Name a new language

Discussion in 'Linguistics' started by Michael, Nov 1, 2010.

  1. Michael 歌舞伎 Valued Senior Member

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    I was thinking of making up a name for a new made-up language. Something that would be kind of clever

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    Or an in-joke sort pun.

    Like say if we made up a language that was like Chinese but not really and combined it with the mythical land of Atlantis. I mean, what exactly DO the Atlantis speak? Atlantian? Atlantinese?

    Any who...
     
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  3. Gremmie "Happiness is a warm gun" Valued Senior Member

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    I figure if they're supposedly so vastly advanced, they probably wouldn't speak any language at all...

    More than likely would use telepathy.

    Or, maybe they would just text each other..
     
    Last edited: Nov 1, 2010
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  5. Michael 歌舞伎 Valued Senior Member

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    SMSese?

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    Modern Q'anjobalan-Chujean?
    Q'anjobalan-Atlanjean?
    SinoQ'anjobalan?

    Hey I know! SinoM'ade Upian?

    pronounced Sign-O, Ma-Day, Youpee, ann

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  7. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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    Yolisnupmybro
     
  8. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    In English the adjective formed from "Atlantis" is Atlantean. So, the Atlanteans would have spoken Atlantean in the Atlantean empire.
     
  9. Michael 歌舞伎 Valued Senior Member

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    What would be the language of "Made Up Land"?

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    How about La La Land?
    Lalanese?

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    What about a future language spoken in Middle Welsh that's post apocalyptic waste llan that's been influenced by three centuries of Chinese overlordism

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    Sino'llanese
     
  10. rcscwc Registered Senior Member

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    New language Primer for Fraggle

    In India, a language is emerging. It has come up as a new SMS lingo. Can be incomprehensible for old ones like me. But our Youngistan has taken to it. What is it? It interperses seamlessly the Hindi and English words. Heavens, sometimes the spellings used by the Young set can tax me!!

    A new language is evolving. Fraggles must track it it.
     
  11. jmpet Valued Senior Member

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    The language "Earth".
     
  12. Mr MacGillivray Banned Banned

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    Kiiri-Kiiri.
     
  13. Gremmie "Happiness is a warm gun" Valued Senior Member

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    How about "Earth-Speak"?

    Of course, people would still find a way to screw it up..
     
  14. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Linguists have many terms for varieties of communication, such as language, dialect, accent and pidgin. SMS is a new one for the internet age, originally the acronym for the various Short Message Service technologies (best-known in much of the world: text-messaging or "texting" with its 140-character limit), but now also used for the language that is evolving for most effective use in this medium.

    In anglophone countries, the major differences between SMS and vernacular English are:
    • The elimination of words that are redundant or nearly so, such as articles and prepositions, unwittingly resulting in what looks like a rather efficient and easily understandable literal translation from the more efficient syntax of Chinese.
    • Shortened respellings that eliminate silent letters and take advantage of the pronunciation of letter names, numerals, and punctuation marks to reduce the character count, such as "4" for "for" and "Y" for "why."
    The hybrid language you describe is a new artifact of the internet era, more than an SMS. The closest technical term for this is a creole, but this is unsatisfactory for a variety of reasons. A creole is a complete, fully functional language that has evolved from a pidgin.

    A pidgin is a simplified medium of communication, created by combining elements of two languages, which can only be used in limited circumstances such as commerce, military cooperation, or (ugh!) the management of slaves. Most of the modern creole languages are, in fact, descended from pidgins used between masters and slaves back in that shameful time.

    It must be noted that a few linguists suggest that some of the modern languages evolved from creoles in the distant past, in regions where two language communities came into contact and one asserted dominance over the other. Many of the Romance languages fall into this category. French in particular contains a huge and obvious substrate of the Germanic language of the Franks, from the gargled Parisian R phoneme to the preference for the present perfect tense over the preterite ("I have gone" instead of "I went"). But the Eastern and Western Germanic languages themselves have been postulated as Creoles, since when the Nordic tribes migrated down through Jutland and took over, there was already a thriving community of Celtic tribes in control of sub-Scandinavian Europe, speaking related Indo-European languages. Even English could be persuasively classified as a creole, considerning that despite its Germanic origin a huge percentage of our words are Norman French, our grammar has been simplified to resemble French more than German, and during the Norman era our phonetics shifted so drastically that Anglo-Saxon pronunciation is totally incomprehensible to a modern anglophone.

    It could also be postulated that Hindi-English SMS is, in fact, a pidgin. It is built up from words in two languages, the grammar is (I presume) oversimplified to the point of childishness, and it is useful only in the very limited domain of quickie text messages with their enforced abridgement. It is (again presumptively) not even a language that can be easily and conveniently spoken aloud. I'll defer to your judgment but I'd be surprised if it could be used to discuss quantum mechanics, gene splicing or the current worldwide political/military/religious/economic crisis.

    In any case, this may be the first example of this new type of communication, but it will hardly be the last. There will eventually be a name for it.
     
  15. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    In the TV series Man from Atlantis, Mark Harris spoke English.

    The series stars Patrick Duffy as an amnesiac man given the name of Mark Harris, believed to be the only surviving citizen of the lost civilization of Atlantis. He possesses exceptional abilities, including the ability to breathe underwater and withstand extreme depth pressures, and superhuman strength. His hands and feet are webbed, his eyes are unusually sensitive to light, and he swims using his arms and legs in a fashion suggestive of how a fish or marine mammal uses its flippers. Following his discovery, he is recruited by the Foundation For Oceanic Research, a governmental agency that explores the depths of the ocean in a sophisticated submarine called the Cetacean.
    Wiki

    A Chinese Atlantean, on the other hand, would probably speak Mandarin from Atlantis.
     
  16. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    In most popular fiction, and almost invariably on TV, aliens always speak English. The reason is obvious: the audience needs to follow the dialog. This is seldom explained. "Star Trek," one of the most beloved and respected TV series of all time, never commented on this phenomenon. It was only in "The Next Generation" that they finally showed us the Universal Translator that everyone wore in one ear. I found this rather odd for a program in which the characters made a laughably unrealistic habit of walking around explaining to each other how their simple, everyday technology worked, for the benefit of the audience. I think it wasn't until "Deep Space 9" that they finally explained why almost all the aliens throughout the galaxy look like humans. Of course up until that time they didn't know either, but it was remarkable that they weren't asking each other that question several times a day, instead of telling each other how replicators and transporters work!

    In "Stargate SG-1," at least they had the courtesy of sharing a wink with us. In one episode a TV network was producing a show very much like "Stargate SG-1," and an observer said, "That's ridiculous: all the aliens speak English."

    The characters on "Farscape" had translator microbes injected into their brains.
     
  17. kevinalm Registered Senior Member

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    I like the "Dr. Who" solution of the language problem. In one episode, the Dr. reveals to a Companion that the Tardis is, among many other things, a telepathic linguist.

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  18. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    What about alien languages?
    The Klingon dictionary has sold over half a million copies.

    Example.
    What do you want?
    (a Klingon greeting)
    nuqneH
     
  19. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    I'm pretty sure that Klingon is the only science fiction alien language that has been developed at all, beyond a few sound bites in a movie or TV show, or a few utterances in print. In most of those cases translations are, at best, perfunctory. Klingon has a grammar and vocabulary adequate for carrying on a halfway-normal conversation and translating books.

    AFAIK the only other fictional language that comes close to that level is Elvish, from the Lord of the Rings. Since elves live/lived on Middle Earth, they're not true "aliens."

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  20. Cifo Day destroys the night, Registered Senior Member

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    Good grief ... Hinglish?
     
  21. Gremmie "Happiness is a warm gun" Valued Senior Member

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    Sure, why not?...We already have "Spanglish" in states that border with Mexico.. So, I suspect many more hybrids are to come.
     
  22. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    The French complain bitterly about franglais. When the first owner's manuals for Toyotas and Nikons came out, they were said to be written in Japanglish.
     
  23. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    The Daleks have their own language too.
    Galkor means "Follow me, I am your guide".
    Starting a sentence with a J is a gross insult.
    eg JGalkor, which I can't translate as it is too awful for sensitive sciforum ears.
    http://dalek77.webs.com/daleklanguage.htm

    Galkor is also a place in Pakistan's North West Frontier, where you would probably need a guide, preferably with a Kalashnikov.
    Ah, the wonders of google.
     
    Last edited: Nov 19, 2010

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