In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [96]
The second morning, when I greeted Scott by the coffee machine, he would only speak to me in Klingon, having taken the vow for that day. Luckily, someone had beamed me a PalmPilot dictionary at lunch the previous day, so I had the means to understand him in a painfully pause-filled kind of way. As the rest of the group came down from their rooms, he gained more game conversational partners and I gained some interpreters, the most skilled of whom was my guide, Mark, who through the rest of the weekend made it a point to keep me included with unobtrusive simultaneous translation in a low, gentle voice.
Mark's translation was also for the benefit of Louise, another beginner who became my study partner. Louise, a French-Canadian ad copywriter in her late forties, had been to three previous qep'a's and had failed the first certification exam each time. She was going to try again. Unlike most of the other attendees, she didn't seem to be into computers, games, science fiction, or even language. She went for a run every morning and then smoked a cigarette. She had short hair and tomboy clothes, but she traveled with a pile of stuffed animals, and when I saw them on the chair in her hotel room, all propped upright like a matinee audience, I asked her, a little embarrassed on her behalf, “Are they animals you've collected since your childhood?” “No,” she answered, not embarrassed in the least, “well, you might say my extended childhood.”
I still don't fully understand why she wanted to learn Klingon, and I asked her more than a few times, trying to make sense of her response: “When I saw Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, I saw those boots, yeah? In the Klingon costume? And I said, ‘Wow! I want to make those boots.’ I thought maybe Japanese Klingon speakers would love to buy them. So I started to learn Klingon.” As far as I know, there are no Japanese Klingon speakers, but she didn't seem worried about this. As for the boot-making part of her plan, she had apprenticed herself to a cobbler in Montreal.
Enigma though she was, Louise was relaxed and likable, and the only other person at the conference besides me who would have a drink at meals. We almost always sat next to each other, so Mark could translate for us and so we could study together.
And I was studying constantly, feverishly. Until I arrived at the qep'a', I thought I was done studying. I had scored perfectly on my postal-course lessons. I was confident, bigheaded even. After all, I was a linguist (and we don't get many opportunities to feel superior). I was already familiar with the grammatical concepts. I memorized the affixes and about forty words of core vocabulary. I leaned back and crossed my arms over my puffed-up chest.
The language has a lexicon of about three thousand words, and there's no way anyone knows all of them without peeking, or so I thought. The words are totally arbitrary and must simply be memorized one by one. You don't get any help from cognates (for example, German Milch for English “milk”) or international words (for example, informazione), and you must deal with words for such things as dilithium crystal (cha'pujqut) and transporter ionizer unit (jolvoy'). How could anyone be expected to remember all of them? I assumed that for the first test, the smattering of words in the postal-course exercises would be sufficient.
Soon after I arrived in Phoenix, I found out that the first test was “beginner's” level because you were expected to know “only 500 words.” I frantically made five hundred flash cards on tiny slips of paper, and carried them around with me to every activity and every meal, cramming and cramming.
If you have a sharp eye and an active imagination, Okrand does