10 MORE Notorious Star Trek Urban Legends
9. James Doohan Invented The Klingon Language
Star Trek: The Motion Picture features the redesigned Klingons, with the captain being played by Mark Lenard. Lenard, more familiar to audiences as Spock's dad, Sarek, speaks the first lines of the Klingon language heard in Star Trek. Legend has it that these words were created by James Doohan almost on a whim, but this is not actually the case.
There were three people involved in this initial creation. James Doohan, producer Jon Povill and UCLA dialectician Hartmut Scharfe. Together, they developed the language as it was spoken. Scharfe went first, but Gene Roddenberry was not a fan of what he came up with alone. According to Povill, Scarfe delivered exactly what they needed for the Vulcan language but didn't quite manage the Klingon one.
Scharfe was a language expert on the Indian subcontinent, though was of Germanic descent. Therefore the language he created was a combination of recognisable Sanskrit and Germanic, which was rejected. Together with Doohan and Povill, the expert reworked the initial ideas and the three of them built the foundations for Klingonese, which Mark Okrand would later develop in full when publishing his Klingon Dictionary.