Week 3: Words that carry their own grammar

Morphology — the smallest pieces that mean anything, and three different ways of gluing them into words. Okrand's Klingon as the worked example

8 March 2027

Marc Okrand built Klingon for The Search for Spock in 1984, working outward from a handful of lines an actor had already improvised in the first film. By The Undiscovered Country there is enough of it to hold a scene, and the courtroom sequence shows the language being used in dialogue rather than displayed as decoration.

Okrand’s design decision was to make Klingon systematically unlike English. Its verbs take stacked affixes — a prefix carrying person and number for both subject and object, then a series of suffixes in a fixed order — so a single Klingon word does work that English spreads across a clause. That is agglutination: morphemes joined end to end, each one keeping its shape and doing exactly one job.

The alternative is fusion, where one ending carries several categories at once and cannot be cut apart — Latin’s case endings, where a single vowel is doing number and case and gender simultaneously. Or isolation, where morphemes are not joined at all and word order and particles do that work instead. You are picking one of these on Thursday, and it affects how your language reads on the page.

Outline#

• morphemes: the smallest pieces that carry meaning, and how to find their edges
• agglutinative, fusional, isolating — three strategies, with real languages for each
• Okrand’s verb: a prefix, a stem, and a series of suffixes in a fixed order
• what your verb must mark, and the much longer list of what it need not