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British School Offers Elvish Lessons
Adair writes "A school in Birmingham, England is offering its students weekly after-hours lessons in Sindarin, a conversational form of Elvish invented by J.R.R. Tolkien and based on Welsh sounds." It won't be long now until the Klingon to Elvish translation books are produced.
I was going to say that the school should really be offering lessons in "real" languages which are more widely spoken like German and Chinese, but I suppose the kids would rather learn this than anything else. It's not interfering with their normal schooling either, so this can only be a good thing.
Wow, shouldn't schools concentrate on teaching real languages, that could be useful in life?
Why not learn a language that matters?
Ive taken it upon myself to learn Spanish, French, Arabic, Indian -- Russian is next on my list. I doubt Ill ever meet more than a few handful of nerds who speak Elvish.
After learning your second language, each additional one you learn becomes easier. Yes, kids will be more interested in learning Sindarin because is fun, but they're still learning valuable cognative principles for future language study.
Tolkein's work is fabulious in terms of its depth. He was a great lanugage scholar and it shows in his attention to detail in the languages he created. I don't know if the same thing can be said for those who created Klingon...
I don't know much about Latin, and I know even less about Elvish, but I've read before that learning Latin can enhance your general mental capabilities (owing to it being such a heavily structured language). I've also read that learning any language can enhance one's general intelligence. Elvish offers a way in to an exercise that otherwise kids may avoid. In other words, the actual language doesn't really matter for the above situation, but I do feel it would be more beneficial to learn a real language instead. Perhaps Elvish could lead students to eventually tackle another language?
...why not teach the kids a MORE useful artificial language: Esperanto? Esperanto at least helps them NOW in their life if they want to make penpals/friends worldwide, read a diverse range of books, or if they want to then move onto Spanish/Italian/French/other languages (using their REAL-WORLD grammar skills gained via Esperanto as a tool to aid further language learning...)
OR, encourage the kids to then move from Elvish to Esperanto? I say this because in my opinion Elvish is a linguistic dead end for them, whereas Esperanto is a "gateway" to a whole community (Fer instance: Q: how many books, websites and magazines are regularly printed in Elvish? (a: very few, versus Esperanto's many, many....)
I doubt you'd count Latin as a "real" language, but I learnt more English grammar in my Latin lessons than in my English, French and Spanish lessons put together.
Videble vi scias neniun, pri kiu vi parolas. Oni nur devas vidi la esperanta vikipedion por scii, ke esperantistoj jam estas tre nombraj. Neniam artifarita lingvo sen tutmonda disvastigxo, sen jam inda literaturo, sen la gramatika malfacileco de la Zamenhofa lingvo povus kreski pli ol gxin. Esperanto jam estas monddisvastigxita lingvo, cxiu alia artefarita lingvo ne.
You should be smacked.
Are you an expert of neurolinguistics? What if Sindarin, with its artificial nuances, allows these youngsters to think in new ways? What if its popularity provides a basis for insight into the nature of language? What if this is the stepping stone for the development of strong AI? And most importantly, why does it matter to you what someone else chooses to do with their time? Nobody is forcing you, or them, to learn it. Sod off, biatch.
Phnglui mgwa nafh, Cthulhu R'lyeh w'gahnagl fthagn!
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
I've seen quite a few posts on this topic, so I thought something might need cleared up:
Linguistics != Language
All of these 'prior art'-esque posts about how their school or some other school has some course in sindarin or quenya or klingon or this or that fail to notice that teaching about the linguistics of a language has little to do with teaching the actual language.
Linguistics is basically about the structure of language. You can learn everything there is about the linguistics of a language without being taught how to speak it (in the sense that reading an RFC doesn't generally relate much to actually using whatever protocol or what-have-you that it's written on from a user-standpoint).
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Ever wonder what Geeks did before computers were invented?
I think about the guys who were blacksmiths back then. In a way they were hackers. Turning lumps of metal into things like swords and wheels. Thinking about it, you realize that it wasn't just brute force that made those things happen, you had to be smart. And you had to keep at it until you got it right. Sounds like a geek to me.
And in your spare time, you could dring wine and tell tales of elves and dwarves travelling around having wild adventures.
So yeah, if I was living in medeival times, I'd want to be a blacksmith. Or maybe a carpenter.
wbs.
Huh?