Klingon (tlhIngan Hol)

I once studied this as light relief from trying to pick up the basics of Japanese, which is fairly easy to pronounce (for an English speaker, anyway) but murderously difficult to write down in the way the Japanese do, with its hiragana and katakana “alphabets” (straightforward enough) and the hideously complicated kanji with their multiple readings that make Japanese one of the most difficult writing systems for a foreigner (or alien, as I remember being referred to at Tokyo airport) to learn.

The relevance of all this? Because the Klingon ‘culture’ – originally just ‘indians’ to the Federation’s ‘cowboys’ – has latterly been loosely based on the bushido or ‘warrior’s way’ of the samurai of historic Japan, with (thankfully) a lot less emphasis on the ritual suicide aspects.

Anyway, the goodly soul who originally dreamt this all up, the gifted linguist Marc Okrand, decided that – like Russian in most of its tenses – Klingons don’t have a verb to be – leading to a major headache when the Shakespeare-quoting Klingon General Chang in the film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country has the line from Hamlet: “To be, or not to be”.

But regardless of all this trivia, what could possibly improve on Hab SoSlI’ Quch! (Your mother has a smooth forehead!)?

M’lord, the defence rests.