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

> [mailto:CONLANG@listserv.brown.edu] On Behalf Of Jorg
Rhiemeier

> > 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.
Yes, but is any of it really unpronounceable by humans?  Only
the /t_l_h/ phoneme seemed far-fetched and I can think of one
language, Nahuatl, that is close with /t_l/.

> > >      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.
That's what I meant by being very different.  I know there are
natural languages with subject and object marked but in Klingon
it's a single prefix to represent both, and it's not systematic
so each pair must be learned separately.

> >       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.
Right, it wouldn't make a very desireable auxlang.  I would say
the same about Tolkien's language too.  In either case though, a
human vocabulary could arise if enough people learned and
started using these languages.

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