Do you speak Klingon?

[Terengo]

BalthierTheGreat said:

Terengo said:

BalthierTheGreat said:

Klingon is just too hard to pronounce and put together in a sentance for most people to learn. Almost as bad as Lojan.

I have to disagree. To establish my total geekiness quotient, you can peruse my Klingon translation of The Fall of the House of Usher, among other texts.

I'm not talking about writing and translating. In doing that, any person with a grammar reference and a [language] to English dictionary could probably make just about any language work.

What I mean is using it in a spoken conversation. Two people who have no language in common except for Klingon. I don't think standard Klingon is easy enough to be used that way. (Quenya and Sinderin fail this too). For most people learning enough Klingon words and phrases, word endings and verb prefixes to have a conversation in Klingon you'd be talking about years of intense effort. Besides the difficulty in pronouncing the words themselves. Some of them can get very long, and some of the letters are hard to pronounce.

Just my opinion of course, but it's awkward to prounounce and hard to memorize the vocabulary.

I still have to disagree. Klingon's reputation for difficulty is not completely accurate. I can speak it somewhat; although I have studied it for years, I wouldn't say it took intense study. I can't carry on a deep philosophical discussion in Klingon, but how often do you do that in English? For the most part, after you learn a certain core vocabulary (~200 words), in any language, you're able to handle 90% of the topics that come up day to day. As for the prefixes and suffixes of Klingon, you learn the handful that come up all the time and just fudge the rest. Those very long words you describe are unlikely to be found anywhere but on the printed page.

But, as you say, it's just an opinion. Maybe I'm just smarter than you?