If your TV is on the fritz, you didn't pay your cable/satellite bill or you're just one of those Communists who does not watch the tube, you may not have heard there is a new Star Trek movie opening today and, according to one Weekly Trekker at least, it's a solid effort.
But some die-hards do have something to complain about, and they can do that complaining in the Warrior Tongue, Klingon. For as Slate's Arika Okrent points out, “There's something missing from J.J. Abrams' reboot of the moribund Star Trek franchise, and that something is Klingon. I mean Klingon the language.”
Time was you could mock those costumed geeks standing in line at the Anaheim Convention Center, practicing their second langugage, all loud and proud. Okay, so that time has not yet expired and probably never will. But do know that being able to converse with that fellow and others who look like these cats to the left is so admired there is a Klingon Language Institute, based on the work of its inventor, linguist Marc Okrand, and a quarterly journal,
HolQeD.
“The Klingon language is something truly unique,” boasts the KLI. “While there have been
other artificial languages, and other languages crafted for fictional
beings, Klingon is one of the rare times when a trained linguist has been
called upon to create a language for aliens. Add to this more than a
quarter-century of the Star Trek phenomenon, a mythos that has
permeated popular culture and spread around the globe.”
Even to California, where the KLI membership directory includes doctors, dentists and professors, some of whom have email addresses that end in “usc.edu,” “ucla.ed” and “berkeley.edu.”
From there, Trekkers, Trekkies, Klingons, Seven of Nines and even, one supposes, Wookies can link to the website of Nick Nicholas, a business analyst and linguist residing in Melbourne, Australia, and a research associate of UC Irvine's Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (Greek literature) project.
If this appeals to you, go here to join the KLI–and have your Visa or Mastercard ready.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.