Priceless

I came across an ad for this production in a magazine the other day:

A Klingon Christmas Carol

Tickets are $32--which would be a stretch for me--but can I really allow myself to miss out on something so wonderfully quirky?

I find it pretty amazing that, in a world where (according to National Geographic) one real language goes extinct every 14 days, there is an ever-growing number of people obsessed with communicating in a fake alien language who's first utterances took place only 30 years ago in the first Star Trek movie. Now there is an official Klingon Language Institute that publishes its own scholarly journal and, in addition to the play mentioned above, I've heard of at least one serious Klingon opera that is being produced in the Netherlands...(you should really read the article in the Dutch Daily I've linked to here...pretty wild stuff...including an interplanetary broadcast between Earth and the Klingon home world...seriously!)

Not that I have a problem with anyone being trek-obsessed enough to want to become a Klingon, but it's a bit sad to think that more attention is being paid to Klingons than to those last speakers of dying indigenous languages that hold such a wealth of cultural, historical, and perhaps even scientifically-relevant knowledge about the natural world. Unfortunately it's often the case that these languages are only spoken and leave no written record behind. Once the children stop learning their ancestral languages in favor of more widely used global giants, those languages disappear with the death of the older generation. Maybe someone should produce an opera or two in Cayuga or Dalabon...