The new burning problem circulating in the Star Trek fanbase: is the Klingon language copyrighted by Paramount?
Actually, whether it is or not, it occurs to me that Klingon is almost certainly trademarked by Paramount … (and, if it isn’t, heads should roll in their legal department).
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tlhIngan Hol tlhabbej
Gesundheit.
Weren’t a lot of these things developed outside of Paramount, e.g., John Ford’s “Final Reflection” and his work on the Star Trek RPG from FASA/Fantasimulations? As well as Michael Okuda (?).
In other words…who knows. So, let’s close with:
Klingon Software Quality Assurance
The top 12 things likely to be overheard if you had Klingon programmers working for you:
12) Specifications are for the weak and timid!!
11) This machine is a piece of GAGH! I need dual Pentium processors if I am to do battle with this code.
10) You cannot really appreciate Dilbert unless you’ve read it in the original Klingon.
09) Indentation?! I will show you how to indent when I indent your skull!
08) What is this talk of ‘release’? Klingons do not make software ‘releases’. Our software escapes, leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance people in its wake!
07) Klingon function calls do not have “parameters”–they have “arguments”–and they ALWAYS WIN THEM!
06) Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Our software does not coddle the weak.
05) I have challenged the entire Quality Assurance team to a Bat-Leh contest! They will not concern us again.
04) A TRUE Klingon warrior does not comment his code.
03) By filing this bug report you have challenged the honor of my family. Prepare to die!
02) You question the worthiness of my code? I should kill you where you stand!
01) Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
Ok, so I’m late weighing in on this, and this will be pedantic and technical, but being late, pedantic, and technical is all I seem to be good for today, so here goes:
Copyright applies to original works that can be copied. So you could copyright a Klingon dictionary or grammar but since a language is not the sort of thing that can be expressed in a concrete form, I don’t think copyright is the right sort of protection for a language. (Linguists tend to think of a language as the set of all possible grammatical sentences in that language, and since that’s often an infinite set or a very very large one, it’s not the sort of thing that can be written down or recorded.)
Perhaps you could copyright each individual word in the language, both in recorded and written forms, and then any author would be violating copyright if they spoke or wrote any word in the language. I think that would have the same functional result as copyrighting the language even though it was achieved by a different method.
If you could argue that a language is really a method, then you might be able to patent a language, and that would get you a similar kind of protection. But I’m not sure that a language is a processing method in the sense that patent law interprets that phrase.
The concept of copyrighting a language is a really fascinating one. Off and on I’ve found the current debates over copyrighs and patents interesting because they are a clear application of philosophical analysis that will really matter in people’s everyday lives. Philosophical analysis is often so abstract and erudite that it often has no clear application, and this is an exceptional case.
>>Dave
That’s an interesting perspective on it.
The question that could be raised is whether Klingon is, in fact, a language, as it is a fictional construction — a free-form “set dressing.”
Or perhaps that’s what it started out to be, but Paramount let it “escape into the wild,” and so it has an uncopyrightable life all its own.
I’m curious — I know that there have been books and dictionaries and the like done. I’d be interested to know what sort of licensing, permission, trademarking or whatever was sought from or granted by Paramount.
And then, of course, there’s this.
Good question about whether or not Klingon is actually a language or not. An artificial language might be small enough that one could actually write down every gramatical sentence in the language. But if the inventor of the language was linguistically sophisticated, it’s likely they tried to make the language more ‘real’ than that, and so they probably set things up to allow enough variety that this would be unwieldy.
Of course, in reality, the inventor probably wasn’t thinking of copyright; extreme corporate concern with intellectual property didn’t come around until the late 80s or early 90s. Even if they did think of it, if you’re right about them letting the cat out of the bag (so to speak) then they have failed to protect their intellectual property rights and thus probably have lost any that they might have had.
Tolkien, of course, had no thoughts about copyrighting any of the languages he invented for Middle-Earth. He was very sophisticated, linguistically, and so I think his artificial languages probably have many of the marks of natural languages, making ithem hard to copyright anyway. I think I read somewhere that some high school is teaching a class in Elvish. Now that would have been much better than learning German!
>>Dave
Humph. Some kind of error bollixed up my earlier post. And there’s some other funkiness too that might be due to the fact that I use Mozilla.
Anyway, it’s a good question about whether the langauge is ‘real’ or not. If the inventor wasn’t careful, an artificial language can have a rather small set of grammatical sentences. Then it would be easier to copyright if anyone had thought of it at the time. As you suggest though, if the owners didn’t work to protect their intellectual property rights, then they will have lost them.
The cartoon is a winner. But in the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction department, I heard recently that some high school is offering Elvish classes as a foreign language. That would have been my choice over German any day!
>>Dave
Some notes on the Klingon language, answering some of the questions and assumptions above.
The word Klingon is copyrighted, but not the term tlhIngan Hol, the name of the language studied/spoken by Klingonists.
Whether or not this is circulating in the Star Trek fanbase I don’t know, but I’ve seen it in the linguistic blogging community, and it seems to have originated on Boing Boing.
The language in John M. Ford’s hilarious books is Klingonaase, not the same language as tlhIngan Hol, and not developed enough to use for anything other than greetings and curses.
Paramount hired a professional linguist, Marc Okrand, to create the Klingon language, for a movie. Paramount/Viacom retains copyright on The Klingon Dictionary that resulted, and on the subsequent Klingon for the Galactic Traveler, Conversational Klingon, and other titles. Klingon is a completely usable language with sufficient vocabulary for most purposes.
Klingon is far too large for every conceivable sentence in the language to be listed. I could talk all day without ever using an example sentence.
The Klingon Language Institute has a limited licence to produce educational materials, including a quarterly journal called HolQeD (“linguistics”), translations of Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, and Gilgamesh, and some booklets on aspects of the language.
The statement “tlhIngan Hol tlhabbej” disregards proper Klingon sentence order. The verb in a Klingon sentence precedes its subject: tlhabbej tlhIngan Hol.
re: Sayings of Klingon Programmers –
Dilbert is not translated from the Klingon. Dilbert is translated from the *Ferengi*.