
Speaking in Tongues: From Elvish to Dothraki, the rise of invented languages - Thevet
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122961/fantastical-rise-invented-languages
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lumpypua
_So, the language Peterson is using isn’t scientific, it’s an act of cultural
interpretation. Which is, of course, fine, and a great reminder that
linguistics is a subject that connects many different fields of knowledge. But
when I see an advertisement for Game of Thrones, I see a cultural vision that
is inaccurate, distorting, and bears a very specific relationship to the
European past. It isn’t an innocent one. I see a Tolkien-inflected vision of
the Middle Ages, with the sexual violence and warfare and ethnic stereotyping
amped up to a pitch so cartoonishly horrendous that I can’t look at it._

PC crap in an otherwise really interesting article.

It's not amped up actually. The degree of butchery that goes on in historical
outbreaks of violence is astonishing to the post-19th century mind. Mass
executions of enemies and conquered cities (and accompanying rape and pillage)
happened with regularity in some parts of history.

One of the noted advancements of the Mongol warfare style in the middle ages,
especially under Genghis Khan, was development of efficient mass execution
tactics. Sexual violence and warfare _happened_ at a cartoonishly horrendous
pitch. Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast has an amazing series on the
Mongol conquests, "Wrath of the Khans" if you wanna know more.

~~~
veddox
> It's not amped up actually. The degree of butchery that goes on in
> historical outbreaks of violence is astonishing to the post-19th century
> mind. Mass executions of enemies and conquered cities (and accompanying rape
> and pillage) happened with regularity in some parts of history.

"... in some parts of history"? Atrocities like that have never ended - human
nature doesn't change. In the civil wars in western and southern Africa, rape
is regularly used as a weapon of war. We all know the kind of massacres IS has
been committing. I don't know an awful lot about Genghis Khan, but I'm pretty
sure the machete-wielding executioners of the Rwandan genocide must have been
just as effective. That kind of violence has nothing to do with the time
period in which you live, there's nothing magic about the post-19th century
world/mind. It's about humans being, well, inhuman. And that, unfortunately,
can include pretty much everybody.

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jensen123
I wish that conlangs were more popular. There are many bad natural languages
that could need replacement. I live in Europe, and the languages is one of the
things that annoys me the most about this continent. For example, languages
like Dutch, German and Spanish use guttural sounds. Normally, when you try get
rid of slime from your throat, you make guttural sounds - why on earth do
people use that to communicate with? It's ugly. Or take some of the grammar of
natural languages, like the das, der and die in German. I think "the ticket"
in German can be called der Farhschein, die Fahrkarte or das Ticket - it makes
no sense.

Maybe I should put my feet where my mouth is, and start learning Esperanto or
something...

~~~
veddox
While I second your wish that conlangs were more popular (I learnt Toki Pona
some time back), I would ask you to refrain from such subjective language
criticisms as "it's ugly". I speak English and German natively, and I can't
stand it when people criticize the other language on such personal grounds.

As for your take on the redundancy of natural languages, I would point out
that it is perfectly natural and can probably be found in just about any
language. (Otherwise, there would be no such thing as a thesaurus...) To stick
with your example, you could also talk about "the boarding pass" instead of
"the ticket" in English.

Indeed, the redundancy of words and vocabulary forms much of the beauty of a
language. Especially in English much of poetry is the art of choosing the
right word. I love the way T.S. Eliot puts it towards the end of his poem
"Little Gidding":

    
    
      And every phrase
      And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
      Taking its place to support the others,
      The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
      An easy commerce of the old and the new,
      The common word exact without vulgarity,
      The formal word precise but not pedantic,
      The complete consort dancing together)
    

So please, if you want to criticize a language at all, let's stick to the
objective side as far as possible. German grammar is difficult, English
pronunciation can be utterly confusing - I'll grant that. But let's not talk
about any "bad natural languages". Because there is beauty to be found in
every tongue.

~~~
jensen123
Actually, I don't mind redundancy. I meant to criticize the lack of logic and
consistency. If it was logical and consistent, it should have been das
Farhschein, das Fahrkarte and das Ticket :-)

~~~
jhanschoo
It isn't illogical or inconsistent. The notion that grammatical gender is
illogical comes from a misunderstanding of the purpose of grammatical gender.
We learn in schools that words are either masculine, feminine, or neuter.

Gender is useful for several things: think of it as a technology with multiple
applications, some more obvious than others. The most obvious would be to
indicate whether a pronoun is male, female, or inanimate.

One of the more important uses for gender is for agreement. Agreement in
gender helps to denote which noun an adjective belongs to. Of course, it's not
foolproof, but it's good enough. In addition to agreement, genders increase
the information redundancy of words, which is useful when communicating in a
noisy, lossy medium.

Admittedly, genders that actually correspond to the natural gender of the
things they refer to may not detract from the purpose of information
redundancy and of agreement, but as with many things in life, good enough is
sufficient cause to adopt the status quo.

What I'm trying to say is, under the supposition that genders should reflect
natural gender, they do indeed appear illogical and inconsistent. But genders
do indeed have practical purposes and do indeed develop according to certain
rules, and if we judge genders by these criteria instead, their development
does indeed follow rules and is consistent.

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pmoriarty
Anyone interested in this subject would do well to read "In the Land of
Invented Languages".[1]

[1] - [http://www.amazon.com/Land-Invented-Languages-Adventures-
Lin...](http://www.amazon.com/Land-Invented-Languages-Adventures-
Linguistic/dp/0812980891/)

