Realising how ludicrous an idea Klingon might seem to the young, Dompé also makes a modernising suggestion in a letter to the Financial Times. Adopt as the EU's patent language the made-up tongue from Avatar, he says.
Dompé is chair of Italian pharmaceuticals trade body Farmindustria and he does use his letter to make a more serious point about the ongoing EU patent reform, which could involve choosing just English, French and German as patent languages to save costs.
"The cost of translating these filings is the least of our problems," he writes. "It is the patent system itself that is creaking and is steadily less able to defend and reward the intellectual property that it is supposed to protect. This vulnerability is the real risk."
