Klingon and Elvish

[Cellar_Door]

I've never understood why anyone would spend valuable time learning a language that no-one really speaks. Is it just a love of learning languages for the sake of it? Or is it a love of the fantasy worlds these languages are used in?

[EmptyForceOfChi]

I've never understood why anyone would spend valuable time learning a language that no-one really speaks. Is it just a love of learning languages for the sake of it? Or is it a love of the fantasy worlds these languages are used in?


Who the hell can speak klingon and elvish? :bugeye:

- I mean apart from klingons and elves ofcourse, but they are expected to, Don't be racist.


peace.

[orcot]

If no one speaks it then I can?

[cosmictraveler]

They are just trying to be Trolls is all. ;)

[nietzschefan]

I've never understood why anyone would spend valuable time learning a language that no-one really speaks. Is it just a love of learning languages for the sake of it? Or is it a love of the fantasy worlds these languages are used in?

The same reason all useless activities are learned...to pick up chicks.

The question is, do you want star trek chicks or Lord of the Rings chicks?

[Cellar_Door]

Who the hell can speak klingon and elvish?

A handful of people, and there are websites devoted to it. I remember on Rock School there was this public school boy who kept talking to everyone in Sindarin.

[Pandaemoni]

I agree. For the same reason who are these losers who spend their time writing things about people who don't exist in places that don't exist. Fiction is dumb.[/sarcasm]

Obviously, learning a made up language is a kind of hobby. In the grand scheme of things it's no better or worse than playing video games or going bird-watching.

[Fraggle Rocker]

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.

[temur]

OMG, I cannot even properly handle the few languages I have “learned” and my wish list is long enough not to learn artificial languages.

[Cellar_Door]

I agree. For the same reason who are these losers who spend their time writing things about people who don't exist in places that don't exist. Fiction is dumb.[/sarcasm]

My post wasn't meant to bash those people who do learn made-up languages; I was genuinely interested in the motivation for such a strange hobby.

[Atopos]

I am quite passionate about languages and I'm currently studying several of them, both for university and for fun. But while now I focus on modern languages, years ago I started studying some elvish (actually quenya, not sindarin). Why?
- I was in high school, I didn't have much to do and I was(am) a fan of LotR.
- I was in High school, I had to study Latin, which is dead dead dead language and boring as hell; Quenya at least was fun.
- To me, most languages are fascinating in the beginning, when you learn the first few words, but in the long run they all seem boring, ugly, stupid and so on. The same very thing happens with my own mother tongue as well (which, BTW, is Italian). So you wonder: is there a pretty language in this world? Well, elvish is very pretty, especially when spoken by a cute elvish chick (somebody said Liv Tyler?).:D

Honestly, even though there is a fair amount of elvish in both the book and the movie of "the lord of the rings", it is usually translated; I never learnt as much elvish to understand what people were saying (or the Namarië). However I believe that understanding other languages spoken in movie is fun, for example the germans in Indiana Jones!
Or I remember a movie (something in mexico, I don't remember the title) in which 30% of the speech was in Spanish, WITHOUT subtitles. There was enough english to understand the main plot, but understanding the spanish in it gave a completely different flavour and meaning to it all.

[phlogistician]

Ah, I love Google, ... all the nutty stories you half remember recovered in seconds.

Anyway, why would you learn Klingon? To converse with the insane, of course;

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3018411.stm

[phlogistician]

Test your Klingon Google-Fu on this;

"It's a bat'leth, you filthy p'tahk."

find me the cartoon where this line is used!

[Arachnakid]

I don't know about other people, but personally I am fascinated with languages both real and fictional, and I am actually developing a couple of my own (not another dwarvish/elvish; neither exists in my stories.)

[synthesizer-patel]

Test your Klingon Google-Fu on this;

"It's a bat'leth, you filthy p'tahk."

find me the cartoon where this line is used!


howzziss?

http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2006/20060813.jpg

[phlogistician]

howzziss?



majQa'!

(apparently)

[Nasor]

I don't think that you can really learn either of Tolkien's elvish languages to the point of them being useful, because unfortunately he never finished them. He mostly just made up words for it whenever he needed them for something that he was writing, so now we have lots of grammar rules but very little actual vocabulary. You can't really use it in conversations (unless you want to have very very simple conversations) because half the words that you will need just don't exist.

[iceaura]

Ursula K. Le Guin has an essay floating around about the world of people who make up languages. There are a lot of them. She suggests, with tongue only partly in cheek, that Tolkien wrote his books largely to give his beloved languages someone to speak them.

Children invent language all the time, as do gangs and most other pack-groups of people. Usually it's a small modification of their parent's lingo, but in places where children of two mutually incomprehensible lingo-packs play together, a new and different human language is a common consequence. Commonly, some of it is more distant or brand new invention - apparently by some one of the children involved.

[one_raven]

The same reason all useless activities are learned...to pick up chicks.

Of course.
Chicks dig guys who know Elvish, because the know it's all in the hips.:shake:

[John99]

All languages are artificial anyway. We need something even more streamilined and simple.

[one_raven]

.. . ........ ...
... ... .............. ...
.....!

[one_raven]

How is learning a non-existant language any more of a waste of time than reading a fiction book, doing jigsaw puzzles, watching football, or any of the other hobbies people enjoy for whetever reason they enjoy them?

[John99]

How many artificial languages are there now? What are we idiots?

[nietzschefan]

Idiots invent new ways of hurting themselves...in a "really cool manner", when they are bored. Smart people, invent languages.

[John99]

That is what i am saying. Invent a NEW language and have everyone speak it.

[one_raven]

People have tried...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

[nietzschefan]

Tolkien was a professor of linguistics. He made the Elvish language(S) (yes more than one!) as a hobby. He created middle-earth with his 300+days a year sitting in the trenches waiting for his 5mins of life and death in the Somme offensive. He wanted a "Mythology" for English people, like most nations of Europe had.

He later wrote Lord of the Rings with such precise English, it cannot be properly translated in most languages without sounding really weird and losing a lot of meaning.

He himself found the fanfare around his work, kinda odd. I'm sure he might have even thought his own work was quite a bit a bit of self indulgence. Which is always the best way for art to come out.

[John99]

People have tried...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

That is interesting. Seems like it has some baggage though. I think that the simplest, shortest least punctuatable would be the way to go.

[one_raven]

It would destroy writing as an art form - which is something that I think is one of man's greatest achivements of all time.

[John99]

Not to me. But for music i can see problems. Just seems like the right thing to do and keep secondary languages.

[Nasor]

That is interesting. Seems like it has some baggage though. I think that the simplest, shortest least punctuatable would be the way to go.
There are two schools of thought on how to best make a language that can be learned quickly and easily. Some people create languages with very simple, consistent grammar rules that anyone can learn completely in 15 minutes, after which learning the language is simply a matter of memorizing lots of vocabulary. Other people have created languages that only have a few hundred or so base vocabulary words, but then use complex grammar to modify the base vocabulary words to fit whatever situation is needed. Although these languages have pretty complicated grammar, the idea is that it's actually faster to learn the complicated grammar and a few hundred vocabulary words than to learn a simple grammar and thousands of vocabulary words. Toki Pona, for instance, only has about 120 base words. Although most people agree that Toki Pona is pushing it a bit, because it's often hard to unambiguously communicate in it.

[Captain Kremmen]

Although most people agree that Toki Pona is pushing it a bit, because it's often hard to unambiguously communicate in it.

A perfect language for politicians.

[lucifers angel]

I've never understood why anyone would spend valuable time learning a language that no-one really speaks. Is it just a love of learning languages for the sake of it? Or is it a love of the fantasy worlds these languages are used in?

i have an elvish tattoo around my ankle bone, saying my name!!

[Fraggle Rocker]

Some people create languages with very simple, consistent grammar rules that anyone can learn completely in 15 minutes, after which learning the language is simply a matter of memorizing lots of vocabulary. Other people have created languages that only have a few hundred or so base vocabulary words, but then use complex grammar to modify the base vocabulary words to fit whatever situation is needed.These are not mutually exclusive. Esperanto has both. The rules of grammar are fairly simple, but it's an agglutinative language so there isn't much vocabulary to learn. "Opposite" is expressed by the prefix mal-, so once you've learned bona and nova, "good" and "new," you automatically know malbona and malnova, "bad" and "old." There's a whole arsenal of suffixes and prefixes that cuts the vocabulary you have to learn by a factor of about 20.Although these languages have pretty complicated grammar, the idea is that it's actually faster to learn the complicated grammar and a few hundred vocabulary words than to learn a simple grammar and thousands of vocabulary words. Toki Pona, for instance, only has about 120 base words. Although most people agree that Toki Pona is pushing it a bit, because it's often hard to unambiguously communicate in it.I learned Esperanto in about six weeks, with nothing more than a book. It's a rich enough language that people write poetry in it, and it's precise enough for explaining the theory of relativity.

[CheskiChips]

These are not mutually exclusive. Esperanto has both. The rules of grammar are fairly simple, but it's an agglutinative language so there isn't much vocabulary to learn. "Opposite" is expressed by the prefix mal-, so once you've learned bona and nova, "good" and "new," you automatically know malbona and malnova, "bad" and "old." There's a whole arsenal of suffixes and prefixes that cuts the vocabulary you have to learn by a factor of about 20.I learned Esperanto in about six weeks, with nothing more than a book. It's a rich enough language that people write poetry in it, and it's precise enough for explaining the theory of relativity.

Really?

Translate פעם into esperanto. By the way I tried to learn it a while back...but I hated its construct.

[Lord Vasago]

I know people that can talk Klingon to eachother.
A member of our fanclub even speaks Hutt's

I myself have started on Elvish 'The gray Elves' there are lots of differnent dialects in Elvish.

The reason you ask ? Don't you agree that Elvish in Lotr just sounds amazing.
I pertisapated in a real-life rpg in France. There were people from Spain, England, Germany, Holland, Greece, Belgium, Italy. It was amazing howmany people talked elvish. It was awesome how people from different country spoke rather in Elvish to eachother then in English. That's also the reason why i started myself.

[Fraggle Rocker]

Translate פעם into Esperanto.First translate it into English please. Or at least Spanish. My Hebrew vocabulary is about twenty words.

[Nasor]

These are not mutually exclusive. Esperanto has both. The rules of grammar are fairly simple, but it's an agglutinative language so there isn't much vocabulary to learn. "Opposite" is expressed by the prefix mal-, so once you've learned bona and nova, "good" and "new," you automatically know malbona and malnova, "bad" and "old."
Which leaves you with no way to distinguish between something that is bad vs. something that is merely not good. The two are not synonymous, unless you use binary good/bad categorizations for everything. Similarly, you can't call something amoral in esparonto - the vocabulary just doesn't exist. You can call a corporation moral or immoral, but to call it amoral you would have to resort to a descriptive phrase.

[Fraggle Rocker]

Which leaves you with no way to distinguish between something that is bad vs. something that is merely not good. The two are not synonymous, unless you use binary good/bad categorizations for everything.You have misunderstood. Mal- does not mean "not." It means "opposite." If you want to say something is not long, you call it nelonga. If you call it mallonga you are saying it is short. In fact, mala can be used by itself as an adjective to mean "opposite." Ne is an adverb meaning "not" or "no"; it can also be used as a prefix.Similarly, you can't call something amoral in Esperanto - the vocabulary just doesn't exist. You can call a corporation moral or immoral, but to call it amoral you would have to resort to a descriptive phrase.Considering how absurdly easy it is to study Esperanto, you should put some effort into that endeavor before commenting. The words you're looking for are malmorala and nemorala. Although we usually use the language's structure to form more specific expressions. Senmorala means "without morals" and might be a better equivalent for "amoral." "Kontraumorala" means "against morals" and might sometimes come closer than "opposite of moral" to what we mean when we say "immoral."

Our Anglo-Saxon prefix "un-" is just as imprecise. It means both "not" and "opposite," depending on context. The same is true of the Latin prefix in- in its various phonetic forms. Words of those forms only have precision when dealing with binary conditions: seal/unseal, animate/inanimate. They become much more dependent on context under other conditions. Does "unloved" mean "not loved" or "hated"? Does "imprecise" mean "not precise" or "vague"?

Greek a-, an- means specifically "without," so "amoral" means "without morals."

[AlphaNumeric]

I've never understood why anyone would spend valuable time learning a language that no-one really speaks. 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 and the whole "Depending on the sentence, the spelling of words change via 'mutations" thing was even worse! For years my father pronounced 'Llanelli' as 'Lan-eli', despite having a Welsh wife and having lived in Swansea (10 minutes drive down the motorway from Llanelli). For non-Welsh speakers 'll' doesn't have a construction in English and the explaination on how to say it is here (http://www.wku.edu/~rob.harbison/pron.html#LL).

[Saquist]

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.

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.

[Fraggle Rocker]

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. . . .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.For non-Welsh speakers 'll' doesn't have a construction in English and the explaination on how to say it is here.I've heard it spoken. It sounds a bit like the phoneme in Aztec that's transcribed TL. Or like HL in Czech.