[203] in tlhIngan-Hol
All Things Considered interview with Mark Okrand
dcctdw@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (dcctdw@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Sun Feb 16 19:20:23 1992
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
From: gt5878b@cad.gatech.edu (Charles Edward Maise)
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
Date: Thu, 6 Feb 92 12:49:18 EST
Robert Siegel interviewing Mark Okrand, on All Things Considered
Thursday, January 30, 1992
[Transciber's note: This interview was very friendly and informal,
more of a chat than an interview. As neither Robert nor Mark
prepared their comments, they spoke colloquially rather than
grammaticly and would occasionally speak over one another. I have
attempted to be faithful to both the content and the feel of their
conversation.
Klingon words and sounds are enclosed in angle brackets.
All Things Considered is a daily news program produced by National
Public Radio, who is solely responsible for its content.
This is an unauthorized transcript. For a transcript or audio
recording please write to:
National Public Radio
2225 M Street
Washington, DC 20036
Support quality radio journalism. ]
RS Mark Okrand is by academic training a linguist; not a guy who
speaks lots of languages, but a student of how languages work.
At Berkely, he studied some west coast American Indian
languages; in fact, his dissertation was on the grammer of
Mutzang, a language of central California. He says the last
native speaker of Mutzang died in 1930. So perhaps it wasn't
such a stretch to do the job that he stumbled onto in
Hollywood. There was a movie with some characters who spoke a
foreign language, and the actors at first were improvising
words and expression, but Mark Okrand took on the job of
codifying it, of making the language. He became our planet's
leading scholar of this language:
[Scene from Star Trek III: Two lines of Klingon dialogue between
Valkris and Kruge, beginning with "<Qapla' jawwI'>."]
RS Mark Okrand is the author of _The Klingon Dictionary_, the
only book that can help you understand what the bad guys are
saying in the Star Trek movies. To understand their language,
he says, you also have to understand the way they behave.
MO Actually, what Klingons do is mostly just bark at you and tell
you to do stuff, so it would be more verbs than nouns.
RS A lot of imperatives, a lot of commands in this language, and
as you discovered, in Klingon, no real greetings as we
understand them.
MO Right, Klingons wouldn't have greetings, you would just strike
up the conversation. None of this "Hello, how are you," you'd
just get right down to business. When I was working on the
films, a lot of members of the crew would come up to me and
say "Say something in Klingon!" and I'd say "Well, like what?"
"Oh, say, 'Hello, how are you?'" and I'd say "No, no, no, you
wouldn't say that." After a while I got tired of answering the
question that way, so I made up a greeting, which is <nuQneH>!
It means "What do you want?"
RS [laughs] That's the first thing...
MO The first thing...
RS ..the first thing that one Klingon might say to one another.
MO Right.
RS "What do you want." The sounds of Klingon don't seem common
to English. Are you familiar with these sounds from the
languages of West Coast Indians, perhaps?
MO Some of them are from West Coast Indians, some of the are from
other parts of the world. What I did in setting up the sounds
was use the sounds from the original motion picture, but when
I added more sounds, I added some from English because the
actors who would be saying them speak English, and also sounds
from places all around the world, and the only care that I
took in doing it was two things: one was to make it guttural,
because that's what the producers wanted, and secondly to make
sure the mixture of sounds didn't replicate any mixture found
in any real language. In other words all the sounds are real
human sounds from real human languages, but the set of sounds
doesn't exist anywhere.
RS What are the hardest sounds for English speakers to master?
MO The hardest sounds are the ones deep down in the throat. Like
the Klingon word for "success," which is said a lot actually
in Star Trek: the Next Generation, it's become kind of a hail,
and that's <Qapla'>! and the <Q> is difficult for some of the
English speakers to say. The other one that's tough is one
that linguists call a epicollateral fricative, and that comes
at the end of the word <batlh> which means to do something in
an honored fashion.
RS Here's an example of Klingon being spoken in Star Trek V: The
Final Frontier. You may recall this; this is where a Klingon
ship receives a message in Klingon that hostages are being
held on a nearby planet, and the chief Klingon on the
spaceship is a trigger-happy hotshot, I gather, who lusts to
engage in battle against the Federation ship that will be sent
to rescue the hostages. I'm sure people who saw this remember
the dialogue, verbatim.
[Scene from Star Trek V: A line of Klingon dialogue from a female,
followed by two from the captain]
RS What are they saying?
MO I don't remember what they're saying. [Chuckles from Mark and
Robert] She says they've got captives down on the planet. One
is a Romulan, one is a Klingon, one is an Earther, a Terran.
He says "Where are they" or something like that, she tells him
where they are, and he says "Okay, we're going to set a course
for over there, we're going to go to" Nimbus Three is the name
of the planet; "Set a course for over there; we're going to
get them." Something like that.
RS And these are actors. Were you present as they were recording
this and learning how to say it in Klingon?
MO Right. Right, yeah. For most of the time when they were
speaking Klingon in the films, in Star Trek Three, I was there
on the set with the actors, would work with them ahead of
time. Then when we did the scene, William Shattner was the
director. We'd get through to the end, and Shattner yelled
"Cut! That was great! I guess, I don't know what they said,
but it seemed all right."
RS [Laughs] You have the book _The Klingon Dictionary,
English/Klingon, Klingon/English_, which is really more than
a dictionary. This is a worthy partner to all those books like
Colloquial Turkish and Learning Czech, or...
MO Right, right. It's a grammatical description so, you know, a
language is not just a list of words; you have to put them
together in the right way.
RS And it does include in the back some handy phrases that one
might use, I guess, in conversing with Klingons...
MO If you happen to encounter one somewhere and you don't want to
get shaken up too badly.
RS [Chuckles] Perhaps you could just teach us how some of these
phrases really should sound, since while you do use the Latin
alphabet which is not one, I gather, favored by Klingons...
MO No, they have their own writing system which Simon and
Schuster doesn't have a character set for for some reason.
RS [Chuckles] But even so, you have to adjust the characters to
convey these sounds. Here's the sort of thing that any
traveller would have to ask at some point: "Where is a good
restaraunt?"
MO <nuqDaq 'oH Qe' QaQ'e'>
RS Which one of those words is restaraunt?
MO <Qe'>
RS [Laughs] Is it related to some root for food, or eating?
MO No, it's just restaraunt.
RS Just restaraunt. "How much fuel do we have left?"
MO <nIn 'ar wIghaj>
RS And, "Where can I get my shoes cleaned?"
MO <nuqDaq waqwIj vIlamHa'choHmoH>
RS On the next page, I imagine something very useful in Klingon
to say, "This helmet suits you."
MO <Du'IHchoHmoH mIvvam>
RS And that I assume would be handy because people wear
helmets...
MO All the time.
RS All the time. And so it would be a flattering...
MO Absolutely.
RS ..thing, likely to say to people.
MO Actually, they never wear helmets, but they talk about them.
RS Well, perhaps you can leave us with some aphorism, or thought
from the Klingons, the sort of thing that a Klingon might say,
on concluding an interview.
MO On concluding an interview, a Klingon would say nothing at
all. He'd get up and leave.
[Sounds of Mark getting up from a table.]
[Sound of a door being shut.]
RS Mark Okrand, Klingonologist, and author of _The Klingon
Dictionary, English/Klingon, Klingon/English_.
[Music, credit finale from STVI]
Eddie Maise gt5878b@cad.gatech.edu Serving Donuts on Another Planet
