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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.
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?
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.
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.
When I was a kid I was really resentful of people trying to decide my curriculum based on what they thought was useful. I had the ability to dedicate a fantastic amount of concentration and study on whatever interested me, and "later usefulness" had no bearing on this.
If kids get excited about learning Elvish or Klingon, by all means we should embrace their excitement. That will lead to "ins" in their intellectual development we could never guess at.
Today's curriculum seems to be based so much on practicality and very little on imagination. No wonder Generation-Y seems to lack enthusiasm about the world. We're trying to mold them into "practical little cogs" by McDonalds-izing their world.
Murray Todd Williams
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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