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Father Spoke Only Klingon to His Infant Son

by Terrence O'Brien on November 19, 2009 at 10:03 AM

Cruel Father Spoke Only Klingon to his Infant Son
We're pretty sure that what Minnesota man d'Armond Speers did to his child could easily be defined as cruel and unusual punishment. For the first three years of his son's life, Speers spoke only a foreign language to him as part of a personal experiment in linguistics -- that's the cruel part. The unusual part is that he didn't even speak a real (nonetheless useful) language to him -- he spoke Klingon.

That's right, Speers decided to put his computational linguistics Ph.D. to use by trying to ensure his son would never be able to communicate with anyone outside of the nerdiest members of a Star Trek convention. Worst of all, Speers claims he isn't even a huge 'Star Trek' fan, according to City Pages, a Minneapolis/St. Paul news blog. So was he was doing this just for fun? Apparently so, since Speers grew bored of his experiment after three years when he decided that his son was, "definitely starting to learn it." Now a teenager, his son doesn't speak a word of Klingon, and is able to converse fluently in English, something we're very happy to hear.

The experiment wasn't all for naught however, as Speers was eventually recruited by Ultralingua, a software company, to help build its Klingon dictionary and translation suite -- something that will come in handy if you accidentally switch your Google preference to the fictional language. [From: City Pages and MNDaily.com, via: BoingBoing]

Tags: geek, klingon, language, linguistics, movies, star trek, StarTrek, top, weird

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