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Category: Artificial Languages
Is it true that Klingon is a living language, and that people who don’t speak the same earth languages can communicate with it?
I have had conversations in Klingon, including with the guy who was trying to teach his kid to speak in Klingon. (The kid lost interest in it, and I have found a photo of the kid, 15 years later, jumping into a mosh pit. He’s turned out fine. 🙂 The vocabulary admittedly can be a […]
How can I get Esperanto taught at my school?
Kaylee Lowe’s answer to How can I get Esperanto taught at my school? Read now for the general principles at work. This answer is the added detail. Kaylee Lowe correctly points out the added constraint of standardised testing and curriculum support; you can’t just waltz in to a school with a copy of Jen Nia […]
Would a universal language be symbolic?
There have been a few proposals for symbolic universal language, most of them taking their inspiration from Chinese ideographic systems. Pasigraphy was at the start of the universal language movement: they were akin to universal thesauruses in symbolic form. Rather naive in retrospect. Blissymbols was probably the most thorough recent effort, and it has found […]
How long would it take linguists to decode a language like Lojban if no speakers or reference grammar existed, but several original texts did?
Great answer from Roman Huczok: see Roman Huczok’s answer. Getting an undeciphered text with no Rosetta stone is, as Roman said, hard work, though not impossible. The question is after the peculiarities of Lojban which would make the decipherment harder—particularly given the whole exoticism that Lojban claims to, of encoding predicate logic as something quite […]
What are some good books or stories to read in Esperanto?
The Esperanta antologio: the anthology of Esperanto poetry. Get hold of the first edition, rather than the second; yes, the first edition stops at 1957, but it has commentary, which is very useful, and the 1984 edition inexcusably got rid of it. Lingvo kaj vivo: 1959 collection of essays by Gaston Waringhien, Esperanto lexicographer and […]
Is there a language designed for use by both human and artificial intelligence?
The artificial language Lojban was not expressly designed to be used by machines; it (or rather its antecedent Loglan) was designed as a test of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, its overt basis in predicate logic being sufficiently alien that its inventor thought it would serve the purpose. Lojban is something of a kitchen sink language in […]
Why is Wikipedia in Ancient Greek and Simple French still rejected in spite of both having a strong support base?
The Wikimedia Language committee clamped down on “dead” languages and artificial languages quite ferociously, after an initial laissez-faire period. Because initially you could set up a Wikipedia in any language you liked, Latin, Old English, Gothic, and Old Church Slavonic got in. Because the Wikimedia Language Committee clamped down, Ancient Greek got rejected even though […]
Which languages lend themselves particularly well for poetry?
They all do. And let me elaborate on that. For starters, there’s the element of formal craft in poetry, and there’s the allusive use of language in poetry. Both of them are essential. For allusiveness, what you need is a culture expressed through that language. All natural languages that people live their lives in are […]
Have you ever created your own language?
Yup, around 10. Set in Liliput, because I’d just read Gulliver’s Travels, and accompanied by some map drawing. Inspired by the Latin textbooks I was poring over, and it had a hell of a lot of declension tables. And diacritics. El Glheþ Talossan-level diacritics. Coz they’re k00l. It wasn’t full, because I don’t think I […]
How much of the Klingon language being spoken today was actually used on the series?
Marc Okrand, who invented the language, was a consultant on all the TOS Star Trek movies. He made sure all the Klingon spoken was canonical, and if the actors flubbed their lines, he retconned them. Okrand was not involved with the Klingon used on the TV series. As a result, the TV series featured words […]