Marc Okrand on Klingon and Conlanging

George interviews Marc Okrand on his work on Klingon and Atlantean and his experiences with both the Klingon speaker community and the greater conlanging community.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Welcome to Conlanguery, the podcast about
constructed languages andthe people who create them.
I'm George Corley.

(00:22):
And with me in Washington, we havesomeone who needs no introduction.
Mark Okrund, the creatorof Klingon and Atlantean.
Hi.
Hi.
Good to be here.
Mark?

(00:48):
We're, we're, we're fightingwith some Internet issues, but
we're going to try to get theshow going as well as we can.
But, uh, thank you somuch for being on, Mark.
Um, I, you know, you are actuallyan inspiration for a lot of conlangers

(01:09):
because I think a lot of conlangerssaw Klingon and that was one of the, the.
things that got them into conlanging inthe first place in the, in the community.
Um, I know that one ofmy first languages I made
VOS specificallybecause I saw it in Klingon.

(01:31):
Um, but just wanted to have you on to,to talk to you about, you know, you were
one of the first people to create alanguage for a major property in Star Trek.

(01:52):
And I, I just, in terms of what you'veseen since that time, could you talk
about like, how has thatsort of scenario changed?
How has that changed in terms of likethe number of properties that are putting

(02:14):
conlangs in and how they're seekingout conlangers and things like that?
Yeah, it's changed a lot.
Uh, cause when I did itfor, for Klingon, which was
back in 1984, uh, there'dbeen essentially nothing.
That's not quite true.
There was a little bit before me, therewas a little bit of Klingon before me.
Um, maybe six, eight lines inthe, in the first Star Trek movie.

(02:35):
And there was, you know, one or twoother movies or TV shows where they'd
done actual conlanging, made up realconsistent languages and stuff, but teeny
tiny bit, but ever since Klingon, and notimmediately when, when Klingon came out,
but, you know, within a number of years,maybe, maybe 10, 15 years, uh, things

(02:56):
changed so that now any film, it seemsany, any TV show that makes use of a, uh,
a people, a civilization or somethingthat's somehow different, it's either,
you know, outer spacepeople or some mythological
fantasy like peopleor something like that.
Um, they always now seem tohave their own language and it's

(03:20):
always conlanged by somebodywho knows what they're doing.
And that's a, that's a hugechange from the way it was before.
I think it's great.
I mean, for years and years and years,people making films and TV shows have
paid attention to, to one degree oranother to the science and the history
to make sure that that'sas accurate as it can be.
And when it came to language,everybody, you know, in American, North

(03:41):
American TV anyway, and movies,everybody just spoke English all the
time, no matter what, or, or spokegobbledygook, but no longer, no longer.
Now, now when they speak somethingthat's not the major language of the film,
it's, it's legit, it's real.
And that's terrific.
Yeah, it's, it's really great.
And it's interesting to think about,like, I've seen talks by you talking

(04:05):
about like the process of doingKlingon dialogue and just sort of the, the,
the general chaos of an actor does aline wrong and you being very gracious
and actually going through and justlike making new Klingon words so that this

(04:27):
line just happens to be entirelyhomophonous with the other line.
Um, I think one of the, myfavorite things from Klingon, and
I, I don't know if this is theway that you think about it.
You can correct me if I'mwrong about it is like, it seems
to me like you took like thecanon names of, of things.

(04:52):
And you said, well, thisis like a bad Anglicization.
It's not Klingon.
It's actually Klingon.
It's not Kronos.
It's actually Kroknos.
And just sort of made it fit the Klingonphonology and said, okay, this is what.
some Federation person heardand then turned into whatever that is.

(05:15):
Well, that, that's exactly right.
I decided, you know, madeup the phonological rules of
Klingon and said, okay,that's the way Klingon works.
Um, people in, in theFederation, non-Klingon,
whatever, they, theydon't get it quite right.
They mangle it a little bit.
So what we hear them saying, what we hearCaptain Kirk saying and all of that is,

(05:36):
is the Anglicized orFederationized or something
version of Klingon, not,not the Klingon version.
So it was taking all those names andthings that the writers had made up and,
and making, you know, givingthem proper Klingon phonology.
Yeah.
And I mean, the, you know, thewriters are going to do their thing.

(05:58):
The writers are going towant their specific pet names.
Was there anything that was particularlydifficult to integrate into Klingon?
Like particular namesthat you looked at that
were like, no, this is justlike not even Klingon?
Well, names in particular, whenthey made up items, you know,

(06:19):
names of weapons or something,that was, that wasn't so bad.
Names were tricky though, because namestended to violate the rules of Klingon
phonology, Klingon phonotacticsmore than other things.
I don't know why that's the case.
But you know, the most famousKlingon of all, I suppose, is Worf.

(06:39):
And Worf can't be a Klingon word, right?
You don't, you don'thave an F at all in Klingon.
And even if you did, you wouldn't haveRF at the end of a word together like that.
And other names theymade up too, just don't fit.
So I thought about thatbecause it wasn't just the
one, it was, it was anumber of different names.
I had nothing to do with makingup any Klingon names, right?

(07:01):
They made up for the films and TV shows.
They made up all thenames with one exception.
I made up the name for Worf's father.
I didn't know that that's what I was doing.
They just wanted a nameand I gave them some name.
Turned out to be Worf's father, who knew?
But anyway, I did "Molch".
Yeah.

(07:21):
What I decided for Klingon names sothat all these weird names could still fit.
Cause I, the way I go, Iwould Klingonize them
is to still come up withpretty weird Klingon.
So Worf, for example, isWorf, which is sort of Worf.
Um, I decided thatthe reason that these
names are so strangefrom a, from a Klingon.

(07:44):
phonological point of view is becausein Klingon culture, Klingon naming
practices happen to be that you giveyour kid a name in another language.
So it doesn't have tofollow the Klingon way.
Oh, that works.
Yeah.
So it is very interesting that likeyou have the philosophy of whatever is

(08:11):
appearing on screen, you're going to treatas canon and then you're going to bend
Klingon around it to, to fit that evenwhen it's like, to anyone who knows the
preexisting rules,this is like bad Klingon.
I think like, if you look at Conlanger'stoday, at least, you know, I see David

(08:36):
Peterson talking about likewhen there's a bad edit and
he's like, he'd just, he'djust be like, well, that's wrong.
That's not the actual Dothrakithat I made or whatever.
Right.
Right.
And, but you were workingwithin like what they did and when
they made a mistake, youjust said, okay, well, that's fine.
Well, it depended on, on whenand when, when it happens too.

(09:00):
If, if I, if I had any control over it atthe time they were doing it, I could make
corrections, either, either redo it, whichdidn't happen very often or figure out
something so that goingforward I could make it fit.
But if I didn't knowabout it until I saw it
on TV, I said, okay,I'm, I'm stuck with that.
They said it.
That's it.

(09:21):
Now, now the, the, the people who speakKlingon, because now there's a bunch of
people who do, which obviously wasn'tthe case when all this got started, sort of
make a distinction in their minds between,between real Klingon language and TV
Klingon language, if Ihaven't adapted it yet.
Oh, so they have an ideasometimes of when there's, there's

(09:44):
a mistake on screen thatit's like not actually what was.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They hear some, no, no, that's just,that's, that's just something that the
actors did or theproducers did or something.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But they'll always, then they'll come tome and say, okay, someone so said this.
What's this all about?
You know, that could be years later inthe very first Next Generation episode

(10:07):
that had Klingons in it at that time,weren't paying any attention to it.
Uh, so years later,and there's, there's just
a few lines of, ofKlingon in that episode.
So years later, people said,this guy, this Klingon guy
goes to the food replicatorand he orders something.
And, but he says is gobbledygook.
Um, what does that mean?
So I figured out something,give him something

(10:31):
tasty that he'sordering from the thing.
What is the, the back and forth betweenyou and like the, the Klingon language
Institute people, the Klingon speakers,uh, like I, I understand that mostly they
treat you as like the ultimate authority,but is there, do you ever draw things

(10:55):
from materials that they make or,or is it mostly like a one to one way?
It's a, it's a two waystreet, but it's, but it's,
it's, it's not like twosides of the highway.
They're two different streets.
The whole organization came intobeing without my even knowing about it.
I didn't know that it even existeduntil, um, this is now years ago.

(11:17):
There's 20 something yearsago, 28 years ago or something.
Um, I got a call froma guy who said he was
the head of the Klingonlanguage Institute.
And I said, what is that?
Right.
So he had to tell me allabout it, even though there'd
been at that point inexistence for a little while.
Uh, but since then I've gotten involvedwith the organization to the extent
that I know the people who, who run itand the, and the, a lot of the members

(11:41):
and I go to their annual meetingsand things like that, and they decided.
I did not make this decision.
They decided that theultimate source of who
can say what's rightand what's wrong is me.
Uh, and also the ult, the only, onlysource of new vocabulary or new grammar.
rules, if there's to be such a thing is me.

(12:04):
So they come to me sort of all thetime, but generally twice a year, because
there's a big, there's a bigmeeting of Klingon speakers
in, uh, usually NorthAmerica in the summertime.
And there's one in Germany in November.
And ahead of these meetings,okay, here's a list of words.
What are the, we'd like tohave Klingon equivalents

(12:24):
for, or explanations orphrases or something.
And here's some grammatical thingsthat's that have been puzzling us.
We don't know what to do.
Um, and do it that way.
So, so that's that the requests,you know, uh, come from them.
And the answers come from me having,having said that in between times, the
ones who are really, really good speakerscarry on all kinds of conversations and

(12:47):
write things and so forth with materialthat's available, they don't make anything
up in the sense they don't make upany, any new morphemes or, or any new
grammatical rules, butthey make very, very clever.
And I would say correctuse of what's there.
Um, to say, to say what theyhave to say, if there's not a
word for something, I say, okay,what, what, what can we use?

(13:08):
What little short little phrase canwe use that means this, if there's not a
single word already in existence, uh,and some of those get incorporated into the
language in the sensethat I say, yeah, that's cool.
And some of them don't, but the onesthat don't are usually because I don't know
about it, I don't know everythingthat they're talking about.
Yeah.

(13:28):
That's, that's interesting.
I mean, I've, they've translatedthe Bible, they've translated Hamlet.
Uh, there's the, uh, uh, a Klingonopera that is actually performed.
It's, it's really interesting.
How much of like growth have youseen since, since you started back in the

(13:52):
eighties and, you know, you talk aboutthe Klingon Language Institute formed
without you knowing about it, uh,to me, this sounds like this is sort of.
Because of, you know, pre Internet things.
If we had social media inthe eighties, you'd probably get
tweeted about it immediately.

(14:12):
But like how much has like, how muchhas the, the community changed because of.
like the Internet and theability to communicate
very rapidly withall kinds of people?
I would say that I wouldn't say thecommunity wouldn't exist without the,
without the Internet, butcertainly the Internet was

(14:34):
instrumental in getting it goingand, and, and keeping it going.
Uh, because the, the, when I was workingon Star Trek three, which is the first
film that had my Klingon in it, uh, I gotthe idea of writing a book explaining how
the language works,thinking that Star Trek
fans might think thisis funny or something.
I don't know what I was thinking.

(14:55):
I was not thinking thatpeople would really learn the
language and carry ondiscussions and translate things.
That was not in my mind at the time.
Um, and I wrote the bookand it came out in 1980,
tail end of 84, beginningof 85, something like that.
And then a second editioncame out around 1992

(15:17):
and that one soldbetter than the first one.
Um, for, for, for whatever you willpartly was because at that point, next
generation had started and all kindsand wharf was a big deal and so on.
Um, but also that's when theInternet was really getting going.
Uh, uh, we're mutual, mutuallybeneficial, you know, Klingon, Klingon is
responsible for the growthof the Internet, of course.

(15:38):
Uh, but that's wherepeople were able to find each
other, uh, in a waythat they couldn't before.
And, you know, it wasn't just, I'mthe only one who's interested in this
language is there's this other person,this other person communities formed and
eventually in-person communities formedthat, you know, because people knew each
other on the Internet, but the Internetwas, I think, I think really, really

(15:59):
critically important togetting this thing going.
People have been making up languages,you know, people doing conlang, even though
it wasn't called that for, youknow, for thousands and thousands
of years, but everyonethought, gee, I'm just doing this.
No one else is doing this.
I'm the only one, or maybemy friend and that's it.
Um, it was the same thing with Klingonor would have been, I think the same thing
with Klingon had the Internet not startedgoing now, having said that, of course

(16:21):
there was Star Trek conventions andthings like that, where people would get
together, so maybe peoplewould find each other, but it
certainly wouldn't, wouldn'thave happened in the same way.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's, it's really interesting to see that.
Um, speaking of like the Internetchanging things, like for me getting
involved in the conlang community wasvery much something that happened because

(16:45):
of Internet forums and things, and itseems that you have, um, in recent years
gotten more involved with likemore broadly conlang community stuff.
Like, uh, you just gave a talk at CopyCon.

(17:06):
Um, uh, you appear in events withthe, with other, with, well, at least with
the other movie conlangers withPaul Fromer and, and David Peterson.
Um, what has, how, what has thatbeen like, and has it like changed anything
about like how you view what you've donewith your languages and, and what is your

(17:34):
view of like the broaderconlang community now
that you've had someinvolvement with that?
Yeah, well, in terms of the working withthe people who have, who have done other
movies and TV shows and stuff,what that's done for me is, uh, reinforce
something that I knew allalong, which is I'm not alone.
I'm not the only one doing this, youknow, for years and years, if I'd meet

(17:55):
people, not people involved withconlanging and not, and probably not even
linguists, um, butthey'd say to me, uh, Oh,
you, you made up Klingon,you made up a language.
Wow.
How unique, how strange.
And I said, it's not strange.
People have been doingthis for a long, long time.
Most people don't get their languages upon a 70 millimeter screen, but people have

(18:18):
been making up languagesforever and ever and ever.
That's not unique.
And working with the people who have,who've done similar things to what I've
done, meaning David Petersonand Paul Frommer, right.
And, and so on, who'vedone it for movies and TV.
So yeah, see, it's not just me.
You know, other, other peopleare doing it too, which is, uh, nice.
It's nice to have this little community.

(18:39):
It's nice to not feelthat I'm all alone in
some kind of a silodoing something or other.
Um, but as a result of doing that, togo to the other part of your question, you
know, I've met people in, in the, in themore general conlanging community, which
certainly, uh, well, I wouldn't say Iwouldn't have happened, but it was,

(19:00):
wouldn't have happened as, as, asmuch, uh, had, had this not happened.
Uh, and what I've foundmeeting these people is
how incredibly brilliantand creative they are.
The kind of stuff that they talk about anddo and the languages they came up with and
the things they're concerned aboutand, and, and, and the back and forth cross

(19:21):
pollination and all is,is just, is just brilliant.
Uh, and you know, absolutely amazing.
Now among the Klingonspeakers themselves,
they do the samething, but it's just Klingon.
Right.
And they're brilliant too.
They're brilliant too.
And what they've done withKlingon is a lot more than
I would probably havedone with it all by myself.
But the, the, the, the extent of the, I'veused the word brilliant too many times.

(19:47):
with this, there's really, really smartpeople doing this kind of thing and the
kind of things that they'reconcerned about and the kind of
things they fuss about are,are, are so just so interesting.
Yeah.
I, I, I do wonder, like thinkingabout like, I think there's still cases of.

(20:09):
people coming into a conlang project withlike preexisting material or, or at least
like names to fit to or somethinglike that, but like, well, so I would say,
well, maybe, maybe you haveactually experienced a difference here.
So like you all also did the languageAtlantean for Disney's Atlantis.

(20:34):
Was that a different experiencethan what you did with Klingon?
Like where you broughton earlier, was there, was
there more control on yourpart or, or how was that?
Yeah, that was, that was verydifferent in a number of different ways.
Um, in, in no particular order, one, oneway was with Atlantean, I did not work

(20:57):
with any of the actors, but anotherdifference that, that you just mentioned
is with Klingon, well, Klingoninitially was just for Star
Trek three and it was only,I don't know, a dozen lines.
Well, it's probably more than that, buthowever many lines, 20 lines, something.
That's it.
Uh, and not very much time to do it.

(21:17):
I mean, you know, several months,but not gobs and gobs of time.
Um, Atlantean was a four year project.
Cause I got involved with that fouryears before the film came out and a lot of
ongoing discussions with the producerand the directors of that film about the
language and about the writing system,which I did not do, other people did it,
but we talked about it a lot and thejumping off points for the two were very

(21:44):
different, what I mean by that isfor Klingon, um, first I knew about the
Klingons because I'd seen them on TVand I read about them in the script, right?
So there was some, some culturalinformation I had about them.
Not, not as much as we've had sincethen, since Next Generation came around.
They've been fleshed out a lot.
Um, so I knew a little bit about, aboutthe people whose language, you know,

(22:07):
who'd be speaking this languageI was going to create, right.
And there was also a teeny bit oflanguage that, that preceded me because
there's a few lines at the very, verybeginning of Star Trek, the motion
picture, uh, and the people whomade that up, which is, uh, two people,
primarily is John Povil, whowas one of the producers
and James Dillon, who wasthe actor who played Scotty.

(22:27):
The two of them came up with that Klingon.
Uh, we're very concerned with what itsounded like, not so much with grammar
and vocabulary and stuff like that.
But that was a start.
I had to make use of those words orphrases or whatever you want to call them.
So I wasn't starting from zero.
So I wasn't starting from zero interms of who, who, who is the speaking
community, and it wasn't starting fromzero in terms of the phonology anyway.

(22:50):
I was in terms of grammar and stuff.
Um, and, and went from thereand also, and also knew that,
uh, I'm making up a languageof people from another planet.
So there's no reason for their languageto resemble a language on earth, except
for the fact that human actorsare the ones who are going to say it.

(23:13):
So I had to make it pronounceable,even if it was weird and stuff like that.
Uh, for Atlantean, I knew verylittle about the Atlantean people.
I'd read the script, but there was just,you know, that that's all there was to
know, uh, didn't haveany, any background from
seeing them on TV earlieror something like that.

(23:33):
Uh, and there's a line in, in the film,in the script, well, there's a scene in
the script, in the, in the film, uh, wherethe explorers, uh, get to Atlantis and
they encounter the Atlantean peopleand the Atlantean people are speaking
Atlantean to them, which of coursethe explorers don't understand.
And then the Atlantean people quicklyrealized that the explorers don't understand.

(23:57):
So they try out other languages.
The Atlanteans do, uh, and they tryout, you know, I forget which one's Spanish
and French, Chinese or whatever it is.
They're, they're doing different thingsand very, very quickly, uh, figure out
that English is thelanguage that they should use
and then proceed to talkEnglish to the explorers.
And one of the characters,the explorer says to, you know,

(24:19):
the hero of the movie, MiloThatch is the hero of the movie.
He's a linguist.
He's the main guy in the exploration team.
Uh, they say to him, how didthey learn our language so fast?
How did they learn English so fast?
And Milo says, well, that's becausetheir language is a root dialect.
You know, it's the languagethat all the languages
on earth came fromor something like this.

(24:39):
Um, and I said to thedirector, they said, you
know, it doesn't, itdoesn't really work like this.
There should be another reasonthat the, that they're speaking English.
Uh, I think I came up with two or threedifferent explanations or something, but
the line ended up staying in themovie anyway, so I said, okay, uh, I don't

(25:02):
think that whateverthey're speaking is really the
language that all languagesof the world came from.
But I have to make up something thathas characteristics such that Milo could
come to that, uh, conclusion,even if he's wrong, right?
So instead of making a language that'sas different as I could from, from earth.

(25:26):
languages, like for Klingon, I made alanguage that's sort of as common as I
could, it had very, very, very commonsounds, very, very common grammatical,
uh, structure for vocabulary.
If I could find a relevant word or rootor something in proto-Indo-European or
proto-Sino-Tibetan or somethinglike that, I would, I would incorporate it

(25:47):
into the thing as longas it didn't sound like
English, which a lot of theIndo-European things did.
Um, and if, if I couldn't findit, then I just make stuff up.
So there's, there is, there was a effortto make it earth language like in a way.
And with Klingon, there was an effort tomake it not earth language like in a way,
even though I didn't fullyachieve either one for either one.

(26:09):
Oh, okay.
Interesting.
See, I would, had been under theimpression that Atlantean was like an
Indo-European language, but what you'retelling me was like, okay, the, the, the
writer people have said that Milo thinksthis is proto-world, which doesn't make

(26:34):
any sense, but we'll gowith that and make something
that sounds like it couldbe maybe proto-world.
It sounds, sounds like somethingthat would spark that idea in Milo's head.
Again, whether he's right orwrong, it was, it was a, Hey,
maybe this is why that,that, that might fit the facts.
Let's see.

(26:54):
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's, that's, that's interesting.
It's always interesting to have thatback and forth in terms of like what the
writers think is good worldbuilding versus what the

(27:15):
linguist knows about howthings actually work and, and that.
So, and it's alsointeresting that like, you're
interpreting that in a wayof like, this is his statement.
This isn't actuallynecessarily true, but it's like a
hypothesis that he came upwith based on limited exposure.

(27:37):
Right.
And it fits and it fix what it fits,what's been presented to us in the film.
It doesn't come out ofthe, from out of the blue.
Yeah.
I do wonder withhaving to go, going back
to Klingon with havingto fit to preexisting
material, if you had been broughtonto that project earlier and been able to,

(28:04):
help design Klingonfrom the beginning, do you
think you would havedone it any differently?
Probably, but don't askme what would be different.
Cause I don't know, since Ididn't have to sit around and
think of, okay, we're startingfrom scratch, what should I do?
I never considered altered,altered, alternate forms of Klingon.

(28:29):
You know, I have made uplanguages or language fragments
for other Star Trek races,if you want to call them that.
So I have, have thought ofstuff that's very UN-Klingon
and, and on English, onFrench, on Chinese, whatever.
But for Klingon inparticular, I don't know, I

(28:50):
don't know what I wouldhave done differently.
The grammar was all my own.
Right.
Right.
Cause there was, therewas no, no way to figure out
from the beginning whatthe grammar was all about.
Right.
Um, so there was no problem.
That may or may, may ormay not have been the same.
I don't know.
And the vocabularyinitially, uh, was all

(29:11):
what was needed forthe film and nothing more.
So, you know, the, the first batch ofwords that I made up for Klingon were those
that were needed to translatethe lines in the script, period.
Right.
And they never talk in the script.
They never talk in the script.
They never talk in the script.
Right.
And they never talk in the script.
They never talked about, youknow, I'd like a bowl of spaghetti.
So I didn't make up a wayto say bowl or spaghetti.

(29:34):
That's, that's super interesting.
The, just the, the difference in theprocess, the, the, the having to fit to
just preexisting gibberish and all ofthe things that you've, you've sort of
rationalized in order to make Klingonmake some kind of sense and also make like

(29:57):
statements made aboutAtlantean make some kind of sense.
It's, it's a very interesting approachthat you have to making these languages.
Um, do you envision yourself like doing anymore of this kind of work in the future?
Like, you know, if you were contacted byHollywood studios now, would you take on

(30:24):
another conlanging job or would you passit to other conlangers you know, or, or
what would you, otherlinguists that you know?
Yeah.
These days, these days,if it's, if it's really starting
from scratch, uh, I'll passit on to somebody else.

(30:46):
Yeah.
It's, it's, it's, it's that timefor, for a lot of reasons.
Uh, if it, if it's, if it's Klingon, uh,then yeah, I'll, I'll, I'll do Klingon.
And I do that, that happens.
On the other hand, there's otherpeople doing Klingon for Star Trek as well.
Uh, in Star Trek Discovery, that,that, that show, um, the first season, uh,

(31:10):
plot wise was heavy on Klingons.
There's, they, they had a strange newlook, but there was Klingons all over the
place and there was Klingonlanguage all over the place.
A lot, lot, lot more Klingonlanguage in that than in
anything else, you know,by far, and I didn't do it.
I didn't, I didn't do anyKlingon for that show.
So all of the words thatwere used were mine.
The grammar was all mine.

(31:31):
Okay.
But the actual translationswere done by somebody else.
They were done byRobin Stewart, who is one
of the best Klingonspeakers in the world.
And a guy called AlanAnderson, who's another
one of the best Klingonspeakers in the world.
You know?
Um, uh, they were, theywere the ones who did that.
And they're sort of, Ithink in the Star Trek
Rolodex of people tocall if, if Klingon is needed.
And that's great.

(31:51):
That's wonderful.
I'm not, I'm not upset by that.
I'm actually pleased bythat for a number of reasons.
Flattered that the, you know, that thelanguage is such that other people can,
is that, is that a state that other peoplecan take it and, and, and translate all
these strange thingsthat they had to translate.
And there's other people too.
I think, you know, Star Trek inparticular has like a group of, I don't

(32:12):
know, four or five different people thatthey called for the different languages.
Yeah.
I, um, I know that I've interviewed,uh, Britton Watkins and I believe he did
some, uh, some, uh, coaching for likethe reboot movie, some Klingon coaching.

(32:35):
And I know that's really interesting.
Klingon.
Uh, yeah.
No, what I was going to say is, is in,in the, in the reboot movies, the three of
them, there's, therewas Klingon in the first

(32:56):
two and there's nonein the, in the third one.
Uh, and in the second movie, uh, they cutway back from what was originally there.
And this is not unusual at all.
I mean, in moviemaking, you'remaking these kinds of changes in
post-production all thetime, so it's no big deal.
Uh, and Britton was onset for the second movie.
So I made up the lines, but Brittoncoached the actors in saying the lines.

(33:20):
Uh, but what endedup happening and he did
a great job and theactors did a great job.
Uh, but what ended uphappening is they edited this one.
They edited so much that there was onlyone scene left that had Klingon language
in it and they editedit so much that the
Klingon that was leftdidn't make any sense.

(33:40):
They, they shortened it.
They took the end of one sentence andput it at the beginning of another one, or
they started a sentence in the middle ofthe sentence and threw away the beginning.
I forget what they did.
They just scrambled it all up.
Um, and they realized that itdidn't make any sense anymore.
Um, and the pronunciation was gorgeous,but it just didn't make any sense.
And it certainly didn't mean what the,what the new subtitles were going to mean.

(34:05):
So they gave me a call and they toldme this and they said basically that they
had three choices aboutwhat to do about this situation.
One was ignore it andjust go with what they got.
And they said, you know, once upon atime they could have gotten away with that,

(34:26):
but not anymore because theaudience is paying attention.
There's people who reallyspeak Klingon out there
who will know that thisjust, this doesn't work.
That is, so we can't do that.
We have, we have to, wehave to have to do it properly.
And there's two properways they thought of doing it.
One is shoot it over again.
And that's not going tohappen at this late stage.
And the other is the one that they did.

(34:47):
They asked me if it were possible and thenwe ended up doing it, which is we, um, uh,
they played me or sent me a video ofthe scene and I made up Klingon, basically
Klingon gibberish, uh, that sounded likeKlingon and matched the lip movements.

(35:11):
that were already there.
And when I say gibberish,it's not really gibberish
because I had to makeit be real Klingon, right?
Um, so I could make up newvocabulary and did to, to make
all this made sense, but Icouldn't make up new grammar.
So grammatically it had to fit inwith, with, with what Klingon was
there, uh, had already existed.

(35:33):
So, uh, we did this, there was onlytwo speakers in, in what was left.
Uh, there was Uhura, actually anon-Klingon, uh, who does most of the
talking, uh, and listened to her linesand figured out how to, how to change,
you know, this to thatand make the, make the

(35:56):
mouth movements workfor the new, the new lines.
Then there was one guy, oneKlingon guy who has basically one line.
Uh, and when I listened to him, I didn'tunderstand at all what he was saying,
you know, with, with the Uhura lines, ZoeSaldana, uh, who, who worked with Britain.
Uh, what, what, what was recordedthere was, was beautiful and clear.

(36:16):
It's just chopped off in themiddle of a sentence or something.
Um, but with this guyand Britain worked with
him too, it didn'tmake any sense at all.
I said, no, no, Britain was there.
Britain did a good job.
What is going on here?
This guy doesn't evensound like he's talking Klingon.
He sounds like he's talking backwards.
I said, Oh, so I looked at my notesto see what lines he might be saying.

(36:40):
Cause there was a bunch of lines thatit might've been, but only one was left.
I said, I think it's this one.
And I wrote it out phoneticallybackwards and then listened to him again.
And that's exactly what it was.
So I called up the movie people andthen said, is this guy talking backwards?
Are you playing the film backwards?
I know it's not film,whatever it is these days.
Um, and they said, yeah, it goes backwards.

(37:02):
And I said, why?
And they said, because it looks better.
And we knew we were goingto replace the audio anyway.
So I had to make up new Klingon thatmeant what the new subtitle said and be
grammatically accurate with perhapssome new vocabulary that matched the lip
movements of some guytalking Klingon backwards.
Right.
So all the, all the great work thatBritain did did not end up in the film.

(37:24):
Yeah.
Well, hopefully they hadsomeone doing dialect
coaching for the ADRwork they had to do later.
That was good.
Yeah.
That's that, that is always, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So with collaborating with the other, orI won't even say that I'll, I'll let you.

(37:50):
define, so when you have other peopledoing the dialect coaching or doing the
translation for Klingon now, like howmuch collaboration with you is there?
Do they, do they email you questionsor do they, do they like talk to you or are
they mostly just goingfor, with your materials,

(38:14):
taking your materialsand applying it?
It's the latter, you know, they'redoing, they're doing it all on their own.
It's again, it's, it's mygrammar and, and, and, and
vocabulary and morphologyand all that kind of stuff.
Um, but they're, they're making use ofthat with, with extremely rare exceptions.

(38:34):
You know, every once in a whilethey, they would hit a stone wall, but it's
less like over the course of the series,two words, three words, something like that.
Now for, for another interesting thingthat happened with Discovery, uh, for
the first season of Discovery, theKlingon season, um, that year Discovery

(38:55):
was on, uh, was streaming, I guess,in, in the U S on what's now it called
Paramount Plus,whatever it was called then.
CBS All Access it was called.
And it was on something or other in Canada.
I don't know what, but everywhereelse in the world, it was on Netflix and on
Netflix for anything, not just Star Trek,but for anything, you know, you can use.

(39:18):
to watch subtitles in anyof a number of languages.
So you could watch a German showwith French subtitles and an English show
with a Spanish subtitlesand the Spanish show with
German subtitles andso on, all that kind of stuff.
For Star Trek Discoveryseason one, you could watch
the entire season withKlingon subtitles, right?
When they're talking English,there's Klingon subtitles.

(39:41):
Um, and I didn't do that either.
I wasn't in, in, uh, because right.
No, no, no, no.
It's in regular Roman characters.
The, the, the, uh, the TVtechnology does not support PICARD.
Oh, it's it's, oh, I, itwould be impossible to do.
Yeah.
Yeah.

(40:01):
No, there's a guy leaving Littar.
So they had someonetranslate the entire script, right?
The entire script.
Um, this guy in Germany,leaving Littar did it.
Uh, and I worked with him a little bitwhile he was doing it because there was a
whole lot more English to be translatedinto Klingon than there was Klingon to be
translated, you know, in,uh, spoken Klingon in it.

(40:24):
So he had a lot, a lot of questions aboutvocabulary, uh, that the, that the ones
doing the Klingon dialoguedidn't have to deal with.
Uh, so I worked, workedwith him a bit on that, but it's
all his work or, or, orvirtually, uh, all his work.
Yeah.
It's interesting too, because the way itworked is, is the program was subtitled
in Klingon, meaning thewhole program was subtitled

(40:45):
in Klingon, including whenthey were talking Klingon.
So the first time I saw thatshow, actually, I wasn't home.
I was, I was in Belgium, uh, and watchingat a friend's house and the program
begins and I said, turn on,turn on the Klingon subtitles.
I want to see how the Klingon subtitles go.
So, okay.
So we turn on the Klingon subtitlesand the first, I don't know, 10 minutes of

(41:06):
the show or something is peopletalking Klingon with Klingon subtitles.
And after a little while,my friend turned to me
and he said, well, thisis all very interesting.
I don't have the slightestidea what anybody's saying.
Please turn on subtitlesin another language.
Right.
Oh, that's, that's great.

(41:28):
I did not know that they did thewhole thing that has to be like some kind
of landmark that your language.
Yeah.
It's just, yeah.
Just that season.
Um, yeah.
So, I mean, with all of these otherpeople doing Klingon, do you feel like,

(41:53):
you know, Star Trek is not going anywhere.
I don't think it's been going for.
What, like 70 years, 60, 70 years.
Uh, do you, do you feel like in thefuture that you'll be just handing off

(42:13):
Klingon to the speakers and,and Paramount will continue
just hiring them to do allthe Klingon in the future.
And do you feel confidentabout them carrying it forward?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, they're doing, I mean,Paramount is doing that already.

(42:36):
So, so certainly they'll,they'll continue to do that.
But in terms of the, the, the continuedgrowth and development of the language,
uh, you know, one of these daysit's not going to be me for sure.
Um, and it's good to these otherpeople and it's, I'm not sure exactly how.
that's going to work itself out,but there's, there, there's incredibly.

(43:00):
good hands, uh, to, to put it into.
So I'm not, I'm not concerned at all.
Yeah.
Okay.
That's, that's really amazing.
You know, and more and more andmore people, I would say right now, there's
more and more Klingon being done forthings other than Star Trek, the Klingon
speakers are producing a lot more stuffin Klingon than, than is needed for, you

(43:20):
know, an episode here and there of, of aTV show or a movie or something like that.
So people are translating things andwriting novels and songs and poetry.
There's, um, videos onYouTube, all kinds of stuff going
on, on in Klingon that hasnothing to do with Star Trek.
So it's, it's, it's, it'sgoing and growing.
Oh, I've seen, I've seen some Klingonmusic videos and I've seen it, you

(43:43):
know, incorporated into other propertieseven, and it's, it's really interesting.
Um, I would say it's, it's, it's amazingto see that this one particular language
has, has sort of transcended and evenit's like there is also a Klingon culture

(44:05):
on earth almost becauseyou have the opera,
you have music videosand all that stuff out.
Um, what was I, wherewas I going with that?
Um,
you know, that's the, from a, from aconlanging point of view that that's,

(44:29):
that's, that's interesting too, because,because when you make up a conlang, one
of the things you do, I think, isthink about who is this conlang for?
Why, why am I doing this?
I'm going to make up a language.
Why am I going to do this?
You know, who's going tospeak it or assuming it's spoken?
Um, so you have some kind of, uh, culturein mind, a fantasy world, an outer space

(44:52):
world, whatever it is, uh, some,some lost, uh, population on earth.
I don't know what, whatever peopleare going to be speaking this thing.
Uh, or you're doing it to,to test the, you know, how
far you can stretchparticular grammatical things.

(45:12):
Um, and so on, um, so there's allkinds of different reasons to do it.
So for Klingon, the reason for doing itinitially is it was the language spoken
by these outer space people doing theirouter space things, and it's some planet
that's not earth and they're mean andtough and warrior-like and all that, but
they're their own society and talk aboutwhatever it is they talk about up there.

(45:34):
But the people who are interested in thelanguage happened to be people on earth
in the 20th, 21st century, andthey talk about earth things.
And initially there wasn't enough vocabularyto do that in any, in any smooth way.
Uh, and the growth of the language moreand more and more is, uh, vocabulary-wise

(45:57):
anyway, is earth, earththings, things that humans talk
about, uh, and stuff likethat, not, not dilithium crystals.
Right?
It's sugar crystals thatyou put in your coffee.
So it's a whole, it's a whole different,whole different direction that it's going.
So it's a, it's a, you know,so who is this language for?
Who's speaking this thing?

(46:17):
Is it these outer space peopleor is it everybody here on earth?
It's just another languagelike Spanish, French, and
Esperanto, for example, youknow, is another language.
It's a, it's an interestingthing that's going on.
Yeah.
I think that's going to be a thing forall, all, all the conlayers that do stuff

(46:38):
for like these, these properties is fromnow on thinking about the potential for
that, because I mean, I think often, Ithink nowadays it, it's going to always
depend on like contracts and stuff andwhether like the studio allows you to do

(46:58):
further building or whatever, but, um,any one of these could catch on with the
audience and now you've got tothink about the, the culture that you're
building this for in world.
And then you've got to think about thereal world audience of the thing, which.

(47:21):
most conlayers are not thinking aboutit because we're doing it for ourselves.
But like when you'redoing it for the properties
now, I think that'sgoing to be a factor.
Um, exactly.
Yeah.
And, you know, and this is, this is not,as you say, this is, this is not unique
to Clingon, there was a veryinteresting gathering about

(47:46):
a year ago, uh, at MIT in, inCambridge, Massachusetts.
Um, the, they were doing a study, theywere doing brain scans on speakers of
conlangs to see if when you, whenyou process a conlang is the same part of
your brain firing, uh, as, as whenyou process whatever your, your native
languages or a naturallanguage or something like this.

(48:06):
And so there was a speakers of Clingonand Navi and Esperanto and Dothraki and,
uh, and then probablysomething else that I'm forgetting.
Um, sort of all, all together inthe same place at the same time.
And then, and the speakers talkingto each other learned about the other
languages or the otherlanguage communities.

(48:27):
And although there are differences,there are certain commonalities.
And this, this one about making use ofa, of a language that's created for one
culture, but using it for anotherone, uh, was kind of across the board.
So for example, uh, in, in Navi, thelanguage from Avatar, the Navi people
don't sit down because that's somethingabout their, their bodies or whatever.

(48:49):
So there's, you know, sothere's no word for chair,
but of course the Navispeakers on earth do sit down.
What are they going todo for a word for chair?
And so I had to deal, deal with this,the Navi speaking community on earth
had to deal with it, the Navispeaking world in, uh, on
the, on the Pandora planetdid not have to deal with it.
Yeah.

(49:10):
That, that's, that's interesting.
Yeah.
Because the tail would prevent themfrom sitting the way a human would.
Right.
Okay.
That's, that's interesting.
And it is interesting now thatlike, there's this cross pollination.
And that's another interesting,interesting thing too about, about,

(49:30):
yeah, yeah.
That it sparked another thought about,about making up a language for, for
other, other beings, othercreatures is, um, you know,
typically for years and yearsand years up until Klingon.
And it's not because Klingon is sowonderful, but chronologically speaking,
uh, if you go traveling around outerspace, encounter any kind of creature,

(49:55):
whatever they look like, look likesort of human, like, or look like a lizard
or look like anything,they, they talk generally,
if it's an American movie,they talk English, right?
Um, but their, their mouthsdon't necessarily want to do that.
If there's some kind ofanother, other sort of creature.
So I've, I've worked on a coupleof languages where I looked at the

(50:16):
character, at what the character lookslike, what their face looks like, what
kind of appliance they're wearing aspart of a make and say, okay, you know,
making this kind of asound would be something
that would bedifficult for them to do.
So whatever their language is,wouldn't have that sound, right?
Isn't that kind of thing, paying it,paying it in the same way you're
talking about the, the, theNavi and sitting down in the tails.

(50:39):
Yeah.
If your lips don't go togetherin a certain way, maybe
you can't make roundedvowels, that kind of thing.
Oh, that's a, that's, that'sa huge thing to think about.
Um, I just recentlystarted making a language.
It's my version of the draconiclanguage that's listed in D&D, right?
So it's for dragons, right?

(51:00):
And so like one of the first decisionsI'm doing this on a stream and going
with over it with my audience, and wekind of decided that they would be able
to do bilabials, but,but, but, but, but, but like
their lips wouldn't bequite flexible to do rounding.
And I don't know ifthat's the right, like, right.

(51:22):
Okay.
I didn't, I didn't know that.
Cause the example I just gave.
Yeah.
Like, I mean, I don't know if that's right.
I'm not a herpetologist.
I don't know exactly how capablesomething with reptile lips would be of
pronouncing different things, butthat was the reasoning that we had.

(51:43):
And you, you gotta think about if you'redoing stuff for aliens that are not like
humanoids, like Klingonsare, they could have
beaks, they couldhave like no nasal cavity.
They could have all kinds of differencesthat would restrict what sounds they
could do, or they couldhave differences that make

(52:07):
them able to pronouncethings that humans can't.
In which case, if you want to do that,then you've got to bring in the sound
guys and teach them some linguistics,which I don't know if anybody's done.
Right.
Um, I think, I think, uh,they've taught them linguistics.
They've certainly brought them in.
Yeah.

(52:28):
Yeah.
The sound effects languagestend to just be sort of gibberish.
Um, I would say.
Not always.
I made up a language for, for discovery,uh, which, which is a language that, that
from a, from a phonologicalpoint of view, I really liked.

(52:49):
I really liked the way it sounded.
They actually did a great job, but whenthey, when they produced it, when they did
the post-production for it, they, theyelectronically did something or other to
it to make it echoey ordifferent pitched or something.
So it sounded very strange to it and waseffective for the television show, but you
couldn't hear the keenphonology that I made up anymore.

(53:10):
So.
Oh, that's unfortunate.
But, uh, yeah, it's, it's.
And then they killed the character.
So we're never going to hear it.
Oh, well.
Yeah.
Well, I guess they, they didn't, theydidn't think that that was an important
part of it to preserve,but, uh, that's interesting.

(53:34):
Well, right.
And that's, and that's another thing tothink about when, when, when working on
the films and the TV and stuff like thatis, is what the writers and the producers
and the director and allthose people are primarily
concerned about iswhat does it sound like?
Yeah.
Cause what it means is what the subtitlessay, and they're not all that concerned

(53:54):
about, about grammar or specificsof vocabulary and stuff like that.
They are very concernedabout what it sounds like.
Right.
And you just have to understand that asa, as a, as a conlanger in this field, if
there's a field, that's somethingthat you just have to bear in mind.
And from what I've talked to other peoplewho have worked on like these conlanging

(54:16):
projects, they careabout what it sounds
like, but they're not very good atdescribing what it should sound like.
A lot of describing things as harsh orguttural and things that a linguist don't
know what that means.
Right.
Yeah.
Klingon in the script.
Exactly.
Exactly.
In the script for StarTrek three, it says

(54:39):
explicitly that Klingonis a guttural language.
All right.
What does that mean?
You have to figure that out.
So we'll stick a uvular African in.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
That's what I did.
Well, I think, I think we can wrap up.
Thank you so much for coming on, Mark.

(55:01):
And as a last thing.
It's been fun.
Thank you.
Do you have any like general advice toall of the conlangers out here who they may
have been inspired to get into conlangingby you or just anything, any sort of little

(55:24):
nugget of advice you'd liketo give as a parting thought?
Yeah, do it.
Just keep doing it.
It's fun, you know, and you're going tolearn so much about the language that you're
making up, but also about otherlanguages, including natural languages.
Just an incredible field.
Yeah.

(55:45):
I concur with that.
I will say I startedconlanging in high school
and then I ended upgetting a PhD in linguistics.
So that could be the future.
See?
Yeah.
Um, well, thank you.
Thank you so much for being on Mark.

(56:05):
And I was very happy tohave you on and, uh, and thank
you all for listening orwatching as the case may be.
And I'm going to say happy conlanging.
Special thanks to my patrons on Patreon.

(56:26):
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You can get access to scriptsfor my solo episodes and you
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