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Speak geek:The world of made-up languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5321 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes  Speaks: German*, English | Message 1 of 5 13 May 2011 at 7:21am | IP Logged |
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I stumbled upon an interesting article about the current state of conlangs. Edited by Doitsujin on 13 May 2011 at 11:25am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 5 13 May 2011 at 10:22am | IP Logged |
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Very interesting and quite entertaining article. Now I'm going to bury it under a mile long commentary.
I'm definitely not interested in creating new languages myself, but once a language already has a sufficiently large community behind it and enough texts and study materials I don't care about its origins. If it looks like a language, if it is used like a language, if it can be learned like a language and if enough people believe it is a language, then it is a language. Period. With the arrival of the internet and other means of electronic global communication such communities don't have to be concentrated in one place on the Earth, although it may still be necessary for some speakers to have personal contact with other speakers to keep up the momentum. The languages that have such supporter groups fall in three groups: 'Theoretical' languages: languages made to represent logical thinking, but without any chance of evolving into something viable EXCEPT the one group that really has taken over the world: computer programming languages (whose vocabulary and to some extent syntax has been stolen from English, which makes the learning curve less steep) 'Idealistic' languages: Volapük once had a large community behind it, but lost out to the the easier Esperanto. Others like Ido have followed in the footsteps of Esperanto without being able to build as large a community. The ironic twist is that Esperanto got its success through the activities of people who had a naive belief in world peace and harmony between the peoples and all that stuff, and without those people it would have died out. For me and many other potential Esperanto learners this ideology is meaningless and maybe even repulsive because it is so hopelessly out of touch with reality. But now there is a language, it has more speakers than most other languages in the world, and those speakers are apparently extremely eager to use it - and that is enough for me: as I said I don't care about the origins of a language, as long it covers whatever I want to write/spreak about and it has a productive and active community behind it. The third group is obviously the languages that were created for specific books or films. Professor Tolkien's Elwish etc. languages would have been a mere curiosity if he hadn't used them in his books, which later were made into films. And the film "Master of the Rings" is crucial because only dusty historical linguistist and a few diehard fanatics otherwise would have cared about them - and such people are not nearly as numerous as the fans of Startrek. These languages have their fan circles, and it is enthousiasm and nothing else that keep them going, but time will tell whether these groups will survive the next 20 or 30 years (as the Esperanto movement did, like it or not). I have already singled out the idealism of Esperanto as both the cause of its continued existence and the single thing that irritates me most about it. But there is another problem: what are you going to do with it once you have learned it? My solution to this is just to accept that it would be more sensible to use English and other geographically rooted languages for international communications and technical writing, but language learning is a purpose in itself and then we just have to take it as an experience to put those languages to practical use. In other words, I deal with Esperanto as the Klingonians deal with their favorite conlang, namely as a hobby. Learning Esperanto has as much purpose as solving sudokus or playing football. However there is an added problem: how much freedom do you have when writing or speaking these languages? According to the article there is some kind of 'language police' that controls several conlangs: "Lúthien say she must tread carefully though when it comes to the words they publish and worries about legal issues should she include them in her dictionary because the Tolkien estate are very strict about their use". Well, she belongs herself to those who want to learn Elwish language only for use within a Tolkien'ish framework, and who in principle accept the limitations: "To speak an Elvish language fluently though is near impossible - the language doesn't work in the modern era. As with Klingon, where the lexicon is specifically written for intergalactic war-talk, Sindarin was created for Middle-earth, a fantasy world where modern culture has no place." However a bit of creative thinking can solve certain problems (in a way also used for instance by Icelandic purists): "The word "television" also exists in Sindarin - “palantír”. A LOTR fan may recognise this as the word Saruman used for “seeing-stones”, the two way television set, or Middle-earth’s version of FaceTime.". OK, one problem solved, but it is a wee drop in the ocean. I have a similar problem with Latin. I want to write and speak about modern things, and I want to do it in the same way as the international communities of 1) scholars and learned people 2) catholic clergy did it in the 17. or 18. century, when Latin long ago had stopped being the language used to buy a bread or deal with your local tax collector. Latin in that period was in a similar situation as the conlangs of today, and the two supranational communities that used it didn't accept that they couldn't write about their interests, so they tweaked it. And that's also what I want to do with both Latin and Esperanto. The basic structure of those languages should remain stable, otherwise they lose their identity and it becomes impossible to learn them, but it is necessary to be creative in vocabulary formation, in style and sometimes even in grammar, otherwise the element of game which I also demand from Latin is killed off, and then it is not worth learning them. And the same degree of creativity and (moderate) irreverence must obviously be permitted in conlangs. Edited by Iversen on 17 May 2011 at 12:03pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 5 13 May 2011 at 11:04am | IP Logged |
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PS: I couldn't resist quoting a couple of comments to that article:
Nigel 11: The world's interesting real spoken languages are Creoles. These are languages that were invented out of necessity, when history jammed two (or more) peoples speaking totally different languages together in the same society. The first generation speak a pidgin mish-mash plus their "own" language. Soon, in the second or third generation, the pidgin is refined into a creole, and both parent languages soon die out. Nobody plans any of this - it just happens. English is (possibly) the grand-daddy of them all. Marvin the Martian: Man: If you learned to speak Lojban, your communication would be completely unambiguous and logical. Black Hat Guy: Yeah, but it would all be with the kind of people that learn Lojban. Oldgoat: I well remember a quiz passed around by a lecturer at college to find the Latin words for various home appliances, IIRC: (a) dishwasher, (b) floor polisher, (c) food mixer, (d) lawn mower. The answer of course was just one word, slave (in translation. Sandra Greer: Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof (born Leyzer Leyvi Zamengov in 1859 in Bialystok, Poland) spoke Russian, Polish, and Yiddish as a child. He later learned a number of other languages. The languages of his childhood are highly inflected, and when he came to invent Esperanto, he could not stand to be without just one. So direct objects (accusative case) take a suffix "n". 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| wyndtrader Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5013 days ago 6 posts - 8 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Ancient Greek, French | Message 4 of 5 14 May 2011 at 7:57am | IP Logged |
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Iversen, I rather agree with you about the idealism surrounding the Esperanto movement being somewhat irksome; similarly, I agree with your comments about being willing to learn a language provided it has what you described as an active community behind it.
I remember reading Tolkien’s criticism of Esperanto being a ‘dead language’ as he said it had no culture. I’ve always thought that those comments were a shade unfair when he made them, and I reckon the internet has probably put paid to that further. For my part, I can vividly remember my father explaining the existence of ‘invented languages’ to me as a child, when he showed me an article on Esperanto torn from a British Airways in-flight magazine. I was inspired to start doing a correspondence course (pre-internet naturally) to learn it, but was stopped by my mother after the second lesson- she didn’t want me ‘talking’ with strangers (which wasn’t horribly unreasonable given I was 9 or 10). I recently had my interest rekindled by reading about Tivdar Soros’ (George Soros’ father) ‘Maskerado Cxirkaux La Morto’, which is an account of how the family survived the liquidation of the Hungarian Jewish community. I rather want to learn the language so that I can read it in the original. Edited by wyndtrader on 14 May 2011 at 8:00am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| dmaddock1 Senior Member United States Joined 5434 days ago 174 posts - 426 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, Esperanto, Latin, Ancient Greek | Message 5 of 5 17 May 2011 at 3:53pm | IP Logged |
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I always get a little annoyed by articles like this because they generally give the impression that Esperanto is roughly on a similar "level" with the other examples when in fact its success is orders of magnitude beyond the others. As Iversen mentions, its population size and body of literature rivals that of many small national languages.
Count me as another Esperantist who thinks the "internal idea" is naive but still finds value in the language. I've started making some YouTube videos with this very viewpoint to try to show that Esperanto is neither equivalent to Klingon nor a world peace pipe dream. Edited by dmaddock1 on 17 May 2011 at 3:54pm 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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