Dead languages -- or not yet born?

Brian Weatherson recently wrote about reading his referral logs, and finding that someone had apparently turned up his page through a search for "LSU", "girls", "porn", "naked" and "sex". Despite demonstrating that this could not be right, it raised SC's suspicions -- after all, right on the front page of Thoughts, Arguments and Rants, one can find "swinging", "desire", and the plaintive lament "she was one in a million". SC is impressed by the brazen Mr. Weatherson's audacity in disguising an X-rated picture site as a well-written philosophy blog, and would like to offer the following trade: Brian can have all of SC's coworkers as slaves to dispose of however he sees fit, in exchange for a copy of the encryption algorithm that turns dirty JPEGs into philosophical speculations.

All this is a roundabout way to getting to the fact that checking referral logs is a habit of SC as well, and recently, it came to the attention of our research staff that somebody had accessed the site with Google's language settings set to display in...Klingon. A bit of further investigation revealed that Google will also let you interact with it in: "Bork bork bork!" (the dialect of the Muppets' Swedish Chef), Elmer Fudd, Esperanto (SC is not interested in agonized shrieks from Esperanto fans about the unfairness of being lumped in with this group), Hacker, "Interlingua" (a bizarre blend of a few languages, not a semantic representation), and Pig Latin. SC was mildly relieved to see that additional resources have not yet been expended to put Tolkien's Elvish ([don't you mean Sindarin? -- ed.]) on the list, but he's sure it's coming. SC lives in terror, though, of the day when he finally meets someone who has learned Klingon through the usual methods of first-language acquisition.

This contrasted in SC's mind -- perhaps unfairly -- with the interview with a researcher on endangered languages that Mark Liberman brough to public attention at Language Log. It's not SC's place to tell anyone how to spend their time or money, but given the efforts that must have been lavished on this translation of Hamlet into Klingon, to say nothing of the reference grammar, one can only imagine how much could be achieved by directing all that time at preserving records of real languages, spoken by actual people. Of course, a lot of the appeal of fictional languages like Klingon or Elvish is the pretext for sharing other interests (read: Star Trek or LOTR). SC wonders if it would be a good idea, though, to try to use this sort of thing for popularizing field methods, and the discipline of linguistics more generally. If it's fun to work on reconstructing a language that only ever existed in the imagination of a few writers, how much more exciting must it be to race against time to preserve one that's winding down?

Comments

[Rachel]

If it weren't for Tolkien's Elvish languages, I would never have learned anything about linguistics. (Well, I still don't actually know anything...) Ú-firo i lamath edhellin!

[x]

Well, Sindarin, Esperanto, and Klingon were all invented by people with a bit of a linguistic clue, and to be fair, are not half bad. Not like some.

[Semantic Compositions]

Points taken. But it's precisely the fact that Tolkien (in particular; I have no idea about the creators of Klingon) was such a good philologist that makes me frustrated over the inability of fictional languages to spur any kind of interest in real-life linguistics.

SC is curious about the mysterious X's hints of more than half bad fictional languages. Leaving Yoda's inconsistent OSV brand of English, what might you have in mind?

[x]

Well, all the rest. 'Conlangs' (horrible word), people re-inventing Latin with SOV order, or Latin with syllabic nasals... scraps picked up from the birdtable of Linguistics 0.001, and no real feel for individuality. :)

[Rachel]

The inability of fictional languages to spur any kind of interest in linguistics? I'm a college freshman and am taking my second linguistics class. I would never have taken one if Sindarin hadn't gotten me interested.

Because I'm impatient, I went out and read a whole lot, and now it's the worst of both worlds. I get bored in class a lot, but I still don't know anything. Such is often the case when I practice autodidacticism. :(

My friend is a high school senior, and he's also taught himself a lot of linguistics because Sindarin got him interested. He's going to be super bored in college.

[Semantic Compositions]

Rachel, you'll pardon my saying so, but you strike me as a person of unusually broad intellectual engagements, not to mention a very healthy curiosity about the world. Judging by your blog, it's linguistics and physics for you at the moment. Which SC heartily applauds, having completed most of an EE major before switching to linguistics.

SC went to engineering school with a whole bunch of stereotypical CS and EE geeks. They were all obsessed with the usual sci-fi/fantasy literature. And yet, despite such a large fan base, most of the linguistics classes in a campus of 5,000 people had only 5-6 students -- with the notable exception of a semantics course which counted as a general ed. requirement. It's my impression that the same is true, on a slightly larger scale, at bigger schools. I'm not claiming that it's an exceptionless universal, just that the number of people stimulated to an interest in linguistics is depressingly low given the popularity of the fictional languages that are out there.

[language hat]

Hey, I was doing physics and math before I got into linguistics. I had no idea there were so many of us.

[search engine]

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