Snarkout has a lively look at made-up languages and the people who love them. I just have one question: Does the Klingon Linguistics Institute have a visiting scholars program?
Posted by Charles Kuffner on May 05, 2004 to Society and cultcha | TrackBackPersonally, I want to find out what language the main help desk at my company writes in. I've eliminated English and Ebonics.
Posted by: William Hughes on May 5, 2004 11:27 AMI know one conlang guy who proudly declared he had invented a language that was a cross of Japanese and Maltese as it would sound if spoken by a dinosaur with long nasal cavities. I am absolutely not kidding. These morons are inventing languages that not only have never been spoken by humans, but also could NEVER be spoken by humans.
Meanwhile, numerous human languages are dying, unrecorded. Why don't the conlang idiots apply themselves to REAL pursuits like this? I read a heartbreaking story in the Journal of the NY Academy of The Sciences, it told of a linguist who was trying to record a dying American Indian language. There were only two extremely old men left who understood it. One man only knew the written language, and he was blind. The other man only knew the spoken language, and he was deaf. For all practical purposes, the language was already dead, but the linguist did his best to record what he could, attempting to construct a dictionary of the language from people who could not verify his work.
Oh, if only ONE conlang geek had taken the time to learn this language back when the 2 men were still in good health, this language, once spoken by a whole nation of Indians, would have been preserved. But no, they were fascinated by Klingon.