QaQ [duh]-Klingon for Well, duh from on online Klingon translation program.
I found a wonderfully odd little book called In The Land of Invented Languages. It’s the story of about nine hundred made up languages and the sad fate that all of them have befallen.
Well, all of them except Klingon. Of all the high ideals and noble goals of such silliness as Esperanto and Vela, whose inventors want nothing less than one spoken tongue for all mankind, Klingon is as close to a living language as any of them have come.
Not to say that we will be seeing street signs in Klingon anytime soon or that brochures at The Tower of London will offer a Klingon pamphlet to go with the countless others. I suppose if some Trek Nerd had decided to make Esperanto the official language of the United Federation of Planets that bit of made up verbiage might have a more active role in reality as well.
There are, it seems, hundreds of new invented languages-with more showing up on the scene everyday. Anyone who likes to dabble with words has surely had the thought that there must be a better way to express our thoughts to one another. But most of us just hunker down with an old copy of Elements of Style and get on with it. But some people, like JRR Tolkien, needed to fill out their personal universe with a good bit of their own language. Klingon falls into this more artistic and less altruistic from of language creation.
There was a fad for a while of not using those nasty old fashioned letters to write drab and mundane words-we are a visual animal, so why not have a visual language? Blissysbols was the king of this little crowd. It’s inventor must have been so happy to see all those emoticons that have found their way into our webby lives. Though, of course, emoticons are but crude and simple bits of fun. Not at all like the crude and simple doodles meant to convey the full range of human endeavor.
Words are all kinds of fun, and making up new words seems to be even more fun. The not so fun part is when the inventors try to get the rest of the world to see the light and start using their made up language. It just never works-and little wonder.
I live in Texas where I am surrounded by Americans that refuse to learn to speak Spanish and immigrants that refuse to learn to speak English. Mixed in for good measure are countless other tongues from countless other countries. All of us move in tiny circles where other people speak the same words that we speak.
Wouldn’t it be easier to just say-Hey, everyone speak English or get the hell out? Apparently not. We are all very fond of our native tongues and go to fairly serious extremes to never learn any others. So the idea of chucking all that we have spent our lives learning for something someone whipped up in their bathtub is patently absurd.
And yet these inventors do expect people to learn that super duper simple hyper complex new syntaxes and gnash their teeth and pull their hair when no one does. It must really piss them off that so many people have taken Klingon to heart.
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You might want to re-read the chapters on Esperanto. Arika makes it clear that while Esperanto has not spread like wildfire, it hasn’t fizzled, either. In fact, as Arika points out, both in her book and at http://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/questions-answered-invented-languages where she answers questions posed by readers of a NY Times blog, Esperanto is alive and well, a living language with a community of real speakers and a culture.
Klingon certainly has not come close to being the living language that Esperanto now is. A lot of people can say the equivalent of “Hello”, “Good-bye”, “How are you?” and “Man the torpedoes, we’re under attack!” in Klingon, but the number of people who can sustain a real conversation in it are said to be able to go out to dinner together. Esperanto, on the other hand, has about 2,000,000 speakers – of the real conversation kind – and growing.
I’ve heard conflicting reports on what Esperanto’s inventor wanted Esperanto to become. But what he may or may not have desired is moot: after publishing his language, he turned it over to the community – a gesture responsible for Esperanto’s success – and that community has decided that Esperanto’s vocation is as a *second* language for all, to help people of different languages communicate with each other cheaply yet effectively. That is precisely how it is used today. Almost everyone who speaks Esperanto abhors as much as you do the idea of “chucking all that we have spent our lives learning”: keep and cherish your native language, learn and use the dominant language of your community, but outside of that, if you want to talk to someone who doesn’t speak your language natively, consider Esperanto.
The Esperanto community has embraced Esperanto willingly; no one forces people to learn Esperanto. That freedom extends to its evolution: the community decides freely what Esperanto is and will be, not an übermeister dictating his linguistic will. One feature that has persisted is the ability to combine roots freely to create new words. Its flexible grammar also allows a great deal of freedom in sentence formation. You should give Esperanto a try – I suspect you’d like it more than you let on :-). If your curiosity ever gets the best of you, a good starting place is http://www.lernu.net, which offers several courses of varying levels, all self-taught (Esperanto is easy enough that you can learn it without a teacher).
Can I add that Esperanto has become a living language 🙂
After a short period of 122 years Esperanto is now in the top 100 languages, out of 6,800 worldwide. It is the 22nd most used language in Wikipedia, and a language choice of Google, Skype, Firefox and Facebook.
Native Esperanto speakers, (people who have used the language from birth), include financier George Soros, World Chess Champion Susan Polger, Ulrich Brandenberg the new German Ambassador to NATO and Nobel Laureate Daniel Bovet.
Your readers may be interested in the following video. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8837438938991452670
A glimpse of the language can be seen at http://www.lernu.net
Well, I didn’t say speaking Esperanto makes you a loser. And in all honesty anyone who has the skill to learn any language, even one whipped up out of thin air, I have to take my hat off to. As with Aikia’s work as a whole, I tend to view the subject as something that is a bit whimsical. As a Trek Nerd myself, I just had a natural attraction to the whole Klingon thing.
May Esperanto live long and prosper.
True, you didn’t call Esperanto speakers losers, for which I thank you. 🙂
I really enjoyed Arika’s book. While the topic is admittedly a bit off the beaten path for a professional linguist, she treats it with great competence while avoiding the stuffiness of your typical academic tome. In particular, I found it offered some very interesting insights into natural languages. For example, better than just about anyone else I’ve ever read, she helps to understand why most constructed languages are abject failures, and why the few success stories are successful. Another example is her analysis of John Wilkins’ attempt at a philosophical language and the problem of taxonomy, which help to understand the futility of many criticisms of Esperanto, which never actually set out to be a perfect language, just one that works.