I have always had a fascination with constructed languages; whether it be Fictional ones(Such as Sindarin or Klingon) or Non-Fictional ones (Such as Lojban, Toki Pona, or Esperanto). I am rather good at picking up the grammatical rules and basic words of constructed languages, but I never progress further because I have no one to practice it with =[
So…
I’d like to start a Group here on the discourse('cause I have a feeling I’m not the only one here who’d be interested in this ^^) to learn and communicate together in constructed languages. We’d vote on a language to learn and then focus on that language until we have a good understanding of it =]
If you are interested in joining, please reply to this thread =D
Once we have a few people interested, We will vote on a language, and then start a new thread devoted to that constructed language =]
I’d be interested for my vote of Klingon. While being interested in many languages, I’m unfortunately not good in learning new ones, but Klingon is interesting enough for me to go through the hassle.
Maybe I’m completely missing something here, but why constructed languages specifically?
I’m trilingual and I’ve been trying to learn new languages (spoken in other countries) but lose interest when I need to learn verb tenses or can’t keep up with my friends who do speak those languages. I can feel for your troubles regarding not having anyone to practice with, but wouldn’t a language spoken by many people be of more use, to communicate with non-anglophones and better learn about their culture?
@Raffo and @15phoenix51 Welcome aboard =]
Feel free to start listing languages which you’d like to learn, I’d like to get a feel for what everyone wants. ^^
@phector2004 I’m not entirely sure. I’ve always just had a fascination with constructed languages, more so than with non-constructed languages. I’ll try and give you some reasons why… but it’s probably just going to be a lot of rambling, lol.
So… let’s see. Well… for one thing, there is less pressure when learning/speaking a constructed language. There are no divisions of Native and Non-Native speakers, because everyone is non-native. Non-native speakers often have accents from their original language. Often (sadly) people with accents are made fun of, or worse. However, In conlangs, since no one is a native speaker, accents are more expected and less ostracized.
Also ConLangs have their own culture, usually a very specific one. For example, If you meet someone who speaks french, you can tell that they are probably from a french speaking country… maybe, and that’s about all you know. But, If you meet someone who speaks Klingon, then you know that you both have something in common (Star Trek fans) and that tells you a lot more about the person with out having to ask questions.
Some conlangs (Such as Lojban and Esperanto) were developed to be “culturally neutral”, especially Lojban. They provide an equal ground for people to communicate, Which I think is really cool =D
Another thing I like about Lojban is that it is unambiguous. So every letter has only one way to say it, every word has only one meaning, and there are no exceptions to any grammar rule. It’s a lot less messy than organic languages.
Other conlangs (Such as Toki Pona) were developed to change the way people think, kinda, lol. Toki Pona is a 120 work language based on Taoistic way of life. By learning and thinking in a toki pona way, you change how you think to be more simplistic and less complicated… or That’s the theory at least.
So, there are a lot of conlangs out there, and each of them are unique and have their own background. I find it really amazing that people have constructed working languages without needing thousands of years to evolve one.
So… I guess I just find them really cool =D
I enjoy non-con languages too, But there is just something about conlangs that I find fascinating =3
I would love to join in! Learning these languages might help us add some mysteries in stonehearth, by adding some sort of ruin/ relic maybe? (Or mods at least). And maybe after awhile we can develop our own stonehearth constructed language. But for now I am open to any language you guys want to learn!
perhaps we could try and learn the ‘dragon tongue’ from skyrim… if thats possible.
stop looking at me like that, i cant help it if im addicted to skyrim, okay…
also, how would we communicate to each other? with a teams peak kinda program or just through text…
Unfortunately, I don’t think it is =[
I’ve played Skyrim (not all the way through) and there just isn’t enough to go off of… There are a total of 26 Shouts(including ones which players can’t learn) with 3 words each. This gives us less than 80 words and no grammar to work off of sadly
I think for right now just text, but later on we might be able to work something else out
Let me know what you think about it when you do =D
I’ve never watched the movie… so I don’t really know anything about it. However, I did look at the “official dictionary”. It consists of 28 phrases and no grammar, so that’s not enough to go off of either =/
Same goes for the “Sims” language, both are just funny noises semi based on real languages =/
Yeah =[
I took a look at the link, The grammar rules are “The same as English but with 3 exceptions” Which I suppose is okay… except the example phrases Don’t really match up with that. Also, from what I can tell (I didn’t read the entire list) most of the words are nouns. So what we have is English with only nouns… somehow =/
I don’t think this language was intended to be spoken outside of the game’s dialog/shouts. If it was, there would be more too it. =’[
Okay so… since we are going to do this organized like, here are the rules:
Proposing a Language
To propose a language please provide the name of the language, a short description, and a link to a good online resource for learning =] Optionally, you can also link to a book(s) too, but an online resource is needed because not everyone will want to buy a book. You can propose as many languages as you want =]
Voting for a language
You can vote for as many languages as you want, but you can only vote for each language once. If you propose a language, that also counts a voting for it =]
To start off, I’d like to propose: Toki Pona: A small and simple (yet complete) language, perfect as an intro into conlangs. (book) Lojban: A fully fleshed out unambiguous language, no exceptions! (bookbook) Sindarin: The language of Tolkien’s wood elves, It’s really fun to speak, and the writing is beautiful =3 (book)
Well, it might seem obvious, but I’d like to propose Klingon!
A fictional language as spoken by the Klingons in the Star Trek universe. Due to the already big fanbase of Star Trek, Klingon is considered to be the most popular constructed language by number of speakers (at least that’s what 'Kipedia says, but maybe chimeforest can comment on that, too. ^^) Due to it’s popularity it even has an official ISO language code (tlh).
There are a few pretty good books about Klingon out there, but there are also quite some websites out there to learn Klingon. There’s of course the Klingon Language Institute (KLI), though it unfortunately seems a little abandoned lately. Wikipedia has a few resources, too (On grammar, as WikiBook or in the Wikiversity) and there’s a separate Klingon Wiki, too. A problem, that might arise is, that apparently there’s barely any vocabulary available for free… I remember that the language was copyrighted some time ago… I’m not sure what’s the current status of this, but it certainly had its impact on the availability of online vocabulary lists…
