Invented Languages
January 12th, 2010 | View Comments
With the popularity of the film, Avatar, linguists around the world have a new invented language to expose their geekiness: Na’vi.
Poised to join the ranks of other invented languages like Esperanto, Quenya (aka High-Elvish), and Klingon, Na’vi is sure to amass a following of nerds and linguists at future nerd conventions like Comic-con.
But philosophically, it calls into a greater question. What makes a language a language? Vocabulary? Native speakers? A grammar filled with syntax, phonology, phonetics, morphology, and semantics?
Having tried to create my own fictional language, I can tell you it is a lot more sophisticated than just making up words.
Anyway, score another one for the linguistic nerds out there!
Peter posted this on January 12th, 2010 @ 10:40pm in Language Psychology, Language and the Internet, Movies | Permalink to "Invented Languages"
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Invented languages?
I think that the choice is between English or Esperanto as the future global language rather than an untried project.
Your readers may be interested in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2LPVcsL2k0
Dr Kvasnak teaches English at Florida Atlantic University.
A glimpse of Esperanto can be seen at http://www.lernu.net
Through its roughly 100 year history, Esperanto has grown substantially and acquired many native speakers, but it originally started off as a constructed language.
I didn’t mean to suggest that in 100 years, the world’s language would become Klingon or Na’vi. The goal of this post was to dork out to a new fictional language.