My frequent roommate at qep’a’mey, Holtej, was very interested in Noam Chompsky’s theories about the nature of the development of language, of and by children. Like most things I learn about, my understanding is incomplete, and I fill in the gaps with my own version of how it works… Observing that when adults without a common language are thrown together, they form a pigeon language with little or no grammar, built mostly from negotiated common vocabulary, but when children are raised in similar circumstances, they develop a creole language, which is grammatically much more sophisticated, with a richer vocabulary. Most natural languages have irregular words, typically the most commonly used ones. As children learn a language, it’s up to the adults to correct the kids when they try to regularize the irregular words. How many three and four year olds learning English come up with the word “gooder” instead of “better”? The answer is, “ALL of them.” If we never corrected the kids, likely they’d completely regularize the language in one generation. The process of making movies has given Okrand opportunities to break earlier rules and make the language weirder and more complex, more like a natural language (like the three plural suffixes when originally there was going to be only one, or like the use of aspect instead of tense), but as I learn ASL, I’m realizing the difference in nature between the irregularities of Klingon, vs. those of natural languages. American Sign Language has two sources of irregularities that strike me as interesting. One involves the way that many signs in ASL are “initialized”, meaning that they use the hand shapes of the fingerspelling alphabet while gesturing often as a way of splitting synonyms out into separate signs instead of just having an even smaller, more generalized vocabulary — the sign for “class” is done with hands shaped as “C”s, while the same sign with “T”s means “team” and with “G”s means “group”. Certain commonly used signs are initialized with the “wrong” letter. All the “newer” signs initialize with the letters of English equivalent words, but the really old signs, like “lend” (using the letter “P”, as in the French “prêter") or “give” (using the letter “D”, as in the French “donner”) exist because the adult who started ASL in the first American school for the Deaf a couple centuries ago spoke French, and the adults who continue to teach the children keep teaching them these irregular, common-use signs. That adult left after three years, so most of the vocabulary has been developed by the kids in the school, so as in the development of a creole language, the majority of signs that are initialized are done more “regularly”, mimicking the letters used in English. (Yes, I know there’s more to it than that, in part because of the “Total Communication Movement” done by a group of hearing adults trying to replace ASL with Signed English, but even with the pushback from that movement, the English initialized signs remain the “regularized” norm.) The second thing is that there are these beautiful signs, like “table”, which look like what a kid does with his forearms when he sits at a table. Also, there’s a sign for “Grandfather” and “Grandmother”, but there are no signs for “Grandson” or “Granddaughter”. You have to fingerspell “Grand” and then sign “son” or “daughter”. Why the asymmetry? Well, kids talk about grandparents. They don’t talk about grandchildren. So, how does this relate to Klingon? I see contrasts. Common words in Klingon are extremely regular, basically because Okrand was making up vocabulary as he made up grammar and rules for building words, so he didn’t violate those rules while making up the most common vocabulary. Exceptions? Consider the word {lo’laH}. I think it may have been the first polysyllabic verb root, at least semi-accidentally created by using it adjectivally when {-laH} was not a permitted suffix on a verb while being used following a noun to describe it. That’s remarkably irregular for Klingon, but it’s not a particularly common word. It’s useful enough, so to speak, but that’s not the kind of word that a natural language comes up with that breaks the rules that other words follow. And there are no cool, kid-centric words. All the weird family relationship words are not especially rich from a kid’s perspective vs. that of an adult. They are pretty symmetrical, as if some guy sat there and started making up words for different kinds of relatives… … and he’s not a kid. He’s an older guy. The vocabulary suits the old guy who comes up with the words, and the adult characters in the movies and TV shows. We rarely see Klingon kids. The least regular of affixes, like the Rovers that don’t Rove, or {-neS}, are not remarkably common-use, except maybe the commonness of {tu’lu’} where one would expect {lutu’lu’}, but let’s face it. THAT was just a lazy error, often repeated. In another generation or two of Klingon speakers, the entire {lu-} prefix is probably going to disappear… But I digress. charghwI’ vaghnerya’ngan rInpa’ bomnIS be’’a’ pI’.