Scary, yet also impressive, blog in Klingon: bo logh.
Klingon blog
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Argleton
Matt is fascinated by the story of Argleton, the unreal town that appeared on GeoMaps but which doesn’t actually exist. When he and his friend and flatmate Charlie are standing at the exact longitude and latitude that defines Argleton, Matt sets in motion a chain of events that will take him places he didn’t know existed… and which perhaps don’t.
A Passion for Science
From the identification of the Horsehead Nebula to the creation of the computer program, from the development of in vitro fertilisation to the detection of pulsars, A Passion for Science: Stories of Discovery and Invention brings together inspiring stories of how we achieved some of the most important breakthroughs in science and technology.
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Queen of the May
Every year, on May Day, a young woman is stolen away by the faeries to become their Queen for a year. This year, though, the faeries have bitten off more than they can chew. Shakti Nayar will do whatever it takes to get her own life as a botanist back. As she struggles to work out how to get home, she uncovers Faerie’s dark secret and finds that she is not the only human who needs saving.
Strange Attractor- Why news organisations are resurrecting their on-site community efforts
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- Lessons from succumbing to the perverse incentives of a rented audience
- How the media lost the future, and how we might regain it
Yes, very impressive to learn a language of a fictitious race from a TV show. Hmm, but wouldn't it have been more useful to, I don't know, use all that effort to learn a new language that real people on our own planet actually speak?
You mean… like Welsh?
Actually, I have to argue here that there are people who speak Klingon – it is a real language, albeit a modern, constructed language. I don't know the figures but some people are fluent in it. The usefulness of a language doesn't rely on total number of speakers, but in daily opportunities to use the language. If you are part of a Klingon-speaking group, then it's a useful language for you. Yet learning, say, French, would be useless if you knew no French speakers. It's all relative.
Well, put it that way and you have a point. I suppose this does throw up lots of interesting ideas to debate like language is nothing but an arbitrary sign system and that words only have meaning because there has been an agreement within a collective of people.
Oh, I hate it when I'm wrong!
Why do people always assume that I speak Klingon at the expense of learning other languages? It's like saying to someone in the weight room, “why do you lift weights when you could be playing soccer?” or “why do you run when you could be mountain climbing?”
Klingon is cross-training. When I'm with my Klingon-speaknig friends I tend to speak Klingon, but there have been occasions when I have spoken with the same people in Russian, or French, or Spanish, or even boring old English. I probably use Klingon more than one member of the group uses his Welsh or Basque, but it all strengthens our mental muscles.
I get the same thing with Welsh, which I am almost fluent in. People wonder why I bothered learning it, considering that it's a 'dead' language with 'no future' (neither point is true), but my opportunities for using it are limited only by my own laziness.
I have to ask, (and I hope you'll come back to answer), how did you find learning Klingon? Is it a nice, logical language? I always thought that constructed languages have no excuse for irregular verbs or nouns, really. 😉 Does it use declensions and conjucations like Polish or auxiliary verbs and word order like English?
Anyway, I can only applaud your linguistic prowess. Klingon, Russian, French and Spanish. Wow. My attempts to expand my languages has just been a bit pathetic really. My Polish (latest attempt) is a bit pathetic really. Well, at least my Python is coming along ok. 😉
OK, fine, I admit it: I'm an evil bigot and deserve to be punished.
Klingon is a fairly regular language, but quite unlike English. Basic word order is object-verb-subject, and a verb is conjugated by adding a prefix that denotes both the subject and the object. In that sense there are no irregular verbs: they all take the same set of prefixes. There are a few irregular noun plurals. Nouns that serve functions other than subject or objects take suffixes (very) vaguely comparable to Polish declensions. For example, “You hate me because of my jacket” is:
wepwIjmo' chomuS
wep -jacket
-wIj -suffix denoting “my” when the thing owned is non-sentient
-mo' – suffix denoting “because of”
cho- -prefix for “you (singular) do the action of the verb to me”
muS – hate
It was fun to learn, because it was the first non-indo-european language I encountered, so it challenged my assumptions about language.
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