Klingon (was Re: Fictional auxlangs as artlangs (was Re: Poll))

Hallo!

On Tue, 16 Dec 2008 19:43:16 -0500, deinx nxtxr wrote:

> [mailto:CONLANG@listserv.brown.edu] On Behalf Of Philip Newton
> [...]
> > Heh. Wasn't Klingon even specifically designed to be "unnatural"
> > from
> > the point of view of "common" Earth languages? (For example, in
> > having
> > odd gaps in its phoneme grid, and an unusual word order; possibly
> > other things, too.)
>
> Phonologically it only has one really odd phoneme.
It's not that Klingon has bizarre phonemes that makes the
phonology unnatural, it is the unsystematic jumble of
phonemes it has.  If you mark the phonemes of a natlang
in the IPA chart, you usually get a semi-regular array
of phonemes.  For example, the stops may come in voiced/
voiceless pairs such as /b/:/p/, /d/:/t/, /g/:/k/ etc.
There may be gaps and odd bits, but in Klingon you get
a complete mess of a phoneme inventory.

>      The only
> grammatical thing that I see being "different" are the verb prefixes
> that represent subject-object combinations.
Many languages mark person and number of both subject
and object on the verb, and while most of those languages
use fairly transparent morpheme combinations for that
purpose, the boundaries can be blurred to a large extent
by sound changes.  However, in Klingon, the prefixes seem
completely arbitrary, which is not very likely.

>       Beyond that I'd say the
> lexicon would be the worst part to learn because it's rooted in the
> fictional Klingon culture.
Of course the lexicon is rooted in Klingon culture, and
that's indeed a *strong* point - because Klingon is a
fictional language and not an auxlang.  But for an auxlang,
the Klingon lexicon would definitely be suboptimal.

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