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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'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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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"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"
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?
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).
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