all languages (including, perhaps, English itself) into endangered languages. What endangers a henceforth ”local” language like German is not a flat-out perdition of speakers (German has the ninth largest number of speakers of any language in the world, with about one hundred million native speakers, and twenty million second language speakers), but rather a rapidly intensifying implosion or erosion from within stemming from the epidemic proliferation of pan-English terms in the interior of the German language. When a German speaker talks in an advertisement, a movie, a television program, or on the Internet, she sprinkles her utterances liberally with pan-English words (or at least with words which she believes to be English). When a German speaker talks about business management, computer software, digital technology, telecommunications, financial markets or services, fashion, ”avant-garde” music, televised sports, window shopping, consumer appliances, home accessories, or ”personalized” emotions ( Ich habe ein happy feeling ), she freely supplements her speech, in every sentence, with substitute or designer words pulled down from the terminological celestial sky, the ur-language of pan-English.

English words (or words which are believed to be English) are used in the German language in any domain or situation where the speaker wishes to enhance the prestige of her discourse by holding up a sign of ”globalized” professional, technical, or consumer knowledge. It is a discrete signal, in the instant in which it is used, of belonging to one of the higher, more ”socialized,” more charismatic, more futuristic systems of value. Since the word, however, is now outside of its living English context, and is not quite integral to any German context, it is like a fish out of both waters. It tends to become a pure sign without denotation, an entropy-increasing factor which drives the German sentence into an uncertain condition of nebulousness. The use of the pan-English word in the German sentence is a perfect illustration of the ”implosion of meaning at the microscopic level of the sign,” which Baudrillard already diagnosed in the seventies in the quantum operation of the electronic media. Starting from McLuhan’s brilliant formulation that ”the medium is the message,” Baudrillard observed that increased information, far from stimulating an increase in meaning, as is usually believed, is in fact ”directly destructive of meaning and signification.” The utilization of a pan-English word by a German speaker is, according to the prevalent intentional model of language, the use of a conduit or medium between the thought which the speaker has in her head and the targeted listener. The medium of the employed pan-English word, however, is primarily a formal gesture towards the elevated status of the master code or ur-language. Its semantic denotation is confused or chaotic, and its message can only be the medium of the word itself in its acoustic, alliterative, material, and ritualistic form. The annexing of pan-English words, under the guise of more information, turns communication into an incoherent, indeterminate field. ”Instead of causing communication, it [information] exhausts itself in the act of staging the communication; instead of producing meaning, it exhausts itself in the staging of meaning.”(1)

At the same time that so many of the world’s languages are either outright disappearing or imploding into deepened meaninglessness, there is one new language which is currently experiencing rapid exponential growth in its number of speakers, and is the object of widespread fascination. This is the Klingon Language, first developed in 1984 by Marc Okrand, an artificial linguist at the California-based National Captioning Institute. There are a number of new Star Trek languages, such as Vulcan, Tamarian, Ferengi, and Cardassian, but the Klingon Language is by far the most important among them. Humanoid aliens from the Klingon Empire figured prominently in five original Star Trek series episodes (”Errand of Mercy” - March 1967, ”Friday’s Child” - December 1967, ”The Trouble With Tribbles” - December 1967, ”Day of the Dove” - November 1968, and ”Elaan of Troyius” - December 1968) and two animated series episodes (”More Tribbles, More Troubles” - October 1973 and ”The Time Trap” - November 1973), but, thanks to the instantaneous language interpretation technology of the Universal Translator, these original series Klingons were overheard speaking only in English (or ”Federation Standard”). Scattered Klingon dialogue was first heard at the beginning of the movie Star Trek I: The Motion Picture (1979), and Okrand then systematized the Klingon Language for the larger roles which it played in the movies Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984), Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989), and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991).

As part of the ongoing Simon & Schuster book publisher's Klingon Encyclopedia project, Marc Okrand published The Klingon Dictionary in 1985 and Klingon for the Galactic Traveler in 1997. The Klingon Dictionary has been a major international bestseller, selling nearly a half-million copies, and Klingon for the Galactic Traveler promises to be an even bigger success (its initial print run in America was 120,000 copies). There is also a series of instructional audio tapes ( Conversational Klingon and Power Klingon ) featuring Lieutenant Commander Worf (Michael Dorn), and a three-volume interactive multimedia language-learning CD-ROM set called Star Trek Klingon: The Ultimate Interactive Adventure . The CD-ROM set, which features Marc Okrand and Klingon Chancellor Gowron (Robert O’Reilly), includes a Language Lab for vocabulary drill and an Immersion Studies ”interactive adventure,” which is really a film directed by Jonathan Frakes, converted to MPEG video, and enhanced with about a dozen interactive situations. You are the young Pok, in a CD-ROM interactivity simulation of a Hollywood movie simulation of an Enterprise holodeck simulation of the apprenticeship of a real Klingon warrior. In order to avenge the death of your father, you must correctly pronounce certain selected consonant-heavy words of the Klingon Language, and be authorized by the voice-recognition software (the Klingon Recognizer ) to proceed further in your ”navigation” of the video.

Frequently and conspicuously showcased by Wired and its online affiliates, and the focal point of hundreds of Internet web sites and home pages, the Klingon Language has also become the principal area of scholarly research for several academic institutions. The metier of Klingonist has become a respected vocational choice among university linguists. Dozens of philology and linguistics Ph.D.s are now devoting their careers to the study of the Klingon Language. Aside from Paramount Pictures and its partners in the publishing industry, the biggest promoters of the Klingon Language are the professional linguists associated with the Flourtown, PA-based Klingon Language Institute (KLI). The KLI is an IRS-recognized non-profit organization founded in 1992, which currently has more than two thousand members. The KLI publishes the Klingonist Studies quarterly journal HolQed and the fiction and poetry magazine jatmey. HolQed is a ”refereed journal utilizing peer review” and is indexed by the Modern Language Association. Several KLI members are bringing up their children to be bilingual in American English and the Klingon Language. Some of the main activities of the KLI are the Klingon Writing Project (to create ”original epics in the warrior’s tongue”), the Klingon Bible Translation Project, and the Klingon Shakespeare Restoration Project (for twenty dollars, you can purchase a copy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - The Restored Klingon Version ).

In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991), Chancellor Gorkon (David Warner) makes the fascinating comment or joke that ”you have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.” Hence the Klingonists do not regard their work on Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing , Macbeth, or Anthony and Cleopatra ( antonI’ tlhI’yopatra’ je ) as translation projects. Their efforts to ”restore” Shakespeare to the ”original Klingon” appear to follow from an invigorating and transgressive release of inhibitions about the legitimacy or importance of ”artificial languages” provoked by Gorkon’s joke. After all, what is more legitimate and canonical than Shakespeare (or the Bible)? However, other ”interpretations” of the joke are possible. Anagrammatically, what makes us snicker at this joke is the surprise substitution at the end of the sentence of the word ”Klingon” for the expected word ”English.” The butt of the joke, to those with no short-term stake in the promotion of the Klingon Language, is the effete, bookish intellectuals who make comments like ”you cannot appreciate Molière until you have read him in the original French.” The joke also plays, just a tad less cynically, on the ambivalence which we feel towards the remote, ”alien” Elizabethan English in which Shakespeare wrote, which is only comprehensible to us today with the help of copious, detailed annotations. The most astute ciphering of Gorkon’s joke and the frenzied ”restorative” activities which it has incited among the Klingonists is that they are indicative of a secret suspicion that the ”original language” version of today’s typical media products, which are dubbed and synchronized into dozens of ”local” languages, is merely a specialized kind of localized version which has lost the aura of an original.

To examine a cultural artifact like the bestselling book Klingon for the Galactic Traveler (1997) is to be immediately confronted by the meaningless hyperreality of this fascinating object. The book’s Introduction does not begin with any sort of disclaimer like ”this is a book about a fictional language spoken by a fictional race of extraterrestrial aliens who are portrayed on a science fiction television program called Star Trek .” The Introduction begins, rather, with a nonchalant description of the most recent political and diplomatic developments in interstellar relations between the Klingon Empire and the United Federation of Planets. It ”jumps right in,” in other words, to the hyperreal yet unreal, hyper-meaningful yet meaningless universe of Star Trek . We are treated in Klingon for the Galactic Traveler to a panoply of previously ”unrevealed” facts about Klingon culture, and, even more delectably, to ”context-sensitive” explanations of thousands of Klingon words and expressions. The culture and language of the Klingon Empire are neither real nor fictional, neither authentic nor imaginary. They float, rather, in a vague hyperreality whose exact cognitive status is almost indecipherable. How, then, can one begin to analyze a cultural phenomenon which is so wrapped in obscurity, so enmeshed in the indeterminate condition of hyperreality? What is the significance of the boom of the Klingon Language? What does its prosperity symbolize or portend for our future?

In addition to the ”modernist” disappearance of humanity’s weakest or most marginal languages (95% of all human languages) and the ”postmodernist” implosion or absorption of its intermediate level languages (all the rest except American English), one glimpses the beginnings of an analogous transformation at the apex of this taxonomic classification of tongues. The reality of a cyber-age global system is that all levels bear a fractal resemblance to each other, because each level inherits its structural lattice from the same cardinal ”genetic code” or informational base classes. As in computer programming languages, each level of the distributed hierarchy, with varying degrees of proximity or distance, gleans its logic and properties from the same master set of instructions. No single level, even the level which appears most powerful or ”closest to the hardware,” is outside the game. Pieces of operational code disperse themselves throughout the system, available through duplication or derivation to anyone who is lured by them. The particular code in question here is a ”principle of change” or structural relationship between a ”denotative sign-system” (a human language) and ”the charismatic flight of cynical power” (Arthur Kroker) which energetically seeks escape from that tired language into another, more seductive language.(2) At the top of the hierarchy, cynical, empty power is clearing its throat and getting set to declare its intentions openly: to seek its escape from American English into synthetic languages typified by the Klingon Language.

Pan-English, which appears to the Germans, for example, to be the master language of globalized technoculture, may itself be giving way to a newer, more exalted ur-language, in an act of intractable endo-colonization at the system’s vertex. The Klingon Language stands in precisely the same relationship to American English as pan-English stands in relation to a henceforth local language like German . The relationship of the German speaker to the ur-language of pan-English is the relationship of someone who suffers from an inferiority complex, who is missing something and needs to be seduced, who senses that her own experiences are taking place on a marginal circuit, who desperately requires an Other to validate an identity or provide something of loftier value. The popularity of the Klingon Language, especially in America, discloses that even English is not good enough, and that many of its ”native” speakers suffer from the same inferiority complex or sense of incompleteness as speakers of the global system’s intermediate level languages. The reputedly masterful global language of American English is not truly sovereign. We pine for a higher cybernetic language, a Linguacode ( Star Trek ’s Universal Translator), a ”more original than original” language version for media products, an alien cryptogram (as in Jodie Foster’s movie Contact) where a hidden confirmation of our Western Civilization’s dromological path of development is covertly transcribed. This would be the language of the mirrored extraterrestrial Other whom we so prodigiously seek.

Just as the materialized double, on the level of the entire human species, will eventually substitute itself for humans as our technical immortal replacement, so too will a cybernetic language, devised in a technical project, come to replace human language, which was too entangled in history and living discourse. Just as the clone, who will be a member of this posthuman species, will have no mother or father, but rather a coded derivation from a genetic matrix, so too will our speech be derived from an artificial and formative linguistic matrix. What would be ideal would be for this DNA of verbal communication, this formula for global conversation, to be elaborated by dubbing experts in a Hollywood think tank, who know all about original language versions and their preprocessing for multiple localization. Even better would be for the cybernetic language to issue directly from the deep logic of computing, or to be discovered as a cryptic alien message or transcription brought back from an honorable civilization in deep outer space. In the latter case, the extraterrestrial ur-language would start to be globally disseminated in entertainment-oriented movies and television series, and in the worldwide compunications system (the Internet), before being discreetly handed over to competent professionals and more zealous fanatics. Like any significant technocultural movement, the campaign for a language without living discourse is steered by a triumvirate of masses, moderates, and extremists. The masses are consumers who look upon the new technology as ”fun” and ”cool.” The moderates are detached businesspeople or professional academics who make money and intellectual capital off the success of the new technology, but without taking either the new technology or its ethical and epistemic implications too seriously. The extremists are self-styled visionary enthusiasts who construe the new technology to the letter, and deem it to be the source of a quasi-religious salvation.

The Interstellar Language School, Inc. (ILS) is a formidable rival to the Klingon Language Institute, and is run by a group of Christian theologians and missionaries. The Interstellarians have fundamental interpretive points of contention with the KLI, beginning with the very question of what they consider the correct name of the Klingon Language to be. According to the members of the ILS, the proper translation of ta’ tlhIngan Hol (or ta’ Hol ) in English is the Alien Language , not the Klingon Language. The Interstellar enthusiasts vehemently protest the propagation of the mistaken ”official translation” (as ”the Klingon Language”) by Paramount Studios and Simon & Schuster. At its web site (”On the Edge of the Galaxy” or qIb HeHDaq ), the ILS presents the Alien Language with unqualified seriousness as a really existing language from a really existing deep space Klingon Homeworld ( Qo’noS, or Kronos, in Federation Standard), which has been ”shared with us” by Dr. Marc Okrand. Unlike the more moderate Okrand and the KLI, the ILS’s descriptions of the Alien Language are completely void of any self-ironic humor. ”Join us at Kamp Klingon (or the Edge of the Galaxy Encampment) for five days of qepHom (an informal gathering of Klingon enthusiasts).” ”Hear the sounds of the warrior tongue spoken out loud, practice Alien conversation, proverbs, and curse warfare, improve your Alien pronunciation.” Then attend church services afterwards where ”the Word of God is preached in Alien, including an Alien choir.”

Chancellor ( Qang) pIntIn (also known as Pastor Glen Proechel, Christian missionary to the Russian Far East) is the ”big boss” of the twenty-member High Council ( yejquv) of the Interstellar Language School, which has its headquarters in Red Lake Falls, MN. Qang pIntIn is currently working on an Alien Language translation of the Old Testament, to match the translation already published by the Klingon Language Institute. Genesis will fit well into the ILS’s burgeoning competitive merchandise series. The product offerings already include the ”Alien Language Primer” at beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels (”for those who wish to improve their skills in Alien communication”), instructional books on Alien calligraphy, a tourist phrasebook called ”The Warrior Tongue at Warp Speed,” a rival set of dictionaries, a rival set of audio cassettes, a translation (not a restoration!) of a Shakespeare play called Hamlet, Prince of Kronos , and translations of some of Mark Twain’s novels. For five dollars, you can have a ”Klingon Imperial Church, Certificate of Membership,” to go along with your copies of ”The Lord’s Prayer in the Alien Language,” ”The No Smoking Poster in the Alien Language,” and ”Good News for the Warrior Race: Advance Edition,” which consists of Alien Language translations of portions of the New Testament, along with Gospel interpretations by Christian missionaries to the Klingon Homeworld. Like the Klingon Language Institute before it, the Interstellar Language School is planning to soon promote the Alien Language in real time Internet language practice forums, using OnLive’s voice-enabled ”Talker” technology, to allow Internet Alien Language speakers from around the galaxy to chat live with each other.

As Marc Okrand explains in his book Klingon for the Galactic Traveler (1997), the purpose of the Klingon Language is to establish a quasi-official interstellar ”lingua franca” to streamline important verbal communications on the scale of a vast political, economic, and cultural planetary union like the United Federation of Planets or the Klingon Empire. Although political power in the Klingon Empire is concentrated on the Klingon Homeworld ( Qo’noS), and more specifically in Qo’noS’ capital First City ( veng wa’DIch ) and the Vospeg region ( voSpegh Sep ), the Empire itself embraces enormous cultural and linguistic diversity ”because over the centuries, Klingons have conquered many worlds representing a variety of languages.”(3) Within the Empire in its entirety, both on Qo’noS and offworld, there are many dialects, local languages, regional languages, and even ancestral languages ( no’ Hol ) which are still spoken today by subjugated populations, marginal groups, and alien outsiders ( nov). The imposition of the Klingon Language as a standard throughout the Empire by the First City was undertaken with an eye towards facilitating Empire-wide exchanges of more exalted kinds, such as in the areas of commerce, technology, and governmental affairs.

The Klingon Language ( tlhIngan Hol ), the Emperor’s Klingon ( ta’ tlhIngan Hol ), and the ”current standard way of speaking” ( ta’ Hol ) all derive from the original language spoken by Kahless the Unforgettable, who united the people of Qo’noS more than 1,500 years ago. If the Klingon Empire is the consummated double of the United Federation of Planets, and the United Federation of Planets is increasingly one of the predominant images in which Earthlings today recognize themselves, then everything that Marc Okrand writes about the Klingon Language in relation to secondary languages of the Klingon Empire can be read as in fact describing the present-day relationship between the surging, synthetic Klingon Language and the secondary languages of Earth’s globalizing technoculture. That Star Trek has become a worldwide icon for the virtual and profit-making strategies of pan-capitalism was dramatized at the Official State Dinner in Washington, D.C. in October 1997 for Chinese President Jiang Zemin, when the unmarried American Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was escorted for the evening by that First Ambassador to the Four Quadrants of the Galaxy, Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart). Captain Picard, of course, is both an accomplished Shakespearean Thespian and a fluent speaker of the Klingon Language.

According to Marc Okrand the galactic linguist, the Klingon Language has a high degree of ”lexical elaboration” (or quantity of terms) in certain specialized vocabulary areas. These rich terminological domains happen to include, among others: insults, curse words, male chauvinism, animal body parts, raw and still-living animal foods, forehead physiognomy, opera ( ghe’naQ), warship and warp speed technologies, traditional and high-tech weaponry of all kinds, warriors, and warfare. The two principal military organizations of the Klingon Empire are the Klingon High Command ( tlhIngan ra’ghomquv ) and the Klingon Defense Force ( tlhIngan Hubbeq ). There are nine officer ranks in the Klingon Defense Force command hierarchy (Admiral or ‘aj, General or Sa’, Commodore or totlh, Brigadier or ‘ech, Captain or HoD, Commander or la’, Lieutenant or Sogh, Ensign or lagh, and Yeoman or ne’), a system which bears a striking resemblance to the command structure of the Federation’s Starfleet. Okrand, after having just presented the evidence supporting the verity of this likeness, immediately denies it.(4) Important Klingon advanced technologies include the cloaking device ( So’wI’), which was ”stolen” from the Romulan Star Empire, but then enhanced and refined to allow a Klingon warship to fire its weapons while still cloaked; a mind-reading device ( tuQDoq) which destroys the mind of the subject on which it is used; a special hand-held pain-infliction device ( QIghpej); and phase disruptor weapons ( nISwI’ DaH or pu’DaH ) which are similar to the Federation’s phasers.

In describing various aspects of Klingon culture, such as their preparation of food and drink, Marc Okrand tries to convey the impression of practices which are very different from those of humans. Heating processes play almost no role in Klingon cuisine, and the staples of their carnivorous diet are mainly small animals which are consumed either still alive or freshly killed and raw. ”Bloodwine” ( ‘Iw HIq ) is the preferred beverage of Klingons, and they disdain the drinking of water. However, what curiously and noticeably comes across in Okrand’s encyclopedic section on Klingon gastronomy is the phonetic and onomatopoetic similarity of many Klingon words to English synonyms or ”friends” of their directly corresponding English words, in what ends up sounding like the proposed creation of a kind of compressed English or English shorthand. The Klingon word for ”bartender” is chom (from the English ”chum”), the word for ”food” is Soj (from ”soy”), ”chewing” is choptaH (from ”chomping” or ”chopping up”), ”nibbling” is noS (from ”nosh”), ”delicious” is ‘ey (from ”hey”), and ”disgusting” is ‘up (from ”throw up”). The Klingon expression for ”delicious food” is Soj ‘ey , and the expression for ”disgusting food” is ‘up Soj . The Klingon word for ”unripened fruit” is baQ (from the English ”bad”), the word for ”edible insects” is ghew (from ”goo”), a ”food concoction” is Su’lop (from ”slop”), an ”alcoholic drink” is a HIq (from ”hiccup”), a specific ale drink is wornagh (from ”eggnog”), and ”coffee” is qa’vIn (from ”caffeine”). The Klingon word for ”heart” is tIq (from the English ”tick”), the word for ”claw” is pach (from ”paw”), ”limb” is gham (from ”gam”), ”tongue” is jat (from ”jut”), ”nose” is ghIch (from ”itch”), and ”muscle” is Somraw (from ”samurai”).

Consistent with its adolescent appeal, the Klingon Language also tends to be a ”contrary” language, where words (or their English cognates which form the basis of their sounds) often have the opposite meaning from what one would normally expect. In an inversion of usual values, overcooked food is said to be rotten or decayed ( Soj raghmoHlu’pu’ or, more simply, Soj non ). Before slaughtering an inadequately performing food preparer (if a Klingon is not satisfied with his meal, then it is customary to kill the cook), one says to him: ”you have caused the food to decay” ( Soj DaraghmoHpu’ ). Since Klingons adore chocolate, the word for chocolate is yuch (from the English ”yuck” or ”yech”). Freshly killed meat, which is also beloved by Klingons, is ghoQ (from the English ”gook”). This contrariness is an expression of youthful rejection of adult norms, or a turning upside down of the terms of what is proper and what is improper. In the Klingon Language, odors are never categorized as either good or bad, and bathing of the body has a decidedly negative connotation. In the realm of food, it is considered proper to play with one’s vegetables, and there are no separate words for individual vegetables or fruits. The general word for vegetables and fruits is naH (from the English ”naaah” or ”no”). The most positive textural attributes a food can have are to be either chewy, lumpy, or slimy, and it is thought of as proper to eat as quickly as possible and in large gulps. Klingons do not use any eating utensils, and they only rarely use plates. Throwing, spilling, and dropping of food, or participation in rowdy food fights like in an Animal House college fraternity, are activities held in high esteem as the quintessence of proper table manners. In depicting Klingon customs, most of Marc Okrand’s attempts at humor are based on the rhetorical procedure of reversal of disgust. ”The food is arranged not haphazardly but in a way that helps the food look appealing. For example, in some dishes, pieces are placed with the veins clearly visible so that the blood still inside them can be seen.”(5)

One of the unique properties of the Klingon Language is its shortening or compression of communicative declarations. This abbreviating feature encompasses the techniques of both Clipped Klingon ( tlhIngan Hol poD or, more simply, Hol poD ) and Ritualized Speech. In Clipped Klingon, which is especially useful in situations where speed is the decisive factor, grammar becomes unimportant and sentence parts deemed to be superfluous are dropped. Intentional ungrammaticality is widespread in the Klingon Language, and it takes many forms. It is exemplified by the practice of pabHa’, which Marc Okrand translates as either ”to misfollow the rules” or ”to follow the rules wrongly.” One example of the use of Ritualized Speech is at the swearing in of officers of the Klingon Defense Force on board a warship just prior to the start of a new mission. Another example is the serene phraseology used at the bIreqtal, which is the ceremony at which the honored murderer of the leader of a Klingon House simultaneously marries the deceased’s widow and assumes his new privileges and powers as the coronated Head of the House. Certain conventions of conducting an everyday conversation are also regarded as being part of Ritualized Speech. A Klingon never initiates a dialogue by saying ”hello” or ”how are you?” but instead greets each potential interlocutor by saying nuqneH, which is roughly translated as ”what the hell do you want?” even though absolutely no offense to the addressed party is either intended or taken.

The ultimate irony for a science fiction media product which is allegedly about the future would be to be stuck in an eternally recurrent time loop with no end (no future beyond itself) in sight. Yet this is exactly the case with Star Trek . The prosperity of the Star Trek industry as a whole is based on a recombinant logic of nostalgia and interminability, and the expansive momentum of this outward-spiralling cultural dynamo leads to application of this same logic to ever more areas of life, such as language itself. With the Tamarian Language and the Klingon Language, repetition and determination by codes enter posthuman speech at the cybernetic feedback, grammatical-syntactical, micro-procedural, and microprocessing levels. The Universal Klingon Translator of later, recombinant Star Trek is a technology for converting posthuman speech into an operational communications system appropriate to our engineered successor species, the ”living species as technologies.”

Klingon: In Search of a Cybernetic Ur-language