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'll be there as well.
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.
With the dodgyness of the Birmingham brummie accent do they really need / want to be doing this?
I am Robert Taylor. I AM the President.
Anyone know if Google supports Sindarin?
Rank Presidents by th
Elvish invented by J.R.R. Tolkien and based on Welsh sounds
Does it mean it has no vowels?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Entire class beaten to near death on first day as jocks create a fake class that teaches "elvish" in a secluded barn. Pictures at 11.
Wow, shouldn't schools concentrate on teaching real languages, that could be useful in life?
Zainab Thorp, a special needs co-ordinator at Turves Green Boys' Technology College in Birmingham, is offering after-hours classes, where pupils struggle through vocabulary and verb tables.
Zainab Thorp? It that her elvish name?
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.
So in other words, they're offerring bullies a central location for all their dork-pummelling needs?
Welsh has lots of vowels. The secret is that 'w' and 'y' are vowel sounds in Welsh. Its actually fairly phonetic so learning to pronounce Welsh place names isn't too hard, even if "cwmtwrch" initially looks as terrifying as Polish.
It's about time the Elvish language is recognized internationally! Too long have the elves been scorned by western nations.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
When you write the language, the vowels do not (usually) have their own character. Based on the "mode" you are writing in, you mark the vowels on the character before or after the vowel sound.
We'll have a legitimate excuse for not understanding what the brits say :)
webpage
But these guys who learn Klingon(Add now Elvish) are out there, a solid 12 or more.
From the article:
"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."
How does getting beaten up everyday improve your self-esteem?
That quote is from the teacher, Zainab Thorp, btw. Which sounds more like a Harry Potter name to me. Maybe she should be teaching parseltongue?
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?
is that you don't get the full effect of the "Lord of the Rings" without reading it in it's native Elvish.
Karma? Karma? I don't need no stinkin' karma.
Nah. All the other countries should learn to speak english. We can always just speak louder and slower at them when they don't uderstand.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
(Foster Brooks voice)Elvish has left the building?
What?
i think i need another raktajino, what kind of p'tach would want to learn elvish?
Lund University http://www.lu.se in Sweden had or has a course in Klingon..
I have a friend who attended and it sounded like a lot of fun, especially If you are already studying languages..
Elvish might not be as much fun but it is probably even cooler..
Will code a sig generator for food
I've never kissed a girl?
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.
Here at UT (as in Texas, not Tennessee), we've had a course on the linguistics of ALL the Middle-Earth languages since last year.
Maybe Sindarin will replace Esperanto.
-- SKYKING, SKYKING, DO NOT ANSWER.
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.
Languages like Quenya must be learned outside, among Nature. That's why the mobs go nuts when we hear the phrase "Elvish has left the building".
--
make install -not war
I've put some time myself in learning Sindarin and Quenya. Not to a conversational level, but enough to be able to say simple phrases and understand them. Enough to understand a lot of the dialog in the movies, and to translate most place-names in LotR and the Silmarillion as I (re-)read them.
I can also read and write Tengwar, the Elvish writing system (at a slow pace). There are a number of resources available on the web at the moment for all this.
http://www.ardalambion.com/
is one of the best, with links to other resources on the web.
http://www.elvish.org/gwaith/language.htm
is also a good resource.
What's more, every year more of the professor's material on those languages is published, and more knowledge of those tongues is acquired so that the information gets refined. Actual teaching of the language is great, as others said it increases interest in languages in general, which is good.
Before looking seriously at Elvish, I learned English, German, and Latin (my first tongue was French). I can usually figure out written material in Italian and Spanish. So my interest in Elvish was NOT alone but only part of a general interest in languages, and learning the basis of those made-up languages made me aware of certain concepts of language which are not always readily apparent in real-world languages, but yet are useful for a deeper understanding of them.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
...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.
LIN 312 is a linguistics class on the languages of middle earth.
It's a real class for which you get real credit.
course description
-
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.
From kli.org:
The Klingon language is something truly unique. While there have been other artificial languages, and other languages crafted for fictional beings, Klingon is one of the rare times when a trained linguist has been called upon to create a language for aliens. Add to this more than a quarter-century of the Star Trek phenomenon, a mythos that has permeated popular culture and spread around the globe. These factors begin to explain the popularity of the warrior's tongue. Klingon was invented by Marc Okrand, for use in some of the Star Trek movies. He invented not just a few words to make the Klingons sound alien, but a complete language, with its own vocabulary, grammar, and usage.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
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?
Im a geek, but yet i pitty them and just hope they find some girls soon.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
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
it would have been more fun if the kids had learn it before the movie, then they could understand all the censored (elvish) horny talk between Aragorn and Arwen.
Lord of the Binges.
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
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
yay? or not?