Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About The Klingon Language
6. The Klingon Hello
Klingons aren’t exactly known for engaging in pleasantries, or for their chit-chat in general. The whole culture is diametrically opposed to such obsequiousness. Klingons just prefer to get to the point (often of the mek’leth [meqleH]).
It may not surprise you to learn, therefore, that there is no word for 'hello' in Klingon. The closest greeting to our Federation Standard would be nuqneH, and this more properly translates as 'What do you want?' Don’t bother looking for the equivalent of 'how are you,' 'good morning,' and the like either. As Marc Okrand states in The Klingon Dictionary, "[…] such words and phrases simply do not exist […]".
In a similar manner, there is no verb like that of the English 'to be' in Klingon. Instead, the language relies on the placement of pronouns and certain suffixes, where relevant, to express various states of being. For example, tlhIngan jIH [I am a Klingon] is literally 'Klingon, I'.
Okrand had already defined this bit of syntactic subversion in The Klingon Dictionary before he was asked to work on the Klingon dialogue for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. If you know the film (and/or Shakespeare) well, you’ve probably already figured out why the lack of such a verb might pose a problem…