That’s kind of amusing, because the German idiom for “It’s all Greek to me” is “Seems like Spanish to me”
Chart of “Greek to me” equivalents
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That’s amusing because my native German speaking colleague used to say he could understand every language except Greek. When challenged with any language but German or English, he would answer, “That’s Greek to me.”
I speak Hungarian and have never heard that comparison made. Klingon is guttural, harsh, with short words. Hungarian has long agglutinated words that sound sing-songy to me because the emphasis is almost always on the first syllable.
I’ve heard it said jokingly about Hungarian, that it so strange it may as well be an alien language, ie, Klingon.
That I’ll buy. lol
Leo Szilard would agree:
And so," Fermi came to his overwhelming question, “if all this has been happening, they should have arrived here by now, so where are they?” – It was Leo Szilard, a man with an impish sense of humor, who supplied the perfect reply to the Fermi Paradox: “They are among us,” he said, “but they call themselves Hungarians.”
When the question was put to Edward Teller – who was particularly proud of his monogram, E.T. (abbreviation of extraterrestrial )[2] – he looked worried, and said: “Von Kármán must have been talking.”[6]
Hm, the “FF” name I’m most familiar with is apparently spelled with an “Ff”:
And I wasn’t joking about Hungarian. The Klingon language used in Star Trek was literally based on Hungarian. Which, since it’s so far separated from any other Earthly language, actually manages to be closer to the invented language based on it.
Apparently, the same with the one I’m most familiar with:
ETA: the OneBox doesn’t get past all that cruft. Ffestiniog is a town in Wales.
Perhaps I’ve misunderstood you, but Hungarian isn’t “far separated from any other Earthly language”. It is part of the Uralic family along with Finnish and Estonian, plus a dozen languages spoken in Siberia, like Mari.
A language isolate like Basque, Ainu or Sumerian would have been a better fit in that respect. Come to think of it, basing Klingon on the latter would have allowed for some intriguing plot possibilites.
A language family is pretty broad, though. For comparison, Spanish, German, Greek, Russian, and Hindi are all the same language family, too, but none of them are all that closely related. Hungarian isn’t the most isolated human language, but it’s still more isolated than the languages spoken by most humans.
And I don’t think Star Trek ever tried to make a plot point of it. The creators of the language just picked a relatively-isolated language because they wanted something that would sound unfamiliar to most viewers.
So far as I can tell, the idea Klingon is based on Hungarian is just a rumor. Hungarian doesn’t sound anything like Klingon, and they, at least at a quick study, don’t really share all that much in common except maybe an agglutinative structure. I’ve heard it was influenced by Native American and other languages. Once again, it seems to be part of a joke based on Hungarian’s perceived impenetrability to English speakers.
- Marc Oknard, creator of Klingon
So, no, Klingon was not “literally based on Hungarian” unless you have better sources than the creator himself.
Frasier had an episode where the title character was supposed to learn a Hebrew prayer to recite at a friend’s son’s bar mitzvah, but his Jewish co-worker pranked him by teaching it to him in Klingon instead. Klingon doesn’t sound much like Hebrew, either.
As I recall from other discussions, Okrand picked features that were very rare in human languages - such as a sentence order (Object Verb Subject) that is used only by three known languages (and not Hungarian)
Yeah, I think it was propagated in the spirit of “there are aliens among us; we call them Hungarians,” and I suspect, knowing many Hungarians myself, probably half-propagated by them, or at least with little pushback against the notion.
Huh. Well, I can’t argue with that.
Ah. I remember that catchphrase - Von Neumann, etc.
The first time I heard “Prisencólinensináinciúsol” was crazy. It was English but with no identifiable words so I could just appreciate the sounds. Now, I can hear English words and phrases in there, blunting the effect. The video @Q.Q.Switcheroo has even more identifiable words. I would love to be able to hear what English sounds like to people who don’t understand a word of it.
The same is true for Spanish-speakers trying to understand Portuguese. I can understand maybe about half of Brazilian Portuguese and less of the European variety.
It’s not just me, then.
As for Klingon, I thought Mayan languages or Quechua, the language of the Incas, was closer to its sounds than any language I’ve heard. I listened to some samples and they sounded rather “normal.” Really, the only weird sounds in those languages are the ejective consonants, which sound so cool.
I’m thinking that Klingon sounds most like American English, the language of a truly alien people.