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Star Trek fans are going to court against the creators of the show about the fictional "Klingon" language

If you've got a bit of phlegm in the throat, the Klingon alphabet is just the thing for clearing that out.

As a speaker myself of a conlang, I am always impressed when other humans willfully become weirder than we already are -- even to learning a "non-Terran" (sort of) language. And its syntax is OVS, rare here on earth, but it does exist. As Hamlet said, "taH pagh, taHbe".

"...a desire in Hollywood to infuse fantasy and science-fiction movies, television series and video games with a sense of believability is driving demand for constructed languages, complete with grammatical rules, a written alphabet (hieroglyphics are acceptable) and enough vocabulary for basic conversations. ... "The days of aliens spouting gibberish with no grammatical structure are over," said Paul R. Frommer ... who created Na'vi, the language spoken by the giant blue inhabitants of Pandora in "Avatar." ... fans rewatched Dothraki scenes to study the language in a workshop-like setting. ... There have been many attempts to create languages, often for specific political effect. In the 1870s, a Polish doctor invented Esperanto ... The motivation to learn an auxiliary language is not so different from why people pick up French or Italian, she said. "Learning a language, even a natural language, is more of an emotional decision than a practical one. It's about belonging to a group," she said. ... The watershed moment for invented languages was the creation of a Klingon language ... But as with any language, there is a certain snob appeal built in. Among Dothraki, Na'vi and Klingon speakers, a divide has grown between fans who master the language as a linguistic challenge, and those who pick up a few phrases because they love the mythology." Reaction on Language Log: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3628 - "there's an attitude among some linguists - and also plenty of non-linguists, as is evident from many of the comments on the NYT piece - that engaging in conlang activity is a waste of time, perhaps even detrimental to the real subject matter of linguistics."

Linguist John McWhorter examines 3 fictional constructed languages, also known as conlangs, and explains the features that make them bona fide languages, including the presence of grammar/syntax and the fact that they evolve and change over time.

The Charles Lutwidge Dodgson poem which gave the English language such portmanteau words as "chortle" and "burble" has also been put into other languages -- including Klingon and Esperanto (four versions). One also in Choctaw. How *does* one translate meaningless words?

thanks for joining us, Mr. Wagenseller!

This article talks about the process that was used to create the alien Kilgnon language from Star Trek. It also talks about how its popularity spread and about how many people "speak" it.