tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Oct 02 13:04:21 2001
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Re: Artificial languages (was RE: Enterprise)
From: "Daniela Berger" <[email protected]>
> At the moment I am working with Esperanto, Lojban, maybe Volapük, and
> Klingon. I am still looking for another language like Klingon though,
> meaning a full language that was not intended to be easy to learn
> (like Esperanto & Co). Huttish and Gargish unfortunately weren't what
> I was looking for, and I have the impression that there are two
> versions of Vulcan (?). Any suggestions?
Just the obvious: Sindarin and Quenya. (Tolkien's Elvish languages.)
> As Russ already pointed out, it is possible to distiguish artlangs
> between those that are meant to be easily learnt and those that try to
> be as alien as possible. I personally think this distiction is very
> interesting and I think this shows us a lot about how people perceive
> languages. So if phenomenom A occurs in several auxilliary languages
> and phenomenom B occurs in several languages like Klingon (that are
> supposed to be "alien" or "strange"), that basically means the people
> think phenomenom A is easier to process, to learn, to whatnot, whereas
> phenomenom B seems to be regarded as more difficult.
Why do you suggest that "alien" is the same as "more difficult"? Klingon is
certainly an "alien" language (though there are elements that are clearly
influenced by English, though probably not intended to be--the "prefix
trick" is one of those), but it is rather simple to learn. It's very
regular, but not absolutely so. Klingon is difficult to PRONOUNCE for some
people.
One of the intentionally alien aspects of Klingon is the sentence order:
Object-Verb-Subject. Yet this order doesn't really seem to make the
language any more difficult to learn (at least, I never had a problem with
it).
David
Stardate 1754.3