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Nov 20 2009

Georgetown alum attempts to teach son Klingon, working on Klingon-English dictionary

Posted by: Imani Siyyan Tate in Leisure, Vox Populi, tags: , , , ,

Raising your children bilingual is pretty common, but one Georgetown grad took it to the next level. D’Armond Speers (GRD ’02), who earned a doctorate in computational linguistics at Georgetown and is a big Star Trek fan, decided to raise his newborn son speaking only Klingon, according to TrekToday.com.

Speers spoke to his son in Klingon for the first three years of the boy’s life. Speers even went so far as to sing lullabies to his son in Klingon, like “May the Empire Endure” before the child went to bed.

Despite Speers’s attempts, his son, now 15-years-old, speaks no Klingonese at all now.

However, Speers passion for the language hasn’t gone to waste.  When Ultralingue, a dictionary, translation, and grammar software company, needed assistance with their latest Klingon dictionary project, they contacted Speers.

Ultralingue, best known for their mobile phone applications and learning software, developed a Klingon dictionary over the summer. It even features audio clips of Commander Work Klingon from the television series.

This is what we get for being the one school with both a solid linguistics program and a class on Philosophy and Star Trek…

This entry was posted on Friday, November 20th, 2009 at 6:52 pm and is filed under Leisure, Vox Populi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Georgetown alum attempts to teach son Klingon, working on Klingon-English dictionary”
  1. Carol says: November 20th, 2009 at 7:05 pm

    And you have an excellent computer science department! The combination of linguistics and computer science is a fascinating one these days!

  2. E.S. says: November 20th, 2009 at 11:45 pm

    That dude is totally awesome! But who is “Commander Work Klingon from the television series”? I’m not aware of any such character. Do you mean Worf from Star Trek: The Next Generation? He’s probably the most well-known Klingon, but “Klingon” isn’t his last name. Instead of a surname, he uses “Worf, son of Mogh”.

  3. K. says: November 21st, 2009 at 1:38 am

    AND if you take one of prof. mark lance’s classes, he might make star trek/battlestar galactica references while lecturing on philosophy. isn’t georgetown great : D

  4. Bill Chapman says: November 21st, 2009 at 7:45 am

    If this man really had to teach a contructed language to his son. At least Esperanto can be used for international communication.

  5. Brian Barker says: November 22nd, 2009 at 2:12 am

    Klingon is difficult, but Esperanto is worldwide. And easy, of course :)

    As in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2LPVcsL2k0

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