What does the klingon say to archer

The final two words sounded similar to a grave insult delivered by Worf a time or two. Didn't anyone have their Closed Captioning running? It must have been spelled out. Mark Runyan. Maybe not a 'natural' language, but it's definitely real. However, it hasn't been used on Star Trek for many years. In practice meaning, TPTB only used Klingon as a real, actual language in the movies, where they had the time and money and incentive.

The TV shows just used random snippets or single words, not long lines of dialogue. Even in TNG. One could of course say that the Klingon language itself has rapidly deteriorated after the TOS times, and is now a grammarless collection of old, new and borrowed words. Pretty much like English. It's real in every technical sense of the word: 1 It has a dictionary plus grammar and syntax rules 2 It's taught in some schools 3 Many people speak it some very fluently.

Maybe more people speak it than speak Latin, Sanskrit or Esperanto? But I can imagine some hardcore trekkie teaching their baby to speak Klingon more than their native tongue.

Esperanto, like Klingon, is an invention. They did not evolve over decades or centuries. Are there any currently spoken languages that in fact are documented as being originally invented in similar manner? By the way, does Aramaic fall under the same category as Latin and Sanskrit? What's interesting, and a good example on why creating languages for practical use doesn't work, is that more people speak Klingon fluently than do Esperanto, by many expert estimates. The TV shows never really had the luxury of taking the time to do it right, but they at least tried for a while before giving up.

Reports are that Michael Dorn got rather upset when he heard about the Klingon translation of the Bible. He insisted to the producers that Klingon not be treated as a real language, because he didn't want to contribute to what he saw as a stupid waste of time.

Is that why he made the "Conversational Klingon" tape? No, the interesting thing is that this "fact" keeps getting spread by people who never seem to be able to point to a definite source for their information. Esperanto certainly enjoys hundreds of times more fluent speakers than Klingon, and probably thousands or indeed tens of thousands. He made the audiotapes including "The Klingon Way" long before he understood that Klingon was a real language.

For a while during the last century, there were a significant number Esperantists who married and started families while having having only Esperanto as a common language. It's more likely to be a hardcore linguist than a hardcore trekkie. The fellow in question was actually raising his son bilingual, without extra emphasis on the Klingon. But without a handy group of Klingon-speaking friends around, the kid didn't really enjoy it, and the experiment was quietly discontinued.

Well, about fifteen hundred to two thousand years ago, lots of people in the Middle East spoke it as their first language. I think there are some parts of Syria where Aramaic is still the local native language. Good programmers write code that humans can understand. As another poster has pointed out, Esperanto is a first language for some people.

I am using "first language" here to mean a language one is exposed to since birth and which one begins learning as soon one can begin to speak. A few thousand people in India list Sanskrit as their mother tongue on their census forms, and in the Madras High Court declared that Sanskrit was not a dead, but a living language.

There are still native speakers of Aramaic, but it is in danger of extinction. There is no way, therefore, of establishing the standard way of saying, for example, "videocassette recorder" in Latin, or "mercy" in Klingon. This was the major stumbling block in translating the Bible into Klingon, which is why that project appears to be moribund.

As a result, Klingon must be considered not a real language, as linguists would recognize the term, but a pidgin, and a particularly limited pidgin at that. Let's see The Klingon Dictionary by Marc Orklan. Being from Minnesota I'm ashamed you don't know this one. Morehead College taught it at a language elective.

Many KLG members speak it quite fluently, and two of my old college chums condicted entire conversations in it. Your point is now invalid. As I recal, this one isn't mine. I think, it's been a while since I posted so it very well could be. I'll definately give you this one. Although the controversy over Sanskrit is quite hot linguistically speaking. Never looked into it to be honest. If not, there's the possibility of it going the same road as Sanskrit.

Actually, there is. Marc Orklan was called on to give the Klingon language the verb "to be" for Star Trek 6 in order to translate the "To be or not to be" from Hamlet. Here I give you some credit again. I agree it's a rather silly thing to classify as a "real language". However, a case a rather strong one can be made for it to be a "real language.

Just as a side point, the folks at Morehead College are Sci-fi nuts apparently, this year they have a Critical Viewing of Doctor Who class which filled nearly immediatly along with guest lecturers from the show, it's own text book, the whole nine yards. Perhaps, but true.

Not so. Among fluent Klingonists and most people who aspire to fluency , there's a general agreement that "we" do not create vocabulary.

There indeed is one authority: Marc Okrand, the language's creator. It's easy to establish the standard way of saying "mercy" in Klingon: look it up in the dictionary. No, the major stumbling block was finding people who had both the linguistic credentials and the time to do it. Again, not so. Please tell me what feature of Klingon you believe invalidates it as a "real language, as linguists would recognize the term," and what makes you call it a "pidgin".

Sorry that I was insufficiently clear in what I wrote. When I said "Unlikely in all three cases. Greenberg's "language universals. No, that doesn't count. The authority has to be willing to continue to be an authority, and I'm sure that Marc Okrand has no interest in making all the new vocabulary that would be necessary to make Klingon a truly useful human language.

As I said previously, Latin does not have an authority nor can it rely on common usage as English does to determine new vocabulary.

Latin speakers can't even agree on a common pronunciation! There are are at least a couple of world standards and many national varieties.

Good grief! I take it you are using two meanings of "real language" in the above sentence. I was interested only in the term as a linguist might use it: In technical use, however, he or she would be more likely to use the term "true language.

I recently attended a meeting of an Esperanto group here in St. Paul, in which I speculated that there were more Klingon speakers than Esperanto speakers in Minnesota.

My suggestion which I based on the fact that Minnesota seems to be a hotbed of Klingon-language learning was met with skepticism, and I am now skeptical of it myself.

This conversation was all in Esperanto, by the way. It was an odd experience to be speaking Esperanto with other Esperantists after having not done so for about twenty years. Change of topic: I was going to write a post in which I blamed the Vulcans for giving us humans the inaccurate transliteration "Klingon" for "tlhingan" as shown in the pilot episode of "Enterprise". I figured it would have been just as easy for us to say the Klingon word. Then I read a description of how one must pronounce the phoneme "tlh" which is one letter in the original Klingon and decided that the Vulcans did us a favor!

To repeat what I said in another post: "Sorry that I was insufficiently clear in what I wrote. When I said 'Unlikely in all three cases. It is treated, then, in a very different way than Esperanto or any other constructed language. However, this very fact makes it questionable whether it is a true language. The reason is that certain things are not permitted in true languages because they are selected out, the language having been formed by an evolutionary process. Thus, you could imagine a constructed language in which the negative form of a sentence is formed by reversing the order of words in the entire sentence: "I have three cookies" would mean you had three cookies, and "cookies three have I" would mean that you did not have three cookies.

A computer might be able to handle such a language although even I have my doubts about that , but a person could not, so that feature has been selected out of natural languages. In fact, the constructed language Solresol had a similar feature which was used to create certain vocabulary: the word for Devil was a reversed form of the word for God.

However, this feature conflicted with another feature of Solresol where words were formed according to hierarchies. The words formed by the reversal process did not fit the hierarchies to which they should have belonged.

In a natural language, such a situation would very likely be selected against. Marc Okrand deliberately constructed Klingon to be a language which violated the "language universals" described by Joseph H. How do we know at this point that one or more of those universals violated by Klingon is not actually necessary for a human language?

Having a single man be the authority for a language sounds like trouble to me: It sets you up for the possibility of schism when the man dies. Better to set up a language academy, as Esperanto does. And I still believe that Mr. Okrand has no interest in creating the necessary vocabulary to make Klingon a fully functioning human language. The Klingons, vicious warriors that they are, have no words, among the 2, or so of which we know, for ideas like God, holy, mercy, compassion, atonement, and forgiveness.

That the project is moribund because of the problem of limited vocabulary is another idea which is not mine, but which I read on a Web page for which I have no cite, unfortunately. It is not what features Klingon has, but what features it does not have.

To begin with, I doubt that linguists will come to the conclusion that Klingon is a real language until it has stood the test of linguistic study, the results of which are printed in refereed scientific journals and verified by other linguists.

That is how American Sign Language ASL was finally recognized as a language, rather than being thought of as a primitive substitute for true language. However, just because linguists don't yet recognize it as a true language does not mean it is not, in reality, a true language. ASL must have been a true language, after all, before it was recognized as such. So what makes a true language? Well, it has to pass certain tests of adequacy.

In due course, children grow up speaking the pidgin as their main language, and when this happens it must change to meet their needs. Depending on the stage at which creolization occurs, different types of structural expansion are necessary before the language can become adequate. A creole and all other true languages are suitable for any use to which their speakers put them. If new vocabulary is needed, it is made. Instead, that seems to have happened on Discovery.

But, when Burnham killed the Torchbearer in the first episode of Discovery , that counted as the Federation making contact with the Klingons, rather than the Klingons making contact with them. Now, Starfleet is headed to the same planet, with a deposed Mirror Universe Emperor leading the charge, and a plan to invade the planet. Ryan Britt. Archer decides to bring a cell ship on board with a grappler. In the situation room, Travis asks Archer and Trip about the workings of the captured Suliban ship.

Trip is unsure, so Travis wants to pilot it, but Archer thinks Travis is needed on the bridge. Then, in Archer's ready room, T'Pol tries to dissuade him from leaving. Archer thinks she's concerned, but she actually just doesn't want the Vulcan High Command to get her in trouble for anything bad happening to Archer or Trip. Malcolm brings Archer two cases, one containing a magnetic device and the other containing phase pistols.

Archer and Trip leave in the captured cell ship and go to the helix, where they find Klaang. He initially tries to attack, but relents when Archer draws his phase pistol.

After a while, Archer tells Trip to bring Klaang back to the cell ship, while he stays behind and tries to separate the helix with the magnetic device. Trip ignites the cell ship's thruster exhaust, alerting Hoshi, who tells T'Pol, who finds him. On the helix, Archer fights an alien into a room with a pulsing light, then is beamed onto the Enterprise , and the Enterprise leaves.

The Klingon Chancellor cuts Klaang on the hand and analyses his blood, revealing it to contain Suliban information. Back on Enterprise , Archer tells his crew to continue forward. Trip sets to work repairing the ship and Travis, despite an ion storm, sets a course for a nearby planet.

Archer then has one last childhood flashback. Community Showcase More. Follow TV Tropes. You need to login to do this. Get Known if you don't have an account. Imagine it. Thousands of inhabited planets at our fingertips. And we'll be able to explore those strange new worlds and seek out new life and new civilizations. This engine will let us go boldly where no man has gone before. Moore: pointing a rifle at Klaang Drop your weapon! I mean it!

Klaang: shouting in Klingonese Moore: I don't understand a word you're saying, but I guarantee you I know how to use this! Klaang: more shouting in Klingonese. Archer: Great. You scratched the paint. T'Pol: Can we dock, Ensign? Screen Shake Travis: These aren't ideal conditions.

Malcolm: Pardon me, but if I don't realign the deflector, the first grain of space dust we come across will blow a hole through this ship the size of your fist. Trip: Keep your shirt on, Lieutenant. Your equipment'll be here in the morning. Archer: Let me get this straight. You're going to disconnect this man from life support even though he could live. Now where's the logic in that? Soval: Klaang's culture finds honor in death. If they saw him like this, he'd be disgraced.