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Category: Artificial Languages
What is the word to call the husband in your country’s language?
Ah, Dimitris. Yoruba oga “boss” vs Ottoman Turkish ağa [aɣa, now aː] Agha (Ottoman Empire) “an honorific title for a civilian or military officer” < Old Turkic aqa “elder brother”. Three letter word, final vowel the same, consonant similar, meanings in the same ballpark. You can see why I’m not impressed. Islam was shared between […]
What auxiliary language or constructed language (conlang) would you like to learn and why?
I can’t count Esperanto, since I have already been fluent in it. Nor Klingon, ditto. Nor Lojban, ditto. So let me go through the others, and say why or why not I’d like to learn it, if I was 20 again, back when I had the free time. Ranking from less to more. Láadan. Pfft. […]
If programs can be written in sonnets, why not in Klingon letters?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_(programming_language) Of course they can: var’aq – Esolang. A programming language using Klingon vocabulary. Of course, the pIqaD (see Klingon alphabets) does not have an official Unicode encoding: the ostensive reason is that Klingonists don’t actually use the pIqaD. The gossip is that the German arm of the ISO vetoed it, for fear of bringing […]
What are some unexpected or unknown benefits from learning Esperanto?
If you immerse yourself in early Esperanto literature (before World War II), you end up learning a lot about Mitteleuropa high culture—and indirectly, a fair bit of German. There’s a lot of Heine, and a lot of emulating of Heine. Esperanto poetry is also a whole lot more formalist than English-language poetry (another Mitteleuropa thing), […]
How long did it take you to learn Esperanto? What methods are available to learn it?
A2A: long time ago, I was 13, and I don’t clearly remember, but I think I was up and running within a month. Answered 2016-09-06 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/How-long-did-it-take-you-to-learn-Esperanto-What-methods-are-available-to-learn-it/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
Is it possible to be fluent in Lojban?
As it turns out, I’m the person who has been accused of being a fluent Lojban speaker the earliest on. The answer is yes, it is possible. With some provisos. The vocabulary is small, and you don’t want to be coining new predicates on the fly if you can help it. Especially if you need […]
Which will get you further in life, learning Klingon or Elvish?
It’s a tough one. I know Klingon and not Elvish, like Brian Collins. I think I disagree with him: Tolkien gives slightly more opportunity. Elvish is a more complicated set of languages than the agglutinative Klingon. Elvish is much less well documented by Tolkien than Klingon is. That’s why people are very reluctant to use […]
Why does Esperanto use the letter Ŭ?
Hm. You didn’t ask why the letter looks like that, which I’ll answer anyway: Italicised й: й Wikipedia Ŭ suggests it was formed by analogy with proposed Byelorussian ў. Like someone else said on Wikipedia: [citation needed] Now, why <ŭ> and not just <u>? Zeibura, you dawg, you know that I love this kind of […]
Was Newspeak inspired by Esperanto?
Yup. You could argue (as both the English and Esperanto Wikipedias do) that the main inspiration for Newspeak was Basic English, which Orwell had been a fan of before rejecting. The minimal vocabulary premiss of Basic English (revisited in xkcd: Up Goer Five) is something Orwell derides in Newspeak. But minimal vocabulary was also a […]
Were the classical greek drama texts complete?
Given the addendum from OP: https://www.quora.com/Were-the-c… (which I’ve added to question details): The bulk of Ancient Greek drama that has survived has survived as part of the postclassical school curriculum, and has been transmitted through manuscript. Even so, we know that bits of the text that the authors must have written (for the text to […]