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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.
Anyone know if Google supports Sindarin?
Rank Presidents by th
Does anyone else aside from me feel very disappointed in the casting of Liv Tyler? I had expected a more delicate, nuanced -- hell, elfin look to my elves, especially one who was such an exemplar. I mean, look at Orlando Bloom as Legolas.
Tyler makes me think "heavy," "slow" and, forgive me, "stupid."
Mrs Thorp, who studied ancient Egyptian at university, said: "Tolkien never left a word meaning 'to love'.
Well perhaps a long-lived race as the elves did not have the concept of love or understood love in a far more abstract fashion than humans, dwarves or orcs.
Also serious queers speak la lingvo geja not Sindarin.
Klingon is obsolete already? Wow, and I thot programming fads changed fast. So Elvish geeks are hipper than Klingon-speaking geeks? Not that geeks are known to be hip, but this just makes Elvish geeks slightly less dispised than Klingon geeks. It is like Musolini bragging that he is less hated than Hitler.
BTW, I think UPN should bring out a Klingon-centric series. The concept of obsessed warriors would be appealing to a wide audience because of the violence, bravery, grunting, worm-eating, etc. They could use ideas from Sparta and Samuri culture. Spartans had a lot of Klingon-like ideas and warrior poetry.
The setting could be the early days of the Klingon alliance. Two Earthlings could be assigned to a Klingon ship and deal with the culture clashes and the adjustments as Klingons have to learn to live within Federation policies. The Klingon captain is constantly challenged by other Klingons for following the "soft" federation guidelines, but he will be demoted by the federation if he goes traditional. Thus, he walks a tightrope between two cultures. He has to act like he dispises the earthlings, but they are sort of closet friends because they learn from each other.
One of the earthlings is talked into the Klingon assignment by the other, his buddy, who is gung-ho about the challenge. Thus, one of the earthlings has a harder time adjusting to the klingon ship and culture in a Hoshi-like way. The gung-ho earthling eventually has a Klingon girlfriend and always has scratches from making klingon love to her. Or, perhaps the reluctant earthling is the one who falls in love with the klingon babe.
Table-ized A.I.
A guy I knew about 15 years ago told me that his grandfather was very good friends with JRR Tolkien.
Apparently Tolkien and some other friends used to come to his Granpa's for Sunday lunch and in the afternoon they would then sit, smoke pipes and speak to one another in a "strange language that wasn't spoken any more".
No more details than that I'm afraid.. interesting all the same.
This is where Tolkien fans are at odds. You've got the Elvish speakers, who throw practicality to the wind by learning an invented language specific to a given mythos. And then you've got the Old English speakers, who pragmatists that they are, learn a more functional Tolkien-oriented language, with better practical applications to every day life. Why waste your life learning a made up language when you could learn one that's been dead for 1,000 years?
Because my other half went to one of them (there is TG primary, TG boys, TG girls etc all adjacent to each other along 100 yards of road) had a daughter at TG primary....
y /i ndex.php?option=show&type=2
The teachers sussed she was IT/web savvy and asked her about websites, she eventually built them a beautiful website for free, inc free hosting, cut a long story short it got quite acrimonious when the head discovered that one of the features (a forum) meant that parents could actually ask questions on a public forum.... questions such as how come a primary school with a couple of hundred pupils has a million pound plus annual budget? how come their IT is limited to a dozen laptops for the kids, half of which are broken at any one time? how come the deeper you dig the more it appears that the school is nothing more than a business with lots of hands in lots of pockets and the absolute lowest priority is the actual education that the students themselves receive?
How come they employ an IT director that doesn't know what Linux is or how to ALT-TAB between windows in windows or even fix a laptop install?
Hence the "special needs" tagline, it is all about bums on seats, and the more bums you have the greater your budget per annum, and the greater number of those bums that you can attach a label to such as "special needs" (which can range from anything from a physical disability to a rowdy kid that needs no more than a clip around the ear) the greater your budget.
Bottom line on this is wasting time teaching the little bastards Tolkien speak isn't going to offend any minorities, except the trekkies or dr who nerds, and who gives a fuck about them anyway, so it is a "safe" way to deliberately cause "mission creep" and thus prepare the ground for greater annual budgets in the years to come.
It makes me want to fucking puke and then take up arms.
http://www.northfield-westheath.org.uk/communit
At the end of the day this is just a classic example of a system that has degraded to the point where simple curative measures no longer suffice, when schools are turning out a MAJORITY of pupils who have severe difficulties with English (never mind a useful foreign language, much less elvish / klingon / aramaic) and find even simple long division extremely taxing then it really is time to throw the baby out with the bath water.
It just so happens that I know this particular school and the goings on there pretty well, but trust me when I tell you that this is FAR FAR FAR from being an isolated incident.
I also note the BBC website readers comments on the story... apart from one person with some class ("Elvish has left the building...") is it only me that finds it strange that all the other people with computers and internet connections and kids of an age to attend these schools have nothing disdainful / critical / ridiculing / negative to say?
I need a green card... any female type slashdotters in the states interested in hooking up with a sexual deviant?
peace.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
While I'm at it, a question from a curious American: do the Welsh, Scots, and Irish all have a commond bond because of their oppression at the hands of the English? I had always assumed that they would but the cultures seem pretty divergent from a distance.
That makes me think we'd either have the Japanese and poorly learned english of Japan, or the poorly learned english and slang ridden spanish of the mexicans here (california). Those are the only two examples I can think of where they try to speak two languages at a time. It seems to not work so well... we should all just speak one language. Though thats happening already. Its just a matter of time before the effeciency and ease of having a world wide language or two and almost no others naturally just happens.
Quenya (the formal, ancient Elvish) is based on Finnish. Sindarin is from the same root grammatically but it sounds more like Welsh. Even the elves couldn't grok Finnish like us natives so they just gave up :)
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
With this trend (people starts - *really* - learning fictional languages), it's time to introduce Latin as an (*the*) international language.
Before I thought that the only language viable to form the international choice was English (as it was the way of least restance). But it seems that fictions and games could drive people to unsual learning efforts.
Then we have also Esperanto, but I don't like it much although it's both simple in structure and easy to pronounce. What I don't like with it is that it's a bit "ugly". Latin may not be exactly beautiful, but it have some sort of "dignity" and have inspiring historical links. And litterature.
Mundus Vult Decipi
Speaking from personal experience, in Ontario we're taught French from grade 2 all the way to Grade 12 (end of high school). I never developed more than a passing understanding of the grammar and vocabulary, just enough to get me past each grade.
Fast forward a few years, and I ended up spending 2 months in Quebec one summer. I picked up more in those two months than after 10+ years of school. Part of it was motivation, definitely, but I think that it is very difficult to learn a language in a formal setting, 30 minutes per day, 5 days a week. Especially when I'm busy trying to learn things like Calculus, Physics, Geography, History, etc etc.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
In middleschool I hit Tolkien with a passion. Read those books more times than I can remember in 2 years. Started trying to translate some of the scripts included in the illustrations (maps, door to Moria, stuff like that). Now, I've just finished my BA in Classics and can read both Latin and Ancient Greek. This is the direct result of my interest in Tolkien's languages as a child. But I suppose my unemployment might also be considered such a result...
The generally poor English conversation skills of Japanese people do not support the position that learning two languages at once works poorly. The fact is that English is poorly taught in Japan. Very few Japanese teachers of English actually speak English themselves. Furthermore, the curriculum and exams, especially the all-important University entrance exams, emphasize the ability to read English, not to speak it.
An example of a country with succesful, quality language-teaching is the Netherlands. A Dutch high-school graduate will generally be fluent in English and capable of getting by in French and German. In Dutch Universities, classes in the languages taught in high school are conducted in the language. That is, if you major in French at the university level, your classes, including classes in subjects like literature and linguistics, will be conducted in French.
There are also many societies in which children grow up fluent in two or more languages as a result of using different languages in different contexts, e.g. one at home and another at school. Millions of immigrants to the US, for example, have grown up speaking both fluent English, learned outside the home, and their heritage language: Italian, Yiddish, Chinese, Polish, etc. Swedish Finns, such as Linus Torvalds, grow up bilingual in Finnish and Swedish, and like other Finns, most acquire a good command of English by the end of high school.
Multilingualism is common in much of Africa. People often speak their local language, a regional African language, such as Swahili, and thelanguage of the former colonial power, which often serves as a national language, such as French or English. To take an admittedly somewhat extreme case, I have a friend from Eritrea who speaks Tigrinya, Tigre, Amharic, Beja, Nara, Sudanese Colloquial Arabic, and Modern Standard Arabic. He's been in the US for a couple of years and his English is imperfect but quite servicable. In all probability, most people who have ever lived have probably spoken at least two languages. Monolingualism is pathological.
Most Japanese don't speak fluent English and don't claim to. Some benefit from good instruction, some try self-learning on top of typically poor instruction, good on them.
Have you ever visited the Netherlands? The majority of the population speak reasonable English and German, as well as Dutch, and in many cases additional languages - French, Spanish, etc.
It is not hard to become fluent in another language - systematic and disciplined learning with a reasonable resource are all that are needed - this is easy if you have caught the 'bug' of language.
I agree a 'core' common language makes business-related communication more efficient, but that is no reason to leave other languages. Language is a means of expression - there is no need to converge languages for this, infact (as you point out wrt slang) language evolves and changes quickly with this in mind. There are many major languages in the world now - English, Spanish, French, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese (Mandarin)... try converging or replacing these!