Klingon and Elvish

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?
 
Idiots invent new ways of hurting themselves...in a "really cool manner", when they are bored. Smart people, invent languages.
 
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.
 
It would destroy writing as an art form - which is something that I think is one of man's greatest achivements of all time.
 
Not to me. But for music i can see problems. Just seems like the right thing to do and keep secondary languages.
 
John99 said:
That is interesting. Seems like it has some baggage though. I think that the simplest, shortest least punctuatable would be the way to go.
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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.
 
Cellar_Door said:
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?
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i have an elvish tattoo around my ankle bone, saying my name!!
 
Nasor said:
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.
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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.
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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.
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
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.
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Really?

Translate פעם into esperanto. By the way I tried to learn it a while back...but I hated its construct.
 
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 said:
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."
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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.
 
Nasor said:
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.
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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.
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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."
 
Cellar_Door said:
I've never understood why anyone would spend valuable time learning a language that no-one really speaks.
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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.
 
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