You may speak.
Fascinating.
Don't give me that Klingon nonsense!
Resistance is futile.
The nucleus of the Vulcan language.
They were my toys.
Your parents wanted you to understand Vulcan?
Yes. As did their parents.
Creating alien languages...
On one hand, you want to make it look strange.
It's from a biology and culture
different from what we have.
On the other hand, it can't be too strange, or it'll look silly.
Or worse, you may not recognise it as writing.
You're always treading that line.
At the same time,
you want to convey something about the culture.
You're also thinking,
"How will we physically build the sets and control panels?"
"This technique lends itself to this design. "
"If we use another technique, it lends itself to another design. "
You take practical considerations into account.
Then you try to be as free as you can,
realising that there's only so much time to design it.
The languages of Earth evolved over thousands of years.
We rarely get more than half an hour.
There are different written Vulcan languages.
It was never in the original Star Trek.
The first Vulcan language, written, that we saw
was on the side of a shuttlecraft in Star Trek I.
Just the word Surak.
Unfortunately, you can never really see it on the movie screen.
Then, in one of the later Star Trek features,
they had these interesting symbols on Spock's robe.
We actually still use some of those symbols today.
But the first time we saw a lot of Vulcan writing
was in the episode in which Leonard Nimoy appeared,
of Next Generation.
We had this Vulcan book of ancient Vulcan wisdom.
I went back and looked at those symbols on Spock's robe.
I tried to think, "What would a handwritten version of this... "
"What would it look like if you wrote this in script?"
It suggested musical notes to me.
I came up with this flowing style of musical notes.
I sat down one night and literally wrote this whole book
with this writing style.
We still use that writing style in the current series, Enterprise.
- Look what I brought you. - This is my friend, D'Tan.
- He's very curious about Vulcan. - Hello, D'Tan.
Where did you get this? It's very old.
They read to us from it at meetings.
It tells the story of the Vulcan separation.
Written Romulan evolved from Asian languages.
The vertical symbols look vaguely kanji-like.
The actual symbols were designed by Monty Thrasher,
who originally suggested it as a language
that could be entirely created with a seven-segment digital readout.
If you look at it, they are composed of the seven line strokes.
We added things to make it more interesting.
But that's the thought behind it.
I have nothing to say to you.
I will resist you with all my strength.
Strength is irrelevant. Resistance is futile.
We wish to improve ourselves,
to have your biological and technological distinctiveness.
Your culture will adapt to service ours.
Borg. It was supposed to be this all-encompassing, web-like culture
that would envelop people.
I thought of it as a bowl of green spaghetti.
You throw it on the floor and photograph that.
I wanted to show a complex network of things
as if, when Borg think,
they think on many levels, with interconnectedness.
I wanted to show complexity and sophistication.
Sins of the Father was a relaunch of the Klingon mythos
that was Worf's story.
For the graphics department, it was fun.
We actually knew quite a lot about how the Klingons communicated.
We saw a lot of them, going back to the first motion picture
and even to the original series.
It was fun to take those elements that we knew
and extrapolate them and make more of them.
So we did door signs and we did little Klingon readouts.
We did Klingon data transmissions.
All those kind of things.
The fact that it was part of this amazing set made it more fun.
Klingon is based on a bit of Klingon from the first film.
Klingon was never spoken in the original TV series, except for names.
We first hear the language in The Motion Picture.
In the beginning, three Klingon ships fly around.
One by one, they get zapped. The commander of the lead ship,
played by Mark Lenard, speaks Klingon.
I didn't work on the first film.
The language was made up by James Doohan. Scotty.
He doesn't get any credit, but he originated the Klingon language.
When I made up Klingon for the third film,
I took what he did for the first film as the basis.
Here's half a dozen words. This one is a command.
This must be the command form, the imperative.
Use that as a core, then elaborate.
I added sounds, grammatical structure,
and kept track of what I was doing.
Instead of being a hotchpotch of sounds,
it's a real language with real words and grammar.
I forget the rules. I have to look it up to make it consistent.
I tried to make sure everybody did it right.
There are rules they have to go along with.
If they did make a mistake, I'd change the rules on the spot,
so it would be consistent in my mind.
I have a PhD in Linguistics from the University of California.
I did undergraduate work at UC Santa Cruz.
I specialised in American Indian languages,
mostly those of California, around the San Francisco Bay area.
I also studied languages from Southeast Asia. Chinese.
With The Next Generation, I did dialogue for two or three episodes.
I also wrote a book.
After Star Trek llI came out, I wrote The Klingon Dictionary.
It's a dictionary.
It has all the words and explains the grammar.
It has more words than there are in the third film,
otherwise, it'd be a skinny book.
For The Next Generation, they've taken the book.
They just look up words in it, and phrases.
I wouldn't say that all the Klingon words
in The Next Generation are mine.
But a good chunk are made up by me for the series,
or they've taken it out of the book.
Today, I am a warrior.
The only Klingon that I know now is nuqneH, the Klingon greeting.
It means "What do you want?"
I didn't work with him on the series but he's in the sixth film.
He doesn't speak Klingon in the sixth film,
not the language, other than people's names.
He does speak my lines in the TV series.
He told me an interesting story. When he tried out for the part,
someone gave him a copy of The Klingon Dictionary.
He read it. From my descriptions of the way Klingons behave,
he developed a character that he used, and he got the part.
I feel good that I had a contribution to his being cast as Worf.
Wait. You can't mean...
We are mated.
I arrived on the set at Star Trek VI one day.
As soon as I walked in, Nick Meyer said,
"I need you to make up a line in Klingon. "
I said, "What's that?" He said, "To be, or not to be. "
I said, "You're joking!" He said, "No, I'm serious. "
I said, "Alright. "
It's interesting. When I made up the language,
to be curmudgeonly, I decided there would be no verb "to be".
That worked out fine until I had to make up "To be, or not to be".
I decided, "What does this really mean?"
"It must mean 'to live, or not to live'." Nick said, "That's fine. "
That comes out...
I mentioned that to Christopher Plummer, who had to say the line.
He said, "That sounds like The Goon Show. "
It's an old BBC radio show with Peter Sellers.
They would talk like that.
He said, "That won't work. " So we changed it a little bit.
We changed it to mean "to continue on, or not to continue on".
In the scene where he quotes that...
That scene was shot probably 15 or 16 times.
Everybody on the set heard that line over and over again.
You must read Shakespeare in Klingon.
"To be, or not to be. "
That is the question which preoccupies our people.
I remember thinking, "This is incredible!"
It would be great to work on a film doing this as a linguist.
But to do it with Star Trek is amazing.
Star Trek is not just a movie or fiction.
It's American mythology, part of everybody's life.
Everybody knows "Beam me up, Scotty",
even if they've never seen the series.