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So we all know that Klingon has been developed into a working language and is a fan favorite. But I came across this article from omniglot and apparently there's at least one developed Vulcan language. This Vulcan language was apparently developed in the 1980s (with the help of fans and friends) by Mark Gardner who runs the Vulcan Language Institute. The script in the Omniglot article was developed at Korsaya.org which is headed by Britton Watkins and are based on what was seen in the movies and shows, although I think the handwritten Vulcan is completely fan made.

According to Memory-Alpha, there was also a fan-made Vulcan language back in the 1960s developed by Dorothy Jones Heydt, though I can't seem to find anything on the internet. And the VLI links to other Vulcan language projects.

The Omniglot article:

Golic Vulcan alphabet (gol-vuhlkansu)

Golic Vulcan

Golic Vulcan is one of the constructed languages of the Vulcan race from the science fiction series Star Trek. It was carefully crafted over many years by Mark R. Gardner and other collaborators in the Vulcan Language Institute, which has been defunct since the latter half of 2008.

The core features of the language including the phonology, syntax and the basis for the morphology are creative extrapolations from the Vulcan language dialog heard in the feature films. As of June of 2011, the language has no official relationship to the Star Trek franchise but used in fan-fiction and other artistic projects.

Notable features of the language

• -Lexicon of 12,000+ terms
  -VSO
  -Pro-drop and contextually omitted copula
  -Pervasive compounding in nouns
  -Standard and short/flat vowel contrasts are traditionally common but not sharply distinguished in all cases in modern speech. Long vowels also exist (cf: maat), but are far less common.
  -Enclitic adverbial prefixes and prepositions
  -Unusual onset consonant clusters (cf: psth-, fn-, tv-)

Like the language itself, the 3 non-Roman writing systems presented here were inspired by Vulcan writing-related imagery that has appeared over the entire history of the series on screen. Specifically, the script referred to as Traditional Calligraphy is inspired by the graphic design of Michael Okuda. The Standard Script derives from the costume work by Robert Fletcher. All of the work to turn this visual imagery into functional alphabets has been done by Britton Watkins of korsaya.org.

Notable features of the orthography

• -Alphabetic (from logographic roots)
  -Visually modeled on canonical sources from the big and small screen
  -Direction of writing: flexible but most traditionally rendered top to bottom. When written horizontally the traditional calligraphy is simply rotated and flows in the same direction of the predominate concurrent system. With English it reads left to right. (See example at the beginning of this article.) With Hebrew it would read right to left. The Standard script can rotate in the same manner if necessary in context. Horizontal Handwriting involves two different placement models for the vowels; inline and diacritic. In vertical handwriting, vowels are used more or less as inline letters with the exception of the /a/. It behaves somewhat like an abugida vowel diacritic.
  -Letterforms are invariable, but conjoined within words. The Traditional Calligraphy supports approximately 60 consonant clusters with unique ligatures, most of which occur only at syllable onset.
  -Used to write: Primarily Golic Vulcan, though other Vulcan languages and loans from other languages can also be rendered in all of the script variations.
  -No regular capitalization, but proper nouns are commonly marked with an ahm-glat (‘name-sign’) signifying the common/proper distinction.

The Golic Vulcan alphabets

In the following table the Standard Script (Gotavlu-zukitaun) letters appear to the left of the Traditional Calligraphy (Vanu-tanaf-kitaun) letters (nuhm) and the Handwriting (El’ru-Kitaun) variations appear in turn at the right in each cluster. The traditional name of the Standard Script letter is given along with the IPA for each sound. Note that for the Traditional and Handwriting scripts it is most common to simply refer to the consonants as C+/o/, hence "M" is "Mo". "N" is "No", etc. Exceptions occur for "oNG" and the consonant clusters "KSo" vs. "oKS" ("X"). The names in ‘o’ are omitted in the table for the sake of visual simplicity. The traditional names represent the fact that these letters are in most cases unmodified logographic glyphs from a more ancient system. Compare the historic usage of Egyptian hieroglyphs to write proper names or the manyo-gana of pre-syllabary Japanese.

Inventory of Glyphs (Vis t'Ek'zuntra)
Consonants (Ikastarzun)


Vowels (Ikatu'azun)


Sample texts


A recording of this text by Britton Watkins

Translation

All sentient populace of the universe are born free and equal with respect to dignity and rights. They are capable of possessing logic and ethical principals and should act each toward the other in a manner of universal equality.
(A version of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

this is both sad and boring.

On the contrary, I find it interesting (although it's not a hobby I want to take up myself).

Didn't the guy who made the Klingon language (forgot his name) make a Vulcan language for ST2 as well (for the scenes were Spock and Saavik are talking with each other).

Lord Revan wrote:Didn't the guy who made the Klingon language (forgot his name) make a Vulcan language for ST2 as well (for the scenes were Spock and Saavik are talking with each other).

Yup. Marc Okrand created the dialogue in STII. Apparently, folks from the VLI tried to contact Okrand for help with a Vulcan counterpart to The Klingon Dictionary, but they didn't hear back from him.

Prometheus Unbound wrote:this is both sad and boring.

The only thing I find sad about it is how far they are driving the Vulcans into being a lame Asian stereotype. I mean, it's stupid enough for Star Trek (and other sci-fi universes) to have one-note alien species (where every member of that species has the same basic personality), but it's even worse when they make them such obvious (and vaguely racist) representations of a specific Earth culture.

Could you please expand on that?

On which part? I don't see how anything I said is at all shocking or controversial. It's a pretty common critique of Star Trek (and sci-fi in general) how one-note the aliens tend to be, and how they are usually explicitly drawn to parallel Earth cultures. It's arguably one of the most common critiques, in fact. For example, the Vulcans have pointy ears and bowl haircuts and are obsessed with science and emotion-less logic (which is a common crude Asian stereotype). This surely can't be the first time you've heard someone say this? I mean, you've watched Star Trek, right?

I've watched it, but...

1) Pointy ears are an Asian stereotype? Really? That I had never heard.

2) The "Asians are obsessed with science and logic" stereotype in the US... I don't think that really took off until Asians started outperforming whites on college entry exams and the like, with large numbers of Asian immigrants being seen as a threat to the white majority because of education and being stereotyped as unimaginative crammers.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but that started happening in the '70s or so... after Spock's character was already established. And Spock pretty much defined the basic parameters of Vulcan culture with few or no modifications having been made at later times. You can hardly blame Star Trek for invoking a stereotype that didn't exist until after the show went off the air.

3) How exactly is what this group in particular is doing somehow a "sad" act of reinforcing the Vulcans-as-'Asians' stereotype?

Simon_Jester wrote:I've watched it, but...

1) Pointy ears are an Asian stereotype? Really? That I had never heard.

He might be talking about the Fu Manchu stereotype of Asians that got transfered over to Asian and non-Asian (though potentially Asian analogue) characters, some depictions of which had pointed ears. Here are some examples:

Boris Karloff's Fu Manchu (1932):



This version of Ming The Merciless from Defenders of the Earth



And this version of The Mandarin from the Iron Man Animated series (from the 1990s, iirc):

Simon_Jester wrote:2) The "Asians are obsessed with science and logic" stereotype in the US... I don't think that really took off until Asians started outperforming whites on college entry exams and the like, with large numbers of Asian immigrants being seen as a threat to the white majority because of education and being stereotyped as unimaginative crammers.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but that started happening in the '70s or so... after Spock's character was already established. And Spock pretty much defined the basic parameters of Vulcan culture with few or no modifications having been made at later times. You can hardly blame Star Trek for invoking a stereotype that didn't exist until after the show went off the air.

I suppose it's possible for the stereotype to insinuate itself after the establishment of the character for certain elements of the population? In fact, the pointy-eared versions of the Mandarin and Ming characters I show above didn't happen until well after they first appeared on film/print, and all versions of those Fu Manchu-type characters (including Fu Manchu himself) with pointy ears seem atypical going by google image searches of those characters.

I don't quite see the connection to the degree that Ziggy Stardust is seeing with respect to the Spock character or Vulcans in general, but then again I live in Hawaii and I'm probably not likely to be exposed to anti-Asian attitudes too often.

Ziggy Stardust wrote:On which part? I don't see how anything I said is at all shocking or controversial. It's a pretty common critique of Star Trek (and sci-fi in general) how one-note the aliens tend to be, and how they are usually explicitly drawn to parallel Earth cultures. It's arguably one of the most common critiques, in fact. For example, the Vulcans have pointy ears and bowl haircuts and are obsessed with science and emotion-less logic (which is a common crude Asian stereotype). This surely can't be the first time you've heard someone say this? I mean, you've watched Star Trek, right?

This is the first time I've heard anyone suggest this.

In the episode with the "space nazis" Kirk attempted to explain Spock's pointed ears as an unfortunate childhood encounter with a rice-picking machine, which so far as I can remember is both the earliest conflation of Vulcans and Asians, and the only one I recall hearing until now... though admittedly, I don't spend a lot of time looking at SF aliens and going "which stereotype does this remind me of...?"

Hell, just google "Vulcan Asian stereotype" and see all of the articles that have been written on the subject. This is not by any stretch of the imagination a novel comment on my part (and I can't even take credit; it's not something I noticed until it was pointed out to me). Hell, the third Google hit with that search term is an article from the long dormant main site, here. I'm not saying you have to agree with it or think it's an issue, but I am honestly shocked that this is somehow news to anyone. It's one of the most common criticisms of science fiction as a genre in general.

I honestly had not heard this idea before this thread. Perhaps I am just sheltered, but I have seen literally all of Star Trek (every season of every show and all 12 movies) and many critiques and commentaries, and have never seen or heard this theory. I'm not saying I'm an expert, but as a fan, this is completely new to me. It's not as obvious as you seem to think.

Well, again, I find the vast volumes of material on the subject that come up with a simple Google search indicative of my point that it is a common critique. There are entire books dedicated to the subject (in fact, dedicated to specific subsets of the subject). It's discussed on both Wikipedia and Memory Alpha. A quick Google search finds mentions of it in a large number of other books about the show and its cultural impact. Hell, it even pops up in sociology books. I clearly did not make this up.

Didn't say you made it up out of whole cloth, just that this is not something blatantly apparent to everyone.

Ziggy Stardust wrote:Well, again, I find the vast volumes of material on the subject that come up with a simple Google search indicative of my point that it is a common critique. There are entire books dedicated to the subject (in fact, dedicated to specific subsets of the subject). It's discussed on both Wikipedia and Memory Alpha. A quick Google search finds mentions of it in a large number of other books about the show and its cultural impact. Hell, it even pops up in sociology books. I clearly did not make this up.

I'm sure if I googled "sex with dolphin litter bin" I'd end up with 300,000 results as well.


Federation was always obviously the USA with Starfleet being the Navy.

Klingons were very obviously the USSR (and then later Vikings, I guess)

Romulans were the Roman Empire

Cardassians Nazis


But I have never once heard this theory about Vulcans being asians. I suppose, now it's pointed out, I can see how someone could connect the dots, but I think it'd need to be someone wanting to see that and really pushing to make stuff fit. I don't think it's obvious and I don't think it was ever intended.

When Roddenberry and others wanted to parallel a culture to an Earth one, they've never been subtle about it. And Roddenberry didn't seem to have any issues with Asians in an of themselves.


EDIT: 419,000 results for that silly search.

applejack wrote:

Simon_Jester wrote:I've watched it, but...

1) Pointy ears are an Asian stereotype? Really? That I had never heard.

He might be talking about the Fu Manchu stereotype of Asians that got transfered over to Asian and non-Asian (though potentially Asian analogue) characters, some depictions of which had pointed ears. Here are some examples...

Well yes, but it's not like pointy ears show up uniformly on WWII anti-Japanese propaganda posters and other racist caricatures or anything. And I'm pretty sure not ALL the characters from that era with pointy ears are supposed to be Asian or Asian-analogues.

Pointy ears are a fairly common way to depict someone as humanoid but not human. I mean, tell me Namor the Sub-Mariner is supposed to be Asian and I'm going to laugh.

Simon_Jester wrote:2) The "Asians are obsessed with science and logic" stereotype in the US... I don't think that really took off until Asians started outperforming whites on college entry exams and the like, with large numbers of Asian immigrants being seen as a threat to the white majority because of education and being stereotyped as unimaginative crammers.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but that started happening in the '70s or so... after Spock's character was already established. And Spock pretty much defined the basic parameters of Vulcan culture with few or no modifications having been made at later times. You can hardly blame Star Trek for invoking a stereotype that didn't exist until after the show went off the air.

I suppose it's possible for the stereotype to insinuate itself after the establishment of the character for certain elements of the population? In fact, the pointy-eared versions of the Mandarin and Ming characters I show above didn't happen until well after they first appeared on film/print, and all versions of those Fu Manchu-type characters (including Fu Manchu himself) with pointy ears seem atypical going by google image searches of those characters.

Agreed. That's kind of my point- that while there are a lot of 'Oriental' stereotypes that DID exist in the 1960s, very few of them are a good match for Spock. About the closest you can come is the 'scheming Oriental genius,' who isn't a good match either, because they're generally evil, treacherous, murderous, and duplicitous, whereas Spock is good, reliable, usually rather nonviolent, and on the whole honorable.

I don't quite see the connection to the degree that Ziggy Stardust is seeing with respect to the Spock character or Vulcans in general, but then again I live in Hawaii and I'm probably not likely to be exposed to anti-Asian attitudes too often.

Thing is, there just... isn't that much support, so far as I can tell, for the idea that in the 1960s it was a common stereotype for Asians to have pointy ears or to be hyper-logical to the extent of being smarter than typical Caucasians humans.

Broomstick wrote:In the episode with the "space nazis" Kirk attempted to explain Spock's pointed ears as an unfortunate childhood encounter with a rice-picking machine, which so far as I can remember is both the earliest conflation of Vulcans and Asians, and the only one I recall hearing until now... though admittedly, I don't spend a lot of time looking at SF aliens and going "which stereotype does this remind me of...?"

That was actually the episode where they time travel back into the 1930s to stop McCoy from accidentally changing the course of history, but yeah.

And it's pretty clear that this is Kirk just trying to invent an excuse in a hurry for why Spock "looks foreign."

Ziggy Stardust wrote:Hell, just google "Vulcan Asian stereotype" and see all of the articles that have been written on the subject. This is not by any stretch of the imagination a novel comment on my part (and I can't even take credit; it's not something I noticed until it was pointed out to me).

I'm not saying you made it up. But I am saying it's kind of a stretch, at least in the context of the 1960s when the basic character of Vulcans was established.

If anything it's the other way around; the stereotype has started to be more plausible since the 1960s their very high academic performance and the way that Asian economies have boomed at the expense of Western economic dominance. So racists who previously thought of Asians as a bunch of jabbering coolies who were just smart enough to make 'monkey copies' of the work of their betters... now think of Asians as a bunch of 'book smart' dweebs who get ahead by working fourteen hour days and having no life.

It's not that Vulcans are stereotypical Asians. It's that our stereotype of Asians changed, into something that looked like Vulcans. Which is hardly Star Trek's fault, since their depiction of the Vulcan character has been preserved more or less unchanged since before that stereotype changed in the first place.

Hell, the third Google hit with that search term is an article from the long dormant main site, here. I'm not saying you have to agree with it or think it's an issue, but I am honestly shocked that this is somehow news to anyone. It's one of the most common criticisms of science fiction as a genre in general.

The hit on our main page is there only because it happens to be an essay on racism in SF in general, which contains the words 'vulcan' and 'Asian' in the same paragraph. It doesn't even talk about comparing vulcans to stereotypical Asians.

The other links I found on the first page, in a cursory search, all unthinkingly copy this "Asians are stereotyped as logical and emotionally repressed, Vulcans are logical and emotionally repressed, therefore Vulcans are fantasy versions of stereotypical Asians" thing.

Trouble is, again, the stereotype of East Asians as logical (and to a large extent, as emotionally repressed) isn't that old. To a large extent it post-dates the original series of Star Trek.

It's like how "authoritarian hyper-organized efficient German" was a stereotype that existed in 1900 but did not exist in 1800 because that was before the rise of Prussian militarism and a unified industrialized Germany. You can't just say "these people are portrayed as hyper-organized, efficient, and authoritarian in this 1700-era novel, so they must be thinly fictionalized Germans."

Now, you can legitimately point out that some modern people writing Vulcans are making them "too Oriental" in flavor, incorporating too many elements of Eastern culture and philosophy and not enough element of Western (or African or Native American or whatnot) culture and philosophy. Or not making up enough entirely unknown elements to put in.

And it IS undeniably the case that the makers of Star Trek have borrowed heavily from East Asian elements to portray the Vulcans; a variety of motives can be ascribed to that, the most obvious one being a desire to make the Vulcans look different in some recognizable way compared to the Western-derived clothes and architecture you'd expect from Western-identified humans.

But it's unfair to accuse the entire concept of the species of being an 'Asian stereotype' in the sense that TNG-era Klingons are clearly a "black Viking" stereotype.
___________________

Other pages I find are... frankly, chronic hypersensitivity run rampant (the second link Google provides can be quoted saying " Captain James T. Kirk was played by William Shatner, who is Jewish. However, Shatner looks and sounds like a gentile! This is not a Semitic looking guy! White gentiles watching Star Trek could easily see him as one of their own, identifying with him, and forgetting that he was Jewish! What could be more Anti-Semitic than selecting a Jewish captain who neither looks nor sounds Jewish?"

...Which makes me think that Dr. Frederickson, who is being interviewed, wants William Shatner to just not have a career at all, since he will always be a "guy who doesn't look Jewish" even though he actually is Jewish.

It also reminds me of the issue made on the 'racism page you referenced, which is that there's somehow this notion that people from a designated minority race HAVE to be all torn up about portraying their minority identity and this has to dominate their personality, and they're not allowed to just be... not all that different from other people around them. Which is a potentially very condescending and patronizing way to talk about race.

So yes, it's easy to find on Google people who claim Vulcans are Asian stereotypes... but from a cursory survey, they're so chronically hypersensitized on racial issues that it's hard to imagine ANY good work of televised art (or other art) which would satisfy them.

Ziggy Stardust wrote:Well, again, I find the vast volumes of material on the subject that come up with a simple Google search indicative of my point that it is a common critique. There are entire books dedicated to the subject (in fact, dedicated to specific subsets of the subject). It's discussed on both Wikipedia and Memory Alpha. A quick Google search finds mentions of it in a large number of other books about the show and its cultural impact. Hell, it even pops up in sociology books. I clearly did not make this up.

Some of those links you provide don't have much to say on that issue. The last one certainly does...

But again, I'm not claiming you made this up any more than Broomstick is. My (our?) point is that it's open to debate, and relies heavily on a stereotype of 'overeducated Asians' that was not nearly as much in play in American culture at the time the Vulcans were first imagined in fiction.

Well, there's that episode with Ponn Farr where they keep hitting a gong.

There's definitely a lot of parallels - Vulcans are overtly "logical" and emotionless, but they have a streak of mysticism in their culture and all these "ancient traditions". This is probably something like the sort of Asian stereotypes floating around in Western nations in the 60s and 70s.

I never really noticed the Vulcans = Asians thing either, but I can see where the criticism comes from. It's a problem with sci-fi in general: in an effort to make some alien race seem "exotic" and "different", the only thing a lot of writers can come up is incorporating elements based on vague stereotypes they know of from other Earth cultures.

That said, I think the Vulcans are a lot less obnoxiously one-note than the Klingons or Ferengi.

Do parallels exist between Vulcans and general Western stereotypes about Asians and Asian culture in Star Trek? Yes. Are those parallels deliberately inserted by the show creators? That's the question. I am inclined to give Roddenberry the benefit of the doubt and presume that any parallel between Vulcans and Asians, as he created that fictional people, are unintentional-- the original Star Trek was far less parodic than it would become later.

Leonard Nimoy contributed to the original depiction of Vulcans as well as Roddenberry - the Vulcan salute, for example, is a gesture from Orthodox Jewish ritual. Does that mean Vulcans are parodies of Jews?

Incorporating a gong into an alien culture does not automatically make an alien race "Asian".

Personally, it's one of those things that likely wouldn't have occurred to me on my own, but once pointed out yes, I can see it somewhat. Thing is, cultures do have similarities, and because someone borrows something from one culture to another doesn't make that borrowing inherently a parody or racist stereotype.

If anything, it was later generations of Trek that made the Vulcans more Asiatic, not Roddenberry's original show. Take the resurrection of Spock at the temple scene in STIII, that's pretty Asian right there because of a deliberately chosen design ethic (bald monks in long robes, fancy robes on other priests, simplistic Zen-style setting, etc).

Roddenberry's original vision was far more Utopian than we give him credit for. His antagonists, while obviously paralleled in the real world, weren't necessarily racial caricatures as much as political-- Klingons full of bluster and bravado but willing to back up their threats with force, secretive Romulans where you didn't know anything about them, and so forth. He was attempting to depict post-racial societies and may have unintentionally used racial imagery in the process, but for the most part he created an entirely new direction of science fiction. Thanks to the second law of thermodynamics, it could only go downhill from there.

Elheru Aran wrote:Do parallels exist between Vulcans and general Western stereotypes about Asians and Asian culture in Star Trek? Yes. Are those parallels deliberately inserted by the show creators? That's the question. I am inclined to give Roddenberry the benefit of the doubt and presume that any parallel between Vulcans and Asians, as he created that fictional people, are unintentional-- the original Star Trek was far less parodic than it would become later.

Well heck, if Roddenberry did invoke some Asian cultural elements, in and of itself that's not a bad thing. If he thought Eastern religions and architecture were interesting and different and wanted to speculate on how those things might be woven into the outlook of a bunch of aliens who would be at once 'human' enough to be recognizable to us yet 'different' enough to be interesting to the audience...

...Is that really so bad?

It becomes bad when it turns into a vehicle to deliver and promote stereotyping, yes- but that's not the same thing.

Elheru Aran wrote:If anything, it was later generations of Trek that made the Vulcans more Asiatic, not Roddenberry's original show. Take the resurrection of Spock at the temple scene in STIII, that's pretty Asian right there because of a deliberately chosen design ethic (bald monks in long robes, fancy robes on other priests, simplistic Zen-style setting, etc).

Okay, see, that's fair. You can justly say that in the movie/TNG era, the Vulcans became stereotypically monkish Asians.

Roddenberry's original vision was far more Utopian than we give him credit for. His antagonists, while obviously paralleled in the real world, weren't necessarily racial caricatures as much as political-- Klingons full of bluster and bravado but willing to back up their threats with force, secretive Romulans where you didn't know anything about them, and so forth. He was attempting to depict post-racial societies and may have unintentionally used racial imagery in the process, but for the most part he created an entirely new direction of science fiction. Thanks to the second law of thermodynamics, it could only go downhill from there.

Mm. I like this.