Jonathan Brown of Milton Keynes, UK, has struggled with dyslexia for many years. But he’s found that studying the Klingon language from Star Trek very helpful for coping with it:
He explained how he has always had difficulty with reading and also has what he describes as “name blindness” but while doing this work he realised that he could use a different part of his brain.
“Dyslexia is not something you get over, you live with it. It’s not necessarily a hindrance, you just learn different ways to pick things up.
“Working on the translation has helped me understand where I’ve been having problems all my life with languages, I realised I’d been trying to remember the words in the name part of my brain and because I can’t remember names, I can’t remember the words.
“With the Klingon language games used on the CD, I tended to put words into a different place and it went into my long term memory.
You can’t go wrong by choosing to study Klingon. At one point, just a couple decades ago, it was the fastest growing language in the world!
Link -via blastr | Image: Paramount
This video shows an actor performing the “To Be or Not To Be” soliloquy from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, restoring the language to the original Klingon. The play became available in the United Federation of Planets in 2000, thanks to the efforts of the Klingon Language Institute.
via Wandering Goblin | Amazon.com Link
The new Star Trek movie may not have the Klingon language in it, but Klingons may have the last laugh yet. They have center stage in a renewal of a long-lost art form: the Klingon opera.
Every culture has its epic tales of mighty warriors. Odysseus blinds the Cyclops. Beowulf rips out the arm of Grendel. For Klingons, there’s Kahless, who dices 500 warriors with a sword forged from his own hair and some help from the Lady Lukara. To celebrate their victory, they make love in the ankle-deep blood.
The story of Kahless the Unforgettable is a cornerstone of Klingon mythology, as told in the opera u. Members of the Klingon Terran Research Ensemble — based in The Hague, the Netherlands — have been workshopping u for the last year with an ambitious goal: to mount the first authentic performances of Klingon opera here on earth.
“The first time I read that proposal, I thought they were freaks,” says Jorn Weisbrodt, the creative director for the Byrd Hoffman Watermill Foundation in New York. “But they’re really being very serious. And I think it really is the result that matters, and I found the result quite fascinating and interesting and strange and weird.”
From the Upcoming
ueue, submitted by CheeseDuck.

