Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About The Klingon Language

10. Laddie, Don’t You Think You Should Rephrase That?

Korax could have called the Enterprise a garbage scow all day long, but Scotty wouldn’t have been able to retort with a similarly effective jibe in 'Klingoni' even if he’d wanted to. Klingons didn’t have ridges at this point (later retconned), and they had a language in only (apparently mispronounced) name. With an epic sense of l’esprit de l’escalier, Scotty could have replied Hab SoSlI' Quch [Your mother has a smooth forehead], for example, only years later.

It wasn’t presumably until all the side-effects of that augment virus had worn off (or everyone got the gift of reconstructive surgery under their seats when Oprah went to Qo’noS) that, in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the Klingons got a language, or the makings of one in any case. What you may not know is that the man behind the engineer (and the punch) played a vital role in its construction.

Dialectician Hartmut Scharfe was originally hired to create the Klingon dialogue for the movie, but Gene Roddenberry didn’t like what he came up with: not "alien enough". James Doohan, already gifted with dialects and languages, offered to help, and spent an afternoon with associate producer Jon Povill inventing a series of sounds (but only that) which would be used as the Klingon in the film. Doohan taught this to Mark Lenard (and the other actors). The latter then played not only the first Klingon with head adornments, but also spoke the first words on-screen in the Klingon language.