Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About The Orions

As well as Big Show, Star Trek: Enterprise's Borderland also featured the first examples of the written Orion language, a lot of which was presumably numbers (in universe). When Orion script was used again in Star Trek: Discovery's third season, Star Trek researcher extraordinaire, Jörg Hillebrand, found the "Rosetta Stone for cracking [it]" by comparing turbolift controls in Orion with ones in English/Federation Standard.

For Discovery, one sign in Orion equalled one letter in the Latin alphabet or a number. As Jörg noted on Twitter, Orion font on Enterprise was used randomly and so is untranslatable. Beneath another Jörg post, Michael Okuda also revealed that "The Orion glyphs were designed by Jim Van Over, Sr," scenic artist for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, and Star Trek: Enterprise. Orion has yet to be spoken on screen, but the language has, at least partially, been developed in beta canon, most notably in two of the Star Trek tabletop RPGs.

The first, FASA's Star Trek: The Role Playing Game, released in the 1980s, added two modules in 1987 — The Orions: Book of Common Knowledge and The Orions: Book of Deep Knowledge (for the gamemaster). Both went into great detail about the Orion people, their history, social structure, politics, and ships. Common Knowledge detailed two forms of spoken Orion — High and Low — distinguished by pronunciation and social status.

The second, Decipher's early 2000s Star Trek Roleplaying Game, added the Aliens module in 2003, which gave the Orion name for the Orion language as "Kolari". Similar to the FASA version, the Aliens module also noted that "more antiquated or poetic versions of Kolari" exist, called "High Kolari" or "Imperial Kolari," used mostly to "score social points" or to "flummox non-Orions".