We spent much of this class (as a wrap-up to our general unit on phonology) critiquing Klingon. Somehow, the general consensus in the rest of the class was that Klingon was a generally successful language, given its design goals. I’m not entirely willing to concede that. Keep in mind that I actually haven’t taken much of a look at anything beyond the phonology, yet – we’ll get to that in a later week (and I’m sure I’ll rant about it here, too). But I feel fairly strongly that the phonology of Klingon is a complete mess.
This was the list of presumed design goals we generated in class, more or less:
- Consistency (internal and with prexisting dialogue; i.e. don’t piss off fandom)
- Ease of learning (for actors, of course)
- Alien aesthetic
- “Harsh”, “angry” aesthetic
- Believable
That Klingon succeeds in not pissing off fandom is self-evident, of course. Ease of learning for actors is not quite knowable, from where I stand – without actually reading interviews with actors, etc., I have to assume that it succeeded well enough. But, with respect to the next three counts, I feel that Klingon fails somewhat miserably.
With regards to alienness: Seriously, uvulars and a retroflex consonants are the best you can come up with? Of course, a truly alien phonology wouldn’t rely on a human vocal tract, but even leaving that aside… Surely clicks, implosives, and (say) creaky voice are much more effective routes to “alienness”, for Americans. Just a few of these need to get added – too many will violate simplicity . But many Americans can produce at least the usual “tsk” click; creaky voice is easy to train.
Similarly with regards to the “harsh” phonology: Why avoid all consonant clusters? Surely, if we’re just going to go along with standard Western (/Tolkien) sound symbolism, a “harsh” language should have lots and lots of consonants (possibly even the syllabic ones that we don’t get in English). And do alveolar trills really sound that harsh? I’d think that Americans would mostly associate them with Spanish, which I’d think would have generally sanguine connotations…
But, of course, I think the biggest disaster is believability. When explaining why the /d/ phoneme should have a different place of articulation than the /t/ phoneme (it’s retroflex, actually), Okrand basically says, “Well, they’re alien, so they don’t have to follow the same rules!” Ok, sure, granted – but presumably they follow some rules! What motivation could there possibly be? Maybe voicing is partially linked to place of articulation throughout the language (some weird cognitive constraint, say). Well, ok – so why is it only /d/ that moves, not /b/? As another example, real languages generally try to find a balance between laziness and distinctiveness – and uvular sounds are enough harder to produce than velar ones that it would be extremely unlikely that the velar position would have no stops, but that the uvular would have one. Are Klingon’s vocal tracts just different enough to make velar sounds harder to produce than uvular ones? But then, why do we have velar fricatives, but no uvular fricatives (but a uvular africate)?
And I certainly can’t think of any justifiable reason to have the stress system of the language treat syllables ending in a glottal stop as extra-heavy…
So, no: I don’t find Klingon to be at all believable. Part of building a language is motivating the choices you make. In a language like Klingon, with a fictional species of speakers, this means justifying the choices with respect to the biology and culture of the that race; I don’t feel that Okrand has managed that.
And don’t even get me started on the ridiculous transliteration scheme…