Real answer: these are actually real languages! They're just conlangs, or constructed languages, instead of natural languages. The major problem with conlangs generally ends up being the limited vocabulary, but the grammar foundations are usually solid.

I actually really like Klingon as a language because it was intentionally designed to be alien, and specifically to be very Klingon. Most languages are Subject-Verb-Object (like English and other Western languages) or Subject-Object-Verb (like Japanese or Hindi). Klingon, however, is Object-Verb-Subject - it's very direct with the emphasis placed on the target of the sentence, which makes sense with the Star Trek world and Klingon culture.

Fun fact, Klingon has at least one native speaker - some guy raised his daughter to speak Klingon as well as English. (I'm not a fan of this - on one hand, learning multiple languages from an early age is a huge leg up in being able to learn more languages in the future, but on the other hand Klingon is entirely useless as a primary language given its structure and the few other people who speak it.)

[–] brbposting@sh.itjust.works 25 points 9 months ago

Speers was also the only person who would speak Klingon to Alec and the boy never saw Star Trek during this experiment, so didn’t ever see anyone but his father speaking it. As everyone else spoke English, Speers stated when Alec was about three years old, “He stopped listening to me when I spoke in Klingon. It was clear that he didn’t enjoy it, and I didn’t want to make it into a problem, so I switched to English…”

Today the teenage Alec no longer is fluent in Klingon and reportedly can’t even pick out the meaning of individual words of the language.

Wow

[–] gibmiser@lemmy.world 21 points 9 months ago (3 children)

So klingons would like the song Hammer Smashed Face?

[–] deegeese@sopuli.xyz 29 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Face, smashed by hammer.

[–] Klear@sh.itjust.works 12 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Face, when the hammer fell

[–] deegeese@sopuli.xyz 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Sokath, his eyes uncovered.

[–] Alteon@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago

I both absolutely hate this episode for how bizarre it is, and love it at the same time for how alien and unique it is.

I'm hard pressed to believe that a society could communicate on metaphors alone.

[–] gramathy@lemmy.ml 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

No, that’s still subject-verb-object or at least adjective clause-noun depending on how it’s read (it should have a hyphen in that case but stuff like that gets left out a lot)

[–] gibmiser@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

Guess I got my subject and object confused. Never paid much attention to sentence diagrams

[–] Holyhandgrenade@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Man I bet Klingon death metal would be amazing

[–] zewm@lemmy.zip 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

https://youtu.be/SKwM8f6vzEI?si=csuTzsEWL_hqvl5a

[–] Holyhandgrenade@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago

Excellent.

[–] nikita@sh.itjust.works 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Even cooler, in my opinion, are languages that are even further outside of common indo european language paradigms, such as Navajo which uses degrees of animacy instead of grammatical gender and Basque which uses ‘focus’ and ‘topic’ to determine word order rather than subjects and objects.

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

such as Navajo which uses degrees of animacy instead of grammatical gender

What makes their use of degrees of animacy not a use of grammatical gender? Keep in mind that even though it's called "gender" because in European languages it usually maps in some way onto human sexual identity, linguistically speaking grammatical gender has nothing to do with human gender identity.

[–] nikita@sh.itjust.works 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Good point. What I meant is that it’s different from grammatical gender typical of European languages as you defined it.

Grammatical gender is a bad name for such a general concept that goes beyond the social definition of gender. In fact, that term is a bit eurocentric.

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 3 points 9 months ago

In fact, that term is a bit eurocentric

Yeah without a doubt it is. There are a few non-European languages that use a masculine/feminine grammatical split, including Arabic and Hebrew, but both masc/fem and masc/fem/neuter are hugely prevalent in European languages, and I doubt the term got its name from Arabic linguists.

I've just done some Googling and learnt that some people prefer the term "noun classes" rather than grammatical gender, especially when the classes are not based on human cultural genders. Other people make a distinction between what "noun classes" means and what "grammatical gender" is, using them for two different concepts. So apparently the term "grammatical gender" is not quite as uncontroversial within linguistics as I thought.

[–] MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 7 points 9 months ago

That can't be right. I've never heard of a language called Dutch. That's just something they print on some food labels to make them seem better.

/s for the dense.

[–] arudesalad@lemmy.funnyname.xyz 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I might be wrong, but isn't German Subject-Verb-Object-Verb?

[–] pankuleczkapl@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 9 months ago

The main verb is most often in the second position, the second verb you are referring to is a placeholder for an auxiliary verb that usually is a different form of a previously main verb