He did a good job.
Because Star trek has such nerd appeal and the Klingons have such ...sex appeal I suppose the infactuation was inevitable.
You have to be really obsessed with the world an author creates to bother putting in the effort to learn its language. But once you do, if you're that obsessed, I'm sure it's rewarding. Klingons used to occasionally spout off on the Star Trek franchises, and being able to understand what they were saying probably enriched the experience of watching. As I recall, Klingon is the only alien language that was developed beyond one or two words, and Klingons are surely the most popular aliens on that show.
The thing about Elvish is a little harder to figure out, since there are no new "Lord of the Rings" franchises to look forward to, and I don't remember that it was spoken in the movies, at least not to any significant extent. Still, it's from the same era when geeks were mighty, (it was written in the 1950s but didn't catch on until the 1960s) and surely attracted the same kind of people.
I read LOTR in 1971, catching that fad when it was still hot, but I never appreciated the original Star Trek series (and still don't) and only became a fan when TNG came along two decades later.
The Klingon language was never spoken on the original series. We were hearing Klingon speech through the Universal Translators. It was first heard in "Star Trek: The Motion Picture," and James Doohan (Scotty) devised the phonetics and that first handful of words. He did a good job (I'd say an over-the-top job) of extracting the elements of the phonetics we Americans identified with our enemies: the guttural consonants that typify German and the paucity of vowels that characterizes Russian.
Linguist Marc Okrand expanded Doohan's work into a complete language and published its grammar, syntax and vocabulary in The Klingon Dictionary. A Klingon translation of Hamlet was published after "Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country" was produced; the title is a quote from the play and presumably it spurred interest in the project among the geeks--whoops I mean the Trekkies.
That will have to change with computerization. Spanish used to count CH, LL and RR as single letters but they recently normalized that because they were out of step with the entire rest of the planet.Some of us got forced to learn Welsh in school! The fact 'ng', 'dd', 'll' (and about another half dozen) are single letters makes crosswords fiendish. . . .
I've heard it spoken. It sounds a bit like the phoneme in Aztec that's transcribed TL. Or like HL in Czech.For non-Welsh speakers 'll' doesn't have a construction in English and the explaination on how to say it is here.