h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It has been circulated that Klingon is a combination of Japanese and Yiddish. Take it as you may.

I'll take it as overly simplistic, uninformed and inaccurate, if you don't mind.

It might SOUND (to some people) like a combination of Japanese and Yiddish (although frankly I doubt even that).

I must say up front that I don't know a great deal of Japanese, and I haven't got the chutzpah to be such a schmuck as to claim any knowledge of Yiddish at all.

But Klingon bears no *useful* relation to either language. It contains sounds which appear in neither. It contains no words at all of Japanese, or Yiddish, as far as I know (please do correct me if I'm wrong, I'd be very interested to know if Klingon actually does feature any words from actual languages. There IS *one*, and only one, and that is qavin, which means "coffee", and is apparently a straight steal of the "Federation Standard" word "caffeine").

Klingon is not tonal in any way, and it is written, even in piQad, from left to right, or vertically from top to bottom.

I think this is one of those much repeated things that someone says from ignorance, thinking (understandably) that Klingon was just chucked together in a hurry to make something that sounds cool. Quite wrong. As I say in the entry, much effort was expended making it as unlike real languages as possible.

H.