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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...
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.
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.
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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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?
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).
SELECT quote.text AS sig FROM quote NATURAL JOIN attribute WHERE attribute.description = 'witty';
0 rows returned