Se'vIr lIngDI' tamlertej, tlhIngan Hol QaQ law' DIvI' Hol QaQ puS jatlh Michelle Francl. (More or less translates as "Should chemists publish in Klingon rather than English wonders Michelle Francl")
and
TlhIngan Hol ghojlu'meH QaQ jajvam. (Today is a good day to learn Klingon.)
Writing this piece I learned a bunch about synthetic languages beginning with Hildegard of Bingen's lingua ignota to Nobel prize winning chemist Wilhelm Ostwald's literal investment in Ido (an offshoot of Esperanto). He gave half of his prize monies to promote use of the language by scientists. Also I was introduced to Volapük, which sounds like it could be Klingon, but is actually the name of another 19th century synthetic language.
The essay isn't about Klingon per se but rather tackles the issue of auxiliary languages and science. If English is the lingua franca of science, what is the cost to scientists who do not speak it as their mother tongue? Time? Visibility? Surely, but the ultimate cost is the work that doesn't get done as a result, or gets done more slowly. It costs us all.
So, a Gedanken experiment...would it level the playing field if we all had to publish in Klingon? Could you squeeze more science into a 15 minute talk if you did it in Klingon? Chaq!
Read the whole thing here.
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