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From Klingon to Dothraki: How sci-fi languages shape worlds

Twenty Thousand Hertz

CHAPTER

The Language of a Fantasy Culture

Tolkien didn't think that people in full big earth would try to actually speak elvish. So when they wanted to write dialogue in elvish for the Peter Jackson films they just had no verbs. Mark Okrand was hired by Paramount in the mid 1980s to invent the Klingon language for the movie Star Trek 3. He did not invent the language completely from scratch but wrote down phonetically what he heard and imposed a structure on it.

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