tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed May 03 00:36:47 1995
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Re: vIHadbogh Holmey
On Wed, 3 May 1995 02:57:40 -0400, [email protected] said:
> My real reason for including ASL in a list of languages of which
> I have at least scratched the surface is that conveyence of concepts
> in it has its own peculiarities. It is not a direct translation
> of words and/or phrases from the English.
The only question is whether those peculiarities aren't too great for
any extrapolation between sign and non-sign languages to be possible.
Note that I'm not saying that they are; I have no opinion either way.
> As to Tengwar Quenya, also Quenya II, I certainly do agree it is difficult
> to convey complete, or even come close, is extremely difficult. Although
> JRR devised 14 languages (??), perhaps none of them truly meets the
> definition of language: the conveyence of concepts amongst beings.
I'm sorry for the strong expression, but this is nonsense. I find it
extremely difficult to form even a simple sentence in Irish, but that
says nothing about the languagehood of Irish, and everything about my
familiarity with it. Each of JRRT's languages is intended and suited
for the conveyance of concepts, and hence is as much of a language as
English or Klingon, it just so happens that too little is known about
them to let us achieve any level of fluency in any of them.
> As to Tengwar Quenya II, this is a phrase I have picked up from
> several articles, bookstore advertisements, and Internet postings.
I still believe that no one who has even the most remote idea of Quenya
would refer to it by a bogus name picked up from bookstore advertisements
and Internet postings. But never mind, this is not the place to evaluate
one another's familiarity with any languages other than Klingon.
> "The Languages of Tolkien" uses Tengwar, Quenya, and Tengwar Quenya
> interchangeably; but, then, the book could be wrong.
`Could be wrong'? Hrmph. That book is wrong on virtually everything,
except on the few occasions where it gets something right by accident.
Still, it is possible that the study of Ruth Noel's linguistic creation
(little resemblance though it bears to JRR Tolkien's) can provide some
insight into Klingon.
--'Iwvan