Slashdot Mirror
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.
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...
You mean like Latin and Sanskrit?
Can I bum a sig?
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?
Yes, but learing a language that you're actually interested in might encourage these kids to learn 'real' languages. Also it'll provide them with the skills to learn the 'real' language.
I find learning easier if I actually enjoy the subject.
...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.
"The reason I'm offering the lessons is to give the boys, some of whom have special educational needs, something to boost their self-esteem.
"They have responded very well and are eager to learn more. It's also very useful if they want to go on to university to study, as it involves looking at some of Tolkien's old manuscripts. This develops some very complex skills."
As many have said, skills learned w/ learning another language, whatever it may be can only help the students expand their minds. The same goes for many math course requirements for non-technical degrees--it is a deductive, logical process of thinking that aids the students, if not the course itself.
"The truth suffers from too much analysis"
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).
SELECT quote.text AS sig FROM quote NATURAL JOIN attribute WHERE attribute.description = 'witty';
0 rows returned