Here’s another head-scratching—yet wildly popular—new iPhone app to ponder: a Klingon-to-English dictionary, with translator and grammar checking software.
Designed by Ultralingua, a Dinkytown, Minn.-based language-learning software company, the app offers users the ability to look up common conversational phrases in Klingon such as, “What is all this debris?” and “I’d like a black ale.” (We hope “Where is the pan-galactic bathroom, please?” is in there someplace.) “Worf,” played by “Star Trek” actor Michael Dorn, coaches users on pronunciation employing an authentic Klingon accent. Although this is probably standard-issue stuff for Starfleet academy graduates, it might also prove useful to Klingons as well, who can use it in the opposite direction to speak with “Terrans” (that’s Earthings, you and me).

For the project, Ultralingua employed a linguist named d’Armond Speers who rather infamously spoke only the fictional alien language to his own son for the first three years of the tot’s life. “I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language,” Speers told the Minnesota Daily. “He was definitely starting to learn it.”

Clearly Speers was the right man for the job, but let’s hope that this “teaching kids Klingon” stuff doesn’t become a meme within Trekkie circles. I mean, sure, I suppose it would amuse your Vulcan friends when Junior starts babbling about SpongeBob SquarePants in Klingon, but this sure sounds like a recipe for raising a crazed loner to me…

Cross posting this from Brand X