Alphaverse.com » Life, the Universe and Everything, The Long Now Foundation » Klingon, Elvish and Esperanto — Linguist takes a serious look at Invented Languages
Klingon, Elvish and Esperanto — Linguist takes a serious look at Invented Languages
What do Klingon, Elvish and Esperanto have in common? They are all explicitly constructed languages — some for fictional worlds, some for the real world. Some are created to entertain, others have such lofty goals as achieving world peace. Some have dictionaries, grammars and language academies. All have a fair number of real world speakers, and probably even a few native speakers. But none, so far, have been the subject of serious linguistic inquiry…until now.
In her recently published book In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language, linguist Arika Okrent takes a serious look at as many of these as she could find (about 900 are well documented over the past several hundred years). In these languages, often dismissed as whimsy, she finds a kind of ingenuity that is uniquely human, and a creative drive that can shed light on our own identification with languages and what they can and cannot achieve for us as speakers. The NPR program “On Point” aired this hour long interview with Arika Okrent today.
We at The Rosetta Project have always thought invented languages are totally cool (after all, philologist J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in his letters that he created Middle Earth as a way to showcase his invented languages and what could be cooler than that?). The invented languages Esperanto and Interlingua are both represented the Rosetta Disk — we have Genesis translations for both (hint: look in the European region for languages of France).
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4 Responses to "Klingon, Elvish and Esperanto — Linguist takes a serious look at Invented Languages"
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If by “serious linguistic inquiry” we mean study by linguists in academia, then Esperanto has been the subject of serious linguistic inquiry for quite a long time—at least a century. For a good starting point, see:
http://dok.esperantic.org/ced/espstu.htm
Thx Hoss for the link, it’s an Interesting article…as reading through it I did become more interested in the subject, so I guess that the authors goal is fulfilled, at least
Concerning Arika Okrent’s book.
I think that the choice, realistically, for the future global language lies between English and Esperanto rather than an untried project.
It’s unfortunate, however, that only a few people know that Esperanto has become a living language.
After a short period of 121 years Esperanto is now in the top 100 languages, out of 6,800 worldwide, according to the CIA factbook. It is the 17th most used language in Wikipedia, and in use by Skype, Firefox and Facebook.
Native Esperanto speakers,(people who have used the language from birth), include George Soros, World Chess Champion Susan Polgar, Ulrich Brandenberg the new German Ambassador to NATO and Nobel Laureate Daniel Bovet.
Further arguments can be seen at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_YHALnLV9XU Professor Piron was a translator with the United Nations in Geneva.
A glimpse of Esperanto can be seen at http://www.lernu.net
thx Brian, by now I really consider learning Esperanto since it is based on intuitional logic. And I certainly believe it can help aquiring new languages, especially the Roman ones.