Analyzing Vulcan Language Sample

[Gray Richardson]

Amazingly, I have not been able to find anything about this on the Web. Leading me to suspect that Star Trek fandom has waned substantially since its heyday, or that no one was watching "Enterprise" in its last season (both very likely).

In the 4th season of Star Trek Enterprise, episode 3, "Home," there is a brief exchange in the Vulcan language between T'pol and her mother. These lines were translated by Mark Okrand, who is said to have developed a Vulcan language. But no details about Okrand's Vulcan language seem to have been released on the net. I don't know if Okrand intended his Vulcan language to be consistent with any Vulcan that had been revealed before. My understanding is that all the movie instances of Vulcan were just English, with something Vulcan-sounding dubbed over in post to match the lip movements. I'm assuming that the instance of Vulcan in the Enterprise episode, was something new that Okrand put some thought into. The 3 lines from the script were rendered as follows on the Memory Alpha website (http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Vulcan_language) as follows:

Ghishun tanfi bosh dwener?
Why is he here?

Pod Tucker avalde keru... Vulkanfi tozhi dawru.
Commander Tucker is my colleague... he wanted to visit Vulcan.

Falu nenvikh valdewizh sukfi lorun.
This is the first time you've brought a colleague home with you.

I was wondering if there was enough information here to draw any conclusions about Okrand's Vulcan language? I see several patterns which lead me to make some guesses. Anyone care to help me out?

First off, Tucker and Vulkan are pretty distinctive nouns, so we can probably say that Pod means Commander.
Vulkanfi has that -fi suffix, which we see in sentence 1 (tanfi) and sentence 3 (sukfi) which leads me to believe it is an allative (indicating motion towards), dative, or a prepositional case ending of some kind. Unless it's perhaps a postposition that gets attached somehow. If -fi is a case ending, then tanfi probably means here or to here, and sukfi probably means home or to home.
tozhi dawru, then, must mean "he wanted to visit."
I am guessing that Okrand's Vulcan must tend towards verb final syntax. Dawru, may then mean visit, or want, or maybe visit in the desiderative mood. -ru might be a 3rd person ending for the verb. Or -ru could be the pronoun "he." Keru might be a copula. Or Ke might be the copula with -ru attached as either 3rd person inflection or pronoun. Or maybe -u is the inflection/pronoun, and Vulcan verbs tend to end in "r."
I am at a loss for how past tense is encoded.
Lorun might mean brought, and the -un suffix might be the 2nd person verb ending, or maybe an attached 2nd person pronoun.
Gishun, might be an imperative, something like "tell" or "answer."
Bosh could be why. But it could also be so or then or well. I am making an assumption that the English translation is as accurate as possible, with some artistic license to account for idiom and grace.
Valde would seem to mean colleague. If avalde means my colleague, perhaps a- is a prefixed pronoun meaning my. Or maybe Vulcan marks the possessed object instead of the possessor, in which case perhaps the a- prefix is a possessed case marker.
The -wizh in valdewizh could indicate a direct object. Maybe it's actually -izh with an epenthetic -w- inserted between the two vowels. Or maybe -wizh means with you, it could be a comitative marker. That is, if Vulcan marks the comitative marker on the direct object. Probably not, though.
I suspect that Falu means this or now and nenvikh means first time or maybe just first. Could nenvikh be an ordinal form of one? Or is falu the ordinal? I don't see enough info to draw conclusions on this.
I do wonder if dwener and dawru could actually be a different form of the same verb. What if the daw or dw root means come? Dwener could be a passive construction, or a participle (why is he come?). While dawru could be active voice, in past tense, or even an infinitive.

That's all that I can fathom at the moment. Does any of that sound on target? Or am I off base? Does anyone else have any other insights?

[Melend]

I greatly prefer Diane Duane's implied Vulcan. I have nothing to add to your conclusions about the sample; given the very limited data, you've gone about as far as I think it's possible for us to go.

[vec]

Mark Okrand also made the Vulcan in the movies. There's quite a lot of Vulcan in Enterprise. The Vulcan Language Institute has some details http://home.comcast.net/~markg61/vlif.htm

[WeepingElf]

Mark Okrand also made the Vulcan in the movies. There's quite a lot of Vulcan in Enterprise. The Vulcan Language Institute has some details http://home.comcast.net/~markg61/vlif.htm

The Vulcan Language Institute web site is a fan work by a certain Mark Gardner, and it would actually surprise me if Okrand based his Vulcan language on Gardner's. So it is probably not helpful here. (However, I haven't actually compared the languages.)

[CatDoom]

Mutsun, a native Californian language for which Okrand wrote a reference grammar, makes use of both independent and enclitic pronouns and a general locative case suffix expressing that the action in a clause occurs at, on, in, or toward an place or thing. Based on that, I would guess that, of the possibilities you suggested, "=u" and "=un" are cliticized pronouns while "-fi" is a locative or allative case marker. In that case, "Gish=un" could be an imperative, as you suggest, meaning something like "you tell me why," while "bosh" could be the independent form of the pronoun "he," perhaps used for emphasis.

[WeepingElf]

Mark Okrand also made the Vulcan in the movies. There's quite a lot of Vulcan in Enterprise. The Vulcan Language Institute has some details http://home.comcast.net/~markg61/vlif.htm

The Vulcan Language Institute web site is a fan work by a certain Mark Gardner, and it would actually surprise me if Okrand based his Vulcan language on Gardner's. So it is probably not helpful here. (However, I haven't actually compared the languages.)

Meanwhile, I have taken a brief look at both the examples given by Gray Richardson and Mark Gardner's site, and it is pretty obvious that the languages are not the same. For instance, Gardner's Traditional Golic Vulcan is verb-initial, and I couldn't find the words in Gray's examples in the VLI dictionary.

Also, is it not Paramount's policy to retroactively canonize fan work by building new canon upon it (after all, that would mean paying royalties to the fan-authors!). See, for instance, how Klingonaase was utterly ignored in Okrand's Klingon (and Klingonaase wasn't even a fan product but from an officially licensed novel, and they still did not canonize it).

[CatDoom]

Speaking of which, the Vulcan quotes on Memory Alpha from Star Trek II and III (where "Okrand Vulcan" was used) seem to support the hypothesis that "-un" marks a second person subject, though it appears as "-an" in one case and "-en" in another. That might indicate some kind of Sandhi, but there's probably not enough data to work out the exact rules.

[GreenBowTie]

i do think it's pretty ridiculous that "vulcan" is apparently their native name for themselves lmao

[WeepingElf]

i do think it's pretty ridiculous that "vulcan" is apparently their native name for themselves lmao

Yes. Before I learned that the Vulcans themselves call their planet Vulcan I assumed that it was just a name assigned by Terran astronomers because it is precisely the kind of name real-world astronomers use for such purposes (indeed, it has been assigned to a hypothetical intramercurial planet which, however, was never found, and the observations which led to the proposal of its existence have since then been accounted for otherwise).

But this is actually hardly more silly than the concept of a humanoid alien race which differs from humans mainly in ear shape and blood colour, and - this is the most ridiculous part - is interfertile with humans. (Of course, the Star Trek folks even have an explanation for that, but not a particularly convincing one.)

[Gray Richardson]

Well, Star Trek was always more of a vehicle for allegorical storytelling than it was pure science fiction. It was Gene Roddenberry's way of holding a mirror up to the day and criticizing society, social trends, and the human condition. That said, they often tried to make the science part realistic, but didn't let it get in the way of telling a good story.

Spock was originally supposed to be a Martian. I forget the particulars of how and why they transplanted him to the planet Vulcan, but the lore regarding Vulcan accreted in small chunks here and there over time, and was never really planned out with much forethought at the conception of the show.

I agree that it seems silly for Vulcans to all call themselves after a name the humans gave them after an obscure mythological figure from ancient Rome. But considering things from an in-story perspective, if it is an established fact that they do indeed call themselves Vulcans, I could think of a couple of logical reasons why this might be so.

Firstly, the most probable reason is that they always called their planet "Vulkan" in their own language, and humans just write it as "Vulcan," probably after long ago having conflated it with the name of the Roman god due to cultural biases of our own—through no fault of the Vulkan people. Do we know that their name for their species or language is also Vulkan? Those might not be the same words in Vulcan as they are in English. One would hope. Surely they would have different words for their planet, species and language in their own tongue rather than Vulkan, Vulkan and Vulkan.

Alternatively, and this is perhaps a stretch, but not without precedent: if the Vulcans were once a planet of disparate, fractious peoples, with different nations and languages (the Romulans being a good example) that had formerly had no one central government or world language, and no one single name to call their race, then perhaps after they met humans and began the process of uniting into a world government and adopting some sort of language standard (a Lingua Vulca, if you will) choosing the word that would refer to their planet or species was such a touchy subject, one that was loaded with so many semantic pitfalls, and prone to ignite such passions that could fray the fragile edges of the logic that keeps Vulcan ferocity at bay, that it was found more agreeable to choose a neutral outside name given them by humans than to favor the preferred name of any one nation, faction, or language group over another.

Take as an example the choosing of the name for the Euro, a choice fraught with difficulty. Originally it was to be called the ECU, an acronym for European Currency Unit, but later it was realized that écu was a word in French that meant shield, and the name of an actual coin in French history. This discovery ruffled enough feathers that they sought a new name. There was apparently a great deal of debate to figure out a culturally neutral term for the currency that did not favor any one particular nation or people. It took them a long while to settle on the name "Euro," chosen both for it's perceived commonality and neutrality.

Similarly, I could imagine that the human name for Vulcans might have developed some caché among Vulcans themselves in the period after first contact and because it had gained wide-spread popular use it was well positioned at just the right time to be adopted by the language unification council as the official toponym for their planet.

I don't know if either of those explanations are even close to accurate, and it's possible this has already been addressed somewhere in official Star Trek lore, but all this to say: though it may seem silly for Vulcans themselves to use the term "Vulcans", there could conceivably be a perfectly satisfactory reason for it.

[vec]

Vulcans were unified under a single planetary government long before (I think centuries before) first contact with Humans.

[Gray Richardson]

I'm not sure that that's correct. I'm not an expert, but my google-fu informs me that Vulcan had a "High Command" that is described as the most powerful governmental body on the planet, and that it existed as early as 1957, and that it was a de-facto military government (http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Vulcan_High_Command) but that doesn't necessarily mean it was a world government. They could have just been a super-power like the US or USSR, or a coalition of governments like NATO. I don't think it precludes the possibility of other nations and factions on Vulcan that were not united.

As a logical people, I could see the Vulcans having a language reform movement to create an auxlang, like Esperanto, or a controlled natural language overseen by something like the Académie française, or Orwell's Ministry of Truth. I don't see any reason why such language reform couldn't have happened post-contact with humans.

But of the two suggested explanations I gave above, I do think the more likely one is that "Vulkan" was just their own word in their language that humans conflated with the Roman god Vulcan.

[CatDoom]

As a logical people, I could see the Vulcans having a language reform movement to create an auxlang, like Esperanto, or a controlled natural language overseen by something like the Académie française, or Orwell's Ministry of Truth. I don't see any reason why such language reform couldn't have happened post-contact with humans.

The auxlang idea makes the most sense to me. It seems to me that a "logical" people would realize that the basic imperfection of sentient beings makes language change inevitable and that it would be a waste of time and resources to try to prevent it. At the same time, it is desirable in a globalized society that everyone should be able to communicate with everyone else, so I could see the "High Command" putting together a think tank to develop a language that was optimally easy to learn and semantically clear, and making it a mandatory subject of study for Vulcan children.

Over time, the auxlang might gradually replace most or all of the other languages on Vulcan, but dialectical variations would, of course, develop within groups that communicate with each other most regularly. Nevertheless, standard, "academic" Vulcan could be sort of the second language of everyone on the planet, even if it sounds a bit archaic in everyday speech.

[WeepingElf]

As a logical people, I could see the Vulcans having a language reform movement to create an auxlang, like Esperanto, or a controlled natural language overseen by something like the Académie française, or Orwell's Ministry of Truth. I don't see any reason why such language reform couldn't have happened post-contact with humans.

The auxlang idea makes the most sense to me. It seems to me that a "logical" people would realize that the basic imperfection of sentient beings makes language change inevitable and that it would be a waste of time and resources to try to prevent it. At the same time, it is desirable in a globalized society that everyone should be able to communicate with everyone else, so I could see the "High Command" putting together a think tank to develop a language that was optimally easy to learn and semantically clear, and making it a mandatory subject of study for Vulcan children.

Over time, the auxlang might gradually replace most or all of the other languages on Vulcan, but dialectical variations would, of course, develop within groups that communicate with each other most regularly. Nevertheless, standard, "academic" Vulcan could be sort of the second language of everyone on the planet, even if it sounds a bit archaic in everyday speech.

And as they are at it, they could have decided that this Vulcan auxlang would be a loglang. Of course, language change would be unhaltable and the language would soon develop dialects and drift away from loglangness. Is Okrand's Vulcan language a loglang?

BTW: The canon name of the Klingon homeworld is a similar case as the name Vulcan: Qo'noS is an adaption of Kronos - a name that sounds like something tacked on by Terran astronomers - to the phonology of Okrand's Klingon language.

[Drydic]

Well, Star Trek was always more of a vehicle for allegorical storytelling than it was pure science fiction. It was Gene Roddenberry's way of holding a mirror up to the day and criticizing society, social trends, and the human condition. That said, they often tried to make the science part realistic, but didn't let it get in the way of telling a good story.

More accurately, they tried to make it sound realistic.

Spock was originally supposed to be a Martian. I forget the particulars of how and why they transplanted him to the planet Vulcan, but the lore regarding Vulcan accreted in small chunks here and there over time, and was never really planned out with much forethought at the conception of the show.

He was also supposed to have red skin, a tail, horns, and basically be extremely demonic. NBC nixed that idea pretty fast.

I'm not sure that that's correct. I'm not an expert, but my google-fu informs me that Vulcan had a "High Command" that is described as the most powerful governmental body on the planet, and that it existed as early as 1957, and that it was a de-facto military government (http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Vulcan_High_Command) but that doesn't necessarily mean it was a world government. They could have just been a super-power like the US or USSR, or a coalition of governments like NATO. I don't think it precludes the possibility of other nations and factions on Vulcan that were not united.

The High Command was the highest military and political body on Vulcan. Surak's teachings basically transformed the government into a meritocracy, once Those who walked beneath the Raptor's Wings (ie the proto-Romulans) were defeated.

[Gray Richardson]

And as they are at it, they could have decided that this Vulcan auxlang would be a loglang. Of course, language change would be unhaltable and the language would soon develop dialects and drift away from loglangness. Is Okrand's Vulcan language a loglang?

That's a really good question. At first blush, it does not appear to be a loglang like loglan or lojban. However, it depends on what you mean by a logical language.

One would think that any Vulcan language reform movement would incorporate principles that would facilitate logical thinking. I could even see neurolinguists and cognitive linguists developing the lexicon, grammar and syntax in such a way as to help with conflict resolution, ambiguity resolution, courtesy, and emotional control, things that would be very helpful to passionate Vulcans to keep them from becoming frustrated when speaking to one another and from losing control of their emotions. Although, if it is the case that Vulcans were historically so volatile, surely their natural languages would have already developed some degree of courtesy and deference mechanisms to a more refined degree than you might see in Earthlangs.

I could imagine linguists creating mechanisms (perhaps evidentials, mediopassives, or using third person for first person) for creating psychological distance in describing emotional things and even helping them to think about their emotions in a compartmentalized fashion. Or even a program, à la Orwell's Newspeak, to reduce the semantic content of the lexicon with regards to emotional connotations and decrease the inventory of emotion words.

While the language is probably not a logical language in the style of loglan or lojban, it may indeed be a logical language that has regular grammar and that was engineered not only to promote logical thinking, but also to achieve certain social goals, perhaps more like Suzette Haden Elgin's Láadan.

[Drydic]

Although, if it is the case that Vulcans were historically so volatile, surely their natural languages would have already developed some degree of courtesy and deference mechanisms to a more refined degree than you might see in Earthlangs.

According to the Vulcan ambassador in Enterprise, humanity and pre-Surak Vulcans are almost equal in their capacity for unrestrained emotion. The Romulans pretty much bear this out.

[CatDoom]

According to the Vulcan ambassador in Enterprise, humanity and pre-Surak Vulcans are almost equal in their capacity for unrestrained emotion. The Romulans pretty much bear this out.

Perhaps at the best of times, but Vulcans enter pon farr every seven years and seemingly become horny and violent beyond what's normal for most humans most of the time. It seems likely that, much like the human ovulation cycle, Vulcans in close contact for a long period of time will tend to find their pon farr periods syncing up, potentially amplifying the resulting chaos. I always kind of figured that the reason Vulcan's constantly worked to suppress their emotions was so that they would be prepared to deal with those crazy alien hormones.

[Drydic]

Romulans don't undergo pon farr, so it can't be used to extrapolate to ancestral Vulcan emotional states.

[sangi39]

Romulans don't undergo pon farr, so it can't be used to extrapolate to ancestral Vulcan emotional states.

As far as I'm aware, no canonical source (in this case only including the TV shows and the movies) no not explicitly state whether Romulans do or do not undergo pon farr. Spock, in TOS, (IIRC) also stated that pon farr was a biological condition (he also states it only affects male Vulcans so whether or not the "biological condition" statement is reliable or not is probably debatable). Either way, it is never said that Romulans don't undergo pon farr so we can't say for certain that it isn't a trait they share with Vulcans, whether they stopped undergoing pon farr (and thus a lost ancestral feature) or whether pon farr is exclusive to Vulcans (and thus an innovation).

[Drydic]

Romulans don't undergo pon farr, so it can't be used to extrapolate to ancestral Vulcan emotional states.

As far as I'm aware, no canonical source (in this case only including the TV shows and the movies) no not explicitly state whether Romulans do or do not undergo pon farr. Spock, in TOS, (IIRC) also stated that pon farr was a biological condition (he also states it only affects male Vulcans so whether or not the "biological condition" statement is reliable or not is probably debatable). Either way, it is never said that Romulans don't undergo pon farr so we can't say for certain that it isn't a trait they share with Vulcans, whether they stopped undergoing pon farr (and thus a lost ancestral feature) or whether pon farr is exclusive to Vulcans (and thus an innovation).

And T'Pol undergoes pon farr in Enterprise.

[sangi39]

Romulans don't undergo pon farr, so it can't be used to extrapolate to ancestral Vulcan emotional states.

As far as I'm aware, no canonical source (in this case only including the TV shows and the movies) no not explicitly state whether Romulans do or do not undergo pon farr. Spock, in TOS, (IIRC) also stated that pon farr was a biological condition (he also states it only affects male Vulcans so whether or not the "biological condition" statement is reliable or not is probably debatable). Either way, it is never said that Romulans don't undergo pon farr so we can't say for certain that it isn't a trait they share with Vulcans, whether they stopped undergoing pon farr (and thus a lost ancestral feature) or whether pon farr is exclusive to Vulcans (and thus an innovation).

And T'Pol undergoes pon farr in Enterprise.

Which so many people either forget or just plain never saw. I think one guy online said he'd only seen one female undergo pon farr in ST:V, and that was B'Elanna (so whether that counts at all is another matter). Since that comment was made after after ST:E finished I'd assume he never saw the series, at least not all of it (ST:E seems to have been fairly unpopular, even amongst the Star Trek fandom (the number of people blaming that on T'Pol being attractive, though, is amusingly ridiculous)).

That's one problem there with Star Trek canon at least (let us not forget that the ST:OS vs. ST:NG Klingons which, IIRC, wasn't fully explained until ST:E).

[CatDoom]

Which so many people either forget or just plain never saw. I think one guy online said he'd only seen one female undergo pon farr in ST:V, and that was B'Elanna (so whether that counts at all is another matter). Since that comment was made after after ST:E finished I'd assume he never saw the series, at least not all of it (ST:E seems to have been fairly unpopular, even amongst the Star Trek fandom (the number of people blaming that on T'Pol being attractive, though, is amusingly ridiculous)).

That's one problem there with Star Trek canon at least (let us not forget that the ST:OS vs. ST:NG Klingons which, IIRC, wasn't fully explained until ST:E).

I think, perhaps, some people would just prefer to ignore Enterprise. I personally prefer Worf's (non-)explanation to the one we eventually got in that show.

[Drydic]

Romulans don't undergo pon farr, so it can't be used to extrapolate to ancestral Vulcan emotional states.

As far as I'm aware, no canonical source (in this case only including the TV shows and the movies) no not explicitly state whether Romulans do or do not undergo pon farr. Spock, in TOS, (IIRC) also stated that pon farr was a biological condition (he also states it only affects male Vulcans so whether or not the "biological condition" statement is reliable or not is probably debatable). Either way, it is never said that Romulans don't undergo pon farr so we can't say for certain that it isn't a trait they share with Vulcans, whether they stopped undergoing pon farr (and thus a lost ancestral feature) or whether pon farr is exclusive to Vulcans (and thus an innovation).

And T'Pol undergoes pon farr in Enterprise.

Which so many people either forget or just plain never saw. I think one guy online said he'd only seen one female undergo pon farr in ST:V, and that was B'Elanna (so whether that counts at all is another matter).

It wouldn't, since B'Elanna is half-Klingon half-human...fuck Voyager sucked.

Since that comment was made after after ST:E finished I'd assume he never saw the series, at least not all of it (ST:E seems to have been fairly unpopular, even amongst the Star Trek fandom (the number of people blaming that on T'Pol being attractive, though, is amusingly ridiculous)).

They went a bit off with all the time travel crap, but pulled it together in the 4th season; I can't ignore the series simply because the Mirror Universe two-parter was so incredibly awesome.

[CatDoom]

That was a cool episode, and I actually liked Bakula as captain. Heck, I even thought it was a cool concept to do a sort of "lower-tech" prequel series, and those grappler arm things were pretty cool.

I'll never forgive them for what they did to the Gorn, though >_>