Imaginary Worlds - Do You Speak Conlang?

Episode Date: July 26, 2018

Sci-fi fantasy worlds often use constructed languages (or conlangs for short) as a worldbuilding tool that can make us believe the characters come from an ancient or alien culture. But art can take on a life of its own once it's released into the world -- and so do languages. Marc Okrand, inventor of the Klingon language, and David J. Peterson, inventor of the Dothraki language and The 100's Trigedasleng, talk about the surprises they encountered. I also talk with Lawrence M. Schoen of the Klingon Language Institute and Robyn Stewart, the language consultant for Star Trek: Discovery, about why the Klingon culture spilled over into the real world. And Jen Usellis -- a.k.a. Klingon Pop Warrior -- will give you a serious case of earworms, and we're not talking about the mind-controlling earworms from Star Trek II. To hear Matt Fiddler's episode from Very Bad Words on cursing in conlangs:http://www.verybadwords.com/shows/constructed-curses-in-sci-fi-fantasy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Molenski. Jen Uselas is a singer in Chicago. And about eight years ago, a friend of hers told her about a show that was looking for performers. The show was a Klingon Christmas Carol. Now, Jen had not watched a lot of Star Trek before. But I have this like hardcore love of really goofy niche theater. And I was like, really? What do I have to do to get cast in that? And he goes, well, are you allergic to latex? And I was like, no. So he goes, we'll come out and

audition. And then she learned something else about the show. All of her lines would be in the Klingon language. And yes, Klingon is a fully functioning language that actors who play Klingons in Star Trek usually have to learn. In this case, in the Klingon Christmas Carol, there would be super titles above the stage in English, so the audience would know what's going on. Now, that might be intimidating for some performers, but Jen has an opera background. So singing in a foreign language is not unusual for her. I picked up on the language very quickly and the pronunciation.

And my fight skills were, my fight choreography skills weren't so great, but... Wait, did you say that there's fighting involved in the show? Oh, absolutely. The Fezziwig party turns into a giant bar brawl. You know, Klingons aren't having a good time if there's not a little blood involved. She did the show for two years, and then she found out that a podcast called Improvise Star Trek was looking for someone to sing Kiss Me by Sixpence Down the Richer in Klingon, and they were wondering if she was interested. And I was like, oh, heck yes!

Within 24 hours, we were picked up by TeamCoco.com and the Mary Sue and just a whole bunch of other big blogs and websites. And we're like, oh my gosh, what just happened? The response to it was overwhelmingly positive. It's kind of crazy because the internet, I always say the internet hates everything.

But for some reason, the internet really liked this. And then Jen had an idea. What if she put out an album of pop songs in Klingon? She worked with translators on songs that she thought a Klingon And that album did so well. She started doing concerts in full costume and makeup. In fact, she created a whole new persona for herself, the Klingon pop warrior. Is it hard to sing in Klingon? Yes.

Simple answer. I'm just kidding. I'm just, yes, it's not easy. There are some really awkward sounds. It's pretty grating on the vocal cords. There's very harsh, guttural sounds in the language. And you just, you get a lot of that kind of stuff. And and then trying to make it melodic and pretty. I usually don't do more than a 60 minute performance just because more than that.

And it just starts to feel really wrong. To this day, she cannot believe there is an audience out there waiting for a Klingon rock star. But if you look at the history of constructed languages, or conlangs for short, this was a long time coming. I mean, people have been inventing languages on their own for centuries, you know, just as a hobby. But those languages all die off because they're usually just spoken among friends. The difference now is because with sci-fi fantasy, we can see a whole imaginary culture attached to these constructed languages. But what happens when we speak the language of fantasy characters in the real world?

Does it change the way we communicate with each other and what we reveal about ourselves? Turns out, yes. That's just after the break. Now, the granddaddy of all constructed languages and fantasy worlds, at least in the modern era, is J.R.R. Tolkien. And I've talked before how Tolkien was really groundbreaking in a lot of ways, like having maps of Middle Earth. And the same thing is true with the languages that Tolkien developed for the elves in his stories. Michael Drought is a Tolkien expert, and he says that Tolkien was one of the first modern fantasy writers to appreciate how much we can learn about a fictional culture by studying their language.

And I think that that interaction between culture and language in history is just much easier to see in something like a constructed language. And he thinks that studying the language of a fantasy culture can give us a new perspective on our own language and how it reflects our culture in ways that we often take for granted. And to be able to see it all right there, and like, you know, a manageable amount in Middle Earth, I think gives us great insight into how this is happening in the sort of distributed intelligence of the millions of people who are making the culture we live in, in full Big Earth.

But Tolkien didn't think that people in full Big Earth would try to actually speak Elvish. And we know that because he barely created any verbs for the Elvish languages. So when they came time, they wanted to write dialogue in Elvish for the Peter Jackson films. They just had no verbs. And finally, David Sallow is a linguist at the Peter Jackson films, they just had no verbs. And finally, David Sallow, who's a linguist at the University of Wisconsin, who was their consultant, they said, you've got to just make something up. Use the same sound system, use the same rules that Tolkien had, but we don't have enough verbs to have a conversation. but really the films gave it such an impetus and you had people wanting to expand the language and people wanting to to write poetry in elvish and write stories and dialogue doing what had

happened in klingon but for people who consider themselves Tolkien purists, any change to the language that Tolkien created was basically heresy. And so what you get then is a lot of, a split because people saying, that's not real Elvish. And others saying, you're a stick in the mud and not allowing us to do what the language should do. And like, no, that's not really what Tolkien said. He never came up with this word. And there's always, there's always something that you

can point to that's like awkward. There's no Elvish word for milk. So let's call it first water because we have a word for water and we have a word for first and the more like canonical people like that's so ridiculous. Tolkien would never compound like that. And so not only did you have groups of Elvish linguists, you had two competing groups of Elvish linguists who hated each other. But when the Klingon language was created, nobody thought that would take off either. Least of all, the guy that actually invented the language, Mark Okrand. Mark was hired by Paramount in the mid-1980s to invent the Klingon language for the movie Star Trek III. But he did not invent the language completely from scratch. We did hear Klingons speaking their own language in the first Star Trek movie in 1979,

but turns out they were speaking gibberish. So I listened to that and wrote down, you know, phonetically what I was hearing, wrote down what the subtitles meant, and imposed a structure on it. Now, even though the audience wouldn't really know this, just by reading the subtitles or hearing the sounds of Klingon, Mark wanted the Klingon language to feel alien in its syntax. Mark wanted the Klingon language to feel alien in its syntax. So he decided to apply the least common rules for languages on Earth.

For instance. In any language, there's sort of three basic parts of speech in a sentence, which is the subject, the verb, and the object. You have to put them in some order or other. In English, it happens to be that order, the subject and then the verb and then the object. But the least common by far are the ones where the object comes first. So that's what I chose for Klingon. For Klingon, I chose object and then verb and then subject.

Mark says the actors playing Klingons were great students because this was a creative challenge that a lot of them didn't expect to get. But then Mark himself actually faced a creative challenge when he was brought back to work on Star Trek VI. Now that movie was about a detente between the Federation and the Klingon Empire that was supposed to reflect the end of the Cold War in real life. And in one scene, the Klingons reveal that they supposed to reflect the end of the Cold War in real life. And in one scene, the Klingons reveal that they can quote Shakespeare in English. But the director had a last minute addition. He wanted Christopher Plummer's Klingon character to quote Shakespeare in Klingon. In fact,

he wanted him to say, to be or not to be. And I thought, oh no. And the reason I thought, oh no, is because one of the decisions I made when I was making up the grammar of Klingon was that there's no verb to be. So Mark decided that the closest translation to that would be to live or not to live, which feels kind of Klingon-ish. So I go over to Christopher Plummer and he says, I understand you have a new phrase to teach me. I said, yes. He says, what is it? Well, to say to live or not to live, there's a number of different ways I could have done that, but I kind of did it a very, very simple way. So it means live or live not, which is yin pa, yin be. Yin, beh. So he says, yin?

Yin? And I said, yeah. He says, that's too wimpy. That's too wimpy. He didn't say that. He said something else, but that's what he meant. He said, think of something else that's more Klingon-like. I said, oh, now what am I going to do?

So I said, what if we say, tach, pach, tach, beh? He goes, tach. Tach is good. Let's do that. Well, up until that moment, was a suffix that meant to continue doing whatever the verb is. So if you say eat plus means to keep on eating, to continue eating, something like that. So I kind of promoted to be a verb in its own right. That means to continue, to go on, to endure. So Christopher Plummer changed the Klingon dictionary.

And yes, Mark had written a Klingon dictionary, which was published in the mid-1980s. But what I thought, honestly and truly thought would happen is people would buy it, thumb through it, say, oh, look, there's the Klingon word for shoe. Ha ha ha. You know, and put it on their coffee table. But that's not what happened. What happened is people bought it and read it very thoroughly and studied it. And a language speaking community started to get going. Now, Mark had no idea that Klingon had taken off like this until he was invited to a conference of Klingon speakers.

That was odd. And I wasn't prepared for it, frankly, because I'll admit I'm not a very good speaker of Klingon because when I was doing all this, there was no particular reason to be one. So when it started happening, I was kind of taken aback that people were doing it. But it was also fascinating to read what people were saying about the language.

And I realized it was more complicated and interesting than I thought it was when I was going along making it up. I like to describe every Klingon sentence as a murder mystery. The first thing you find out is who's lying dead on the floor? Then you find out how they died. You know, were they shot? Were they stabbed? Were they poisoned? And lastly, you find out who did it to them. Object, verb, subject.

That is Lauren Schoen, one of the founders of the Klingon Language Institute, or the KLI for short. And the KLI has a rule that only Mark can add new words to the dictionary, but every year they can petition him to invent new words. Meanwhile, the KLI has been using that limited vocabulary to translate all sorts of stuff, including Shakespeare. But I asked Lawrence, why did the Klingon language catch on in the early 1990s? I mean, was it just because of Star Trek VI and the character of Worf on The Next Generation? He said, yeah, but there's one other really important factor.

We came about as the internet exploded and suddenly you could do real-time conversations in this made-up language with people all over the world. So in the very early days of the KMI, I would get these letters, and they all invariably began with some variation on, I thought I was the only one. And maybe they were in their town, in their city, but suddenly that didn't matter. Now, as I mentioned earlier, constructed languages are nothing new. People have been making them up for years.

In fact, David Peterson is a member of the Language Creation Society, which creates conlangs for their own sake. There's also an element of writing to it. Because when you're creating a lexicon, you're essentially creating the entire history of a people through their words. And you don't have to learn a language or use it to appreciate it. It's just the type of thing that you should be able to, you know, look at a description or look at a grammar or even just look at a lexicon and see the treasures that language creators have buried therein, you know.

Now, David has been hired to create languages for sci-fi fantasy worlds. In fact, he actually won a competition to create Dothraki, the language of the warrior clans in Game of Thrones. It was incredibly grueling because I just spent every hour working on my proposal. I made it through the first round, which was judged by other language creators. Then I beefed up my proposal again. I had over 300 pages of material by this point in time. We sent the final four proposals off to the producers,

and they chose mine. And David thought he had created the next big conlang that would take on a life of its own. You know, essentially the next Klingon. We were super excited about the Dothraki job. Two months later, Avatar comes out. So if you're looking at something that took off, the Na'vi language, it did take off. It's still very successful. So then it's by the time Game of Thrones comes along, it's like, well, it's another created language.

It never had a chance. He hits a few theories why Dothraki did not take off the same way that Navi did. But his main theory is that Avatar appealed to a younger audience that has the time and energy to learn a constructed language from a fantasy world. After that, he was hired to create a few more conlangs, but they didn't take off either. And then he got a job inventing a language for the CW show The 100, which is about the young descendants of people who survived a nuclear war. And this language, which he created called Trigittislang, was supposed to be an evolution of English in the far future. Now get it down, Gustus. Feel like you don't tell Ayopote.

I've got to hook up stay a fee. Now this show, The 100, does not have a big audience, but the audience is young, the show, The 100, does not have a big audience, but the audience is young, very loyal, and they love these characters called the Grounders, speak Trigittislang. So the fans really took to the language. In fact, they asked David questions about it all the time. It's really wonderful. It kind of took me by surprise. This is the reaction I thought I was going to be getting to Dothraki,

and that just never happened at all. David has now become an advocate for constructed languages being part of any fantasy culture, because he's seen how a conlang can really help bond a community of fans together, and it can be really effective in world building. And I think that, especially if you're talking about worlds that aren't our own, language is a detail that matters. It's not expensive to get somebody, like there are people that already are just spending almost every single free hour of their day working on a created language that would be over the moon to have created, for example, you know, to create a language that would be over the moon to have created, for example,

a language for the Martians in Supergirl. And so since it's not going to be super expensive, why not? I mean, God, it just kills me to hear when, you know, shows and movies are skating by on gibberish. It's just, there's no point to it right now. But David does think that there is a correlation between how often characters are featured on a show and how popular the language is. I mean, he thinks that one reason why Dothraki didn't catch on is that the Dothrakis weren't in the show very much after season one. And even though Klingon may be the envy of the conlang world, even Klingon's popularity started to wane when Star Trek didn't feature the Klingons for many, many years. That's why a lot of Klingonists have been very excited about the new show, Star Trek Discovery. The first season featured the Klingons very heavily.

And in the conlang community, there's a lot of buzz around the language consultant on that show, Robin Stewart, who in many ways represents the next generation, no pun intended, of Klingon speakers. And there's also, I mean, let's face it head on, there's a stereotype about the Klingon speaker being a virgin that lives in his mother's basement. Somebody that has the intellectual capital and the spare time to learn an entire language from scratch for fun has enough other negotiable skills that they do not need to live in their mother's basement and are probably doing quite well for themselves. In fact, beyond being a Klingon expert, Robin is also a pilot. And if you hear the wind whipping through her cell phone, it's because she was calling me from an undisclosed location near a military base in Canada.

You know, I have the army life. I have the flying life and the Klingon life and probably more lives than that. Oh, by the way, so your Klingon name is spelled Q-O-V. How do you pronounce that? It's going to sound like a wind noise again. Kove. I say it rhymes with stove, except the first sound is like you're choking on spinach.

Kove? Yeah, you need some more k in there. Matt, have you ever choked on spinach, like you're eating it, and then you realize some of it's gone down your throat, and it's too much, and you have to go k to get it back out again? Probably. I mean, I don't know if it's spinach, certainly i've had that experience so like i actually think that speaking klingon you know and having the ability to say that at will may have saved my life i was actually

joking once and did that and food came right out you know i said to robin the one thing that's always baffled me about the success of klingon is that it's such a harsh language to speak and to listen to. I mean, it makes sense for the Klingons are this fierce alien warrior culture. They're often the antagonists in the story or maybe anti-heroes. But she says that's the point. The Klingons are rowdy, boisterous, and very blunt, which she finds freeing. It's actually easier to discuss really hot-button topics because the same conversation hasn't been said over and over again. The same trite words aren't coming out. I have a good friend whose father was murdered,

and he told his Klingon friends that in Klingon, there's no euphemisms in Klingon. You just say the things. Another Klingonist came out to me as trans. I haven't had that conversation very often in English, but for her, it was kind of freeing to have it in Klingon because the trite words aren't there. It's so strange to have learned these new words and have them go right to your soul. In fact, she says that Klingon has really become part of who she is in the real world. We were talking once about body modification. There was somebody that came to one of the Kappa Ame, the Klingon conferences,

modification. There was somebody that came to one of the Kappa Ame, the Klingon conferences, and they had not just tattoos, but had done some, you know, actual interesting body modifications. You know, there's kind of a, whoa, like you made this huge step thing. And I said, you know, I mean, Klingon, I said, well, you know, by speaking Klingon, we're remapping the insides of our heads in, you know, in ways, you know, far more altering than this, the surgery. That's funny, because it totally ties into Arrival, the short story it was based on in the movie, the idea that the way you speak a language begins to change the way you think. Yeah, that concept that the way someone speaks entirely changes the way that they

can look at the world. Sadly, they have found very little evidence for it. It's so appealing. Jen Ucellas, the Klingon pop warrior, agrees with Robin. Taking on the attitude of a Klingon can be really liberating. Because everything about Klingons is hard. They work hard and they fight hard, but they also love really hard and everything is very immediate for them. It's very much about living in the present because, you know, today is a good day to die. OK, if I could start every day by saying today is a good day to die instead of, oh, my God, first I need coffee and then I have so much work to do. I might have a better attitude as well.

But to keep evolving, Klingon does need to keep branching out, so it's not so dependent on Star Trek. And that's why I think that Jen's music also represents a next phase of Klingon culture evolving in the real world. And as I mentioned before, she tries to pick songs that feel Klingon-like, but she's also pushing the boundaries of what feel Klingon-like. But she's also pushing the boundaries of what a Klingon would say or sing. Even when I'm doing silly love ballads like My Heart Will Go On, there's something really

powerful about a Klingon singing that song. Is there, when you sing that, is there a more literal translation to my heart will go on? Is like, my heart will not explode or I will not stab myself or something? It actually, it's, you hear tah a lot in that song, and tah means to continue. And we know

that tah means to continue because of a change that Christopher Plummer added to the Klingon language. Although, there is another reason why my heart will go on takes on a different meaning in Klingon. Klingons actually have fully redundant organ systems, so it kind of makes sense on a literal level that if something happened, the heart would go on. Well, that is it for this week. But before I go,

I want to tell you about a podcast series that just wrapped up called Very Bad Words. The host is Matt Fidler, and he is an old colleague of mine from WNYC. And he brings a public radio approach to the history of curse words. In fact, he recently did an episode about swearing in constructed languages. And I asked Matt, which conlangs have the worst curse words? Well, Dothraki is pretty filthy. An interesting thing in my episode is, you know, there's no cursing whatsoever in the Lord of the Rings. But Tolkien said that the orcs had filthy, filthy mouths, but they censored the translation of it because fantasy is supposed to lift society up, not bring it down. So the orcs did swear, but Tolkien refused to translate their filthy tongues. I love that.

That's so Tolkien, too. I love it. Yeah, it's like, I know, talk about like layers. I'll include a link to that episode in my show notes. Special thanks this week to Jen Ucellas, Michael Drout, Mark Okerind, Lauren Schoen, David Peterson, and Robin Stewart. Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply Network. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emalinski. And if you or someone you know might be interested in advertising on Imaginary Worlds, let me know. The email address is contact at imaginaryworldspodcast.org. I throat rip You throat rip He she it throat rips

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