Re: CHAT: t-shirt

* Dan Jones <yl-ruil@...> [000926 14:57]:
> Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> > 100% agreed.  None of them is better known to the general public
> > than Esperanto, sure, but it is pretty well known (at least
> > among those who take an interest in fantasy and science fiction)
> > that Tolkien invented languages and that the Klingon language
> > exists.  These three classics must not miss!
>
> Tolkien, yes. Esperanto, maybe. But please, not Klingon, please! I
> hate it, It's nonsensical and hideous. Enough of the rant, here's
> why I hate the damn thing:
>
> 1) the orthography. The weird phonology doesn't bother me much-
> it's not very likely mind you, but I hate the orthography.
It was meant to look ugly and alien, and your reaction equals sucess
:) Since it has it's own script we won't even have to use the latin
version.

> 2) OK, the phonology. It has too many holes in it. Why are the
> velars the only fricatives to make a voiced/voiceless distinction?
It was meant to sound strange and alien, and conculturally, the
speakers aren't human. M'Okrand deliberately decided to not follow
the usual rules for how a human language is put together.

> 3) the lexicon. None of the words seem to have any relationship
> too each other, they appear to have been made up at random (I know
> they were, but this looks like it) like ghop and ruQ, which mean
> hand and manually, respectively. They bear no relation to each
> other or any other word.
See 2), and considering how a word's meaning might change in your
average earthlang (my brain is toast, no examples)...

Now, I read the Dictionary even before I read any Tolkien, and
my earliest descriptions of târuven followed the template of
the Dictionary, much of the pages on it still do in fact. My
languages prior to that book (actually, prior to the illegally
scrounged bbs-textfile that I probably still have somewhere)
either was very inspired by German (syntactically, vocab-wise
all my langs have been a priori) or nice-sounding relexes of
Norwegian (tho' much simpler/no morphology).  That book really made
things take off, possibility- and imagination-wise, especially
since the linguistics-section in the local library wouldn't know
non-IE-languages if they started a violent revolution.</rant>


t., who has rediscovered the joys of :<start>,<stop>!par w<width>