Street Sign Posted in Klingon

I love it. Comic-Con is getting ready to drop in San Diego, so in the spirit of that the city changed one of its public transit signs to the Klingon language to encourage Klingons to use public transportation. See original UT story HERE.

Slideshow of "Chinglish" and Funny Translations from Abroad

The NYT has a great slideshow of funny English translations in signs from abroad. Check it out HERE.

Flickr Collection of "Teabonics" Signs

This Flickr page by Pargon, who introduces them:

These are signs seen primarily at Tea Party Protests.

They all feature "creative" spelling or grammar.

This new dialect of the English language shall be known as "Teabonics."

See Pargon Teabonics sets HERE.

A taste:



No Diploma!

Slate on how Avatar fans are learning how to speak Na'vi (It's the new Klingon!)

SLATE
the good word
The New Klingon
Without so much as a dictionary, Avatar fans are learning how to speak Na'vi.
By Arika Okrent
Posted Wednesday, March 24, 2010, at 10:51 AM ET

Twenty-four hours after Avatar appeared in theaters, the Web site Language Log was teeming with comments about Na'vi, the alien tongue spoken in the film. The site is always lively, but it was especially so that day because Paul Frommer—who created the language—had shown up to discuss Na'vi syntax and phonetics. His fans were asking questions. How to say "I don't speak Na'vi" or "I love you," for example. An especially ambitious commenter named "Prrton" even posted a lengthy statement in the new language:

"Ngaru ätxäle … oel set futa Hal'liwutta tsayeyktanru ngal peng futa lì'fyati Na'viyä nume nereeiu a ngeyä wotxa lì'utìtäftxurenu sì aylì'uyä sänumeti perängey ayoel. Ayoel nereu a tsa'u ke tsayängun lu txo ayoel pänutìng futa rawketi sayi nìwotx ulte Eywafa ke txayey. Kawkrr!!;-) Eywa ngahu."

Or, in English:

"I now ask you to tell the Hollywood bosses [Hal'liwutta tsayeyktanru] that those of us who want to learn the Na'vi language are waiting (impatiently) for your full grammar and lexicon. We promise to raise a lotta hell if what we want is not forthcoming, and 'by Eywa' we wont stop. Ever!! ;-)"

Prrton—a California consultant who goes by Britton Watkins in the real world—is clearly a little unusual. But not because he's an Avatar obsessive (there are lots of those). He's unusual in that he formulated a paragraph in Na'vi without a complete grammar or dictionary. And he didn't just stick a few words from the movie into random order or repeat lines that had occurred in the film. He produced an original and grammatically correct statement.

At this point, you might be wondering how that's even possible. But it is, because Frommer developed a complex system of rules that determines the "correct" form for Na'vi sentences. And fans who pay close—very close—attention, can figure out those rules just by listening to the dialogue. They can take the information available and back-engineer the system, like anthropologists jotting down field notes in the jungle. Fans of The Princess and the Frog, which came out the same week as Avatar, could not do the same with the made-up language spoken by the frog-prince, who hails from the imaginary kingdom of Maldonia. He utters a few vaguely "European"-sounding phrases, but there is no system behind them. Aspiring Maldonian princesses can exclaim "Ashidanza!" when they think something is "cool," but they can't produce never-before-uttered Maldonian sentences.

Aspiring Pandorans, however, can introduce themselves, give opinions, make requests, and even write poems in Na'vi. This, in fact, is what they are doing at learnnavi.org. The forum there already has 153,000 posts by 4,300 people—aficionados who chat, translate, and encourage novices who have never even studied a foreign language. (Yes, there are people who didn't bother learning Spanish in high school but who are eager to learn the invented language spoken on a fictional alien planet.) Na'vi, it would seem, has been taken over by the Na'vi speakers. While waiting on Frommer's full lexicon and grammar, Na'vi enthusiasts have produced their own study guides, word lists, and audio samples. They have posted guidelines for picking a "correct" Na'vi name and compiled warnings about common beginners' errors.

..........

Read the full story HERE.

Global Motherf*ckers (cursing around the world)

SLATE
explainer
Global Motherf*ckers
Does every culture use the suggestion of maternal incest as an insult?
By Nina Shen Rastogi
Posted Thursday, March 12, 2009, at 6:47 PM ET

A mythical beast known as the "grass-mud horse" has become an Internet phenomenon in China. The New York Times reported Thursday that the alpacalike creature's Mandarin name just happens to be a very, very dirty pun. Times style rules prevent the paper from clarifying the joke, but other, less-dignified outlets explain that the phrase Cao ni ma is a homonym for "fuck your mother" in Chinese. Is some variant of motherfucker used all over the world?

Pretty much. While it's not quite a universal insult, variations on the command to commit incest with one's mother appear in every region of the globe. Anthropologists note that, across cultures, the most severe insults tend to involve a few basic themes: your opponent's family, your opponent's religion, sex, and scatology. Because motherfucker covers two of these topics—plus incest, a nearly global taboo—it's a popular choice just about everywhere. In Mandarin Chinese alone, riffs on the basic phrase include Cao ni ma ge bi, meaning "fuck your mother's cunt," and Cao ni da ye, "fuck your elder uncle." Given the Chinese culture of ancestor worship, Cao ni zu shong shi ba dai, or "fuck your ancestors of 18 generations," may be the worst incest instruction of all.

Incest-related invectives are only one class of mother insults, which may impugn a mother's sexual integrity—as in the Italian phrase "If the streets were paved with pricks, your mother would walk on her ass"—or suggest that the speaker is about to rape or violate the listener's mother himself. (For example, the great Turco-Mongolian curse, "I urinate on your father's head and have intercourse with your mother!")

In Mediterranean cultures, where the relationship between mother and son is particularly sacred, insults about incest carry special potency. The nastiest Greek curses, for example, are gamo ti mana sou, gamo tin Panagia sou, and gamo to Khristo sou—"fuck your mother," "fuck your madonna," and "fuck your Christ," respectively. According to G. Legman's classic Rationale of the Dirty Joke, "Go fuck your mother" (Idy v kibini matri) is the "Russian ultimate-insult." Other cultures that venerate motherhood use variations of the phrase as well. Mexicans like to hurl the invective chinga tu madre at their rivals. During the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese exclamation du me—literally, "fuck mother"—morphed into the popular American military slang term doo-mommie.

African cultures yield some colorful entries in the motherfucking canon. Anthropologist Philip Mayer, in a 1951 article on joke-telling among the Gusii people of Kenya, noted that close friends were likely to rib one another with the directive, "Go eat your mother's anus!" The Igbo people of Nigeria use the phrase O-ra nna ye!, or "fucker of his mother!"

The first known print appearance of the English phrase—as the adjectival intensifier motherfucking—dates to a legal document from 1889. In a case before the Texas Court of Appeals, it was reported that the defendant had been referred to by another man as "that God damned mother-f—cking, bastardly son-of-a-bitch!" The phrase was considered so vile in late 19th-century America that, in another Texas court case, it was argued that a man who had been called a "mother-fucking son-of-a-bitch" by a person he later shot "could not be found guilty of a higher offense than manslaughter," so grave was the offense.

Going back even further, medieval Arabic literature is a font of motherfucking, mostly in the form of ritualized insult-dueling. For example, Al-Nu`man ibn al-Mundhir, a sixth-century king of Al-Hirah, was lampooned in a poem as "a king who fondles his mother and his slave(s),/ His joints are flaccid, his penis the size of a kohl-needle." An eighth-century Persian poet named Bashshar ibn Burd dissed another poet, Hammad Ajrad, by writing, "Ajrad jumps on his mother: a sow giving suck to a sucker." To which Hammad responded: "You are called Burd's son, but you are another's. But even if you were Burd's son (may you fuck your mother!), who is Burd?"

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Reinhold Aman of the journal Maledicta, Timothy Jay of the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, Jesse Sheidlower of the Oxford English Dictionary, and Robert Vanderplank of the Oxford University Language Center.
Nina Shen Rastogi is a writer and editor in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Jets? Yes! Sharks? ¡Sí! In Bilingual ‘West Side Story’

In the New York Times
July 17, 2008
Jets? Yes! Sharks? ¡Sí! In Bilingual ‘West Side’
By JULIE BOSMAN

More than 50 years after the musical “West Side Story” had its original Broadway premiere, it is set to return in February in a darker, grittier, bilingual revival, the show’s producers said on Wednesday.

In an element that its director, Arthur Laurents, said would heighten the passion and authenticity of the show, much of the dialogue — both spoken and sung — will be in Spanish.

“They will speak Spanish where they would naturally,” Mr. Laurents said in a telephone interview from his home in Quogue, N.Y., adding that supertitles would be used to aid the audience. “The scenes with the Spanish are wildly exciting because they are much less inhibited. I don’t think many eyes are going to stray to the translation.”

Mr. Laurents, the author of the book for “West Side Story” and the director of the current Broadway revival of “Gypsy,” whose book he also wrote, has vowed to make this revival a more realistic version of the original, a teenage-gang-romance musical modeled after “Romeo and Juliet” and set on the West Side of Manhattan in the 1950s. With music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, it was first staged on Broadway, to great critical success, in 1957. Writing in The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson called it “a profoundly moving show that is as ugly as the city jungles and also pathetic, tender and forgiving.”

After playing for 732 performances, “West Side Story” was turned into a film starring Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer in 1961, and later revived in 1964 and 1980.

Mr. Laurents still rankles at the mention of the 1980 revival, which he called bland, and the film version, about which he said: “Bogus accents, bogus dialect, bogus costumes. I think it’s also terribly acted.”

Earlier interpretations left the teenage characters appearing too innocent, Mr. Laurents said. “You don’t treat these kids as little darlings, but as what they are,” he said. “They’re all killers, Jets and Sharks. And the piece is really about how love is destroyed by a world of violence and bigotry.”

The idea for a 21st-century revival first came up nearly five years ago, said Kevin McCollum, a producer along with Jeffrey Seller and James L. Nederlander, but after several discussions, it was set aside. “It just wasn’t the right timing,” he said.

Then two years ago Mr. Laurents called. “He got me to the apartment and said, ‘I’ve got it,’ ” Mr. McCollum said. “He really wanted to play with the idea of authenticating the language, and that got us really excited.” (Mr. McCollum and Mr. Seller also produced “In the Heights,” a musical set in Washington Heights and peppered with Spanish phrases.)

Mr. Laurents, who turned 91 on Monday, traced the origin of the new revival to his companion of 52 years, Tom Hatcher, who died in 2006.

Mr. Hatcher was a fluent Spanish speaker, and on a visit to Bogotá, Colombia, saw a staging of “West Side Story” in Spanish.

In that version, Mr. Hatcher reported back to Mr. Laurents, the language had transformed the show: the Sharks were the heroes and the Jets were the villains.

That sparked the idea of incorporating Spanish into a modern revival. “I thought it would be terrific if we could equalize the two gangs somehow,” Mr. Laurents said. “But I had a lot of trouble because I was depending on Tom, who is fluent. And then he died.”

Not long afterward, two of Mr. Laurents’s friends in Buenos Aires told him that they had a “West Side Story” script entirely in Spanish, on which Mr. Hatcher had made handwritten notations. “It was like he was telling me, ‘You must do it,’ ” Mr. Laurents said.

So with the help of a translator, Mr. Laurents began adding Spanish to the original script.

The result is what he calls “bilingual sexual spats” between the characters Anita and Bernardo, and some of the Stephen Sondheim lyrics translated into Spanish. Other elements, like the original choreography by Jerome Robbins, remain unchanged.

Casting for the show has begun and should be completed by mid-September, Mr. McCollum said. The show will play for a four-week engagement at the National Theater in Washington beginning in December.

Mr. Laurents said he intended to cast Hispanic actors in the roles of the Puerto Rican Sharks and particularly the lead role of Maria.

“I’m not about to go slap some dark makeup on her,” Mr. Laurents said. “I think it’s important to have a Latina in the role for a very simple reason — I think they know what it feels like to be an outsider. If they’ve got Puerto Rican blood, they know what prejudice is. If they’ve got any kind of Hispanic blood, they know what prejudice is.”

Has modern life killed the semicolon?

Slate
culturebox
; (
Has modern life killed the semicolon?
By Paul Collins
Posted Friday, June 20, 2008, at 4:51 PM ET

When the Times of London reported in 1837 on two University of Paris law profs dueling with swords, the dispute wasn't over the fine points of the Napoleonic Code. It was over the point-virgule: the semicolon. "The one who contended that the passage in question ought to be concluded by a semicolon was wounded in the arm," noted the Times. "His adversary maintained that it should be a colon."

French passions over the semicolon are running high once again. An April Fool's hoax this year by the online publication Rue89 claimed that the Nicolas Sarkozy government planned to demand "at least three semicolons per page in official administrative documents." Parliamentarian Benoist Apparu was in on the joke—"The disappearance of the semicolon in Eastern France is absolutely dramatic," he gamely proclaimed—and linguist Alain Rey (barely) kept a straight face for a video calling Frenchmen to arms. Reporters were taken in, since, like every great hoax, it was plausible enough to be true. Le Figaro has proclaimed, "The much-loved semicolon is in the process of disappearance; let us protect it," and there was even a brief attempt at a Committee for the Defense of the Semicolon—a modern update on the Anti-Comma League that France had back in 1934. French commentators blame the semicolon's decline on everything from "the modern need for speed" to the corrupting influence of English and its short, declarative sentences. It's a charge leveled for years stateside, too, with Sven Birkerts bemoaning the Internet's baleful influence on semicolons a decade ago.

Has modern life killed the semicolon?

The semicolon has a remarkable lineage: Ancient Greeks used it as a question mark; and after classical scholar and master printer Aldus Manutius revived it in a 1494 font set, semicolons slowly spread across Europe. Though London first saw semicolons appear in a 1568 chess guide, Shakespeare grew up in an era that still scarcely recognized them; some of his Folio typesetters in 1623, though, were clearly converts.

Back then, the semicolon wasn't for interrogation or relating clauses; punctuation was still largely taught around oratorical pauses. The 1737 guide Bibliotheca Technologica recognizes "The comma (,) which stops the voice while you tell [count] one. The Semicolon (;) pauseth while you tell two. The Colon (:) while you tell three; and then period, or full stop (.) while you tell four." Lacking standards for how punctuation shades the meaning of sentences—and not just their oration—18th-century writers went berserk with the catchall mark.

Take this extraordinary passage from Samuel Salter's Sermon Before the Sons of the Clergy (1755):

It is evident then; that, if Atossa was the first inventress of the Epistles; these, that carry the name of Phalaris, who was so much older than her, must needs be an imposture.—But, if it be otherwise; that he does not describe me under those general reproaches; a small satisfaction shall content you; which I leave you to be the judge of. ... Pray, let me hear from you; as soon as you can.

This chaos couldn't last: By the 1793 New Guide to the English Tongue, modern usage peeks through—"Its chief Use is in distinguishing Contraries, and frequent Division." Yet the older implication of a thoughtful pause always underlies the semicolon's appeal. Even as punctuation became more orderly, poet Samuel Coleridge mused that "the semicolon is far more common in the elder English Classics. ... It was perhaps used in excess by them; but the disuse seems a worse evil."

As Coleridge hints, semicolons hit a speed bump with Romanticism's craze for dashes, for words that practically spasmed off the page. Take this sample from the 1814 poem The Orphans: "Dead—dead—quite dead—and pale—oh!—oh!"

Yet in 1848 Edgar Allan Poe declared himself "mortified" by printers once again using too many semicolons. Poe may have the distinction of being the last writer to complain of the semicolon's popularity. By 1865, grammarian Justin Brenan could boast of "The rejection of the eternal semicolons of our ancestors. ... The semicolon has been gradually disappearing, not only from newspapers, but from books—insomuch that I believe instances could now be produced, of entire pages without a single semicolon."

1865? But surely that's a century off: Isn't modern life to blame?

Not exactly: From the 1850s onward, it's virtually impossible to find anyone claiming a prevalence of semicolons in writing. We now lived, complained a critic in 1854, in a "fast era" that neglected punctuation; by 1895, the Times took it for granted that "[m]any writers have adopted the plan of punctuating as little as possible." What these writers intuited had an empirical basis: A 1995 study tallying punctuation in period texts found a stunning drop in semicolon usage between the 18th and 19th centuries, from 68.1 semicolons per thousand words to just 17.7.

Researcher Paul Bruthiaux notes the steepest semicolon drop-off came in the mid-19th century—a finding that matches the gap between Poe's 1848 complaint and that 1865 "rejection." Technology is a leading suspect in rapid aesthetic shifts, so consider what debuted in the 1850s that might radically change language usage: the telegraph.

Poe's 1848 comment came just three years before the founding of Western Union. The next decade saw lines strung across the country to create what science writer Tom Standage fittingly dubs the "Victorian Internet." And that's precisely when semicolon usage begin to slump.

Perusing telegraph manuals reveals that Morse code is to the semicolon what weedkiller is to the dandelion. Punctuation was charged at the same rate as words, and their high price—trans-Atlantic cables originally cost a still-shocking $5 per word—meant that short, punchy lines with minimal punctuation were necessary among businessmen and journalists.

By the new century, simplified punctuation migrated into textbooks; one 1903 guide recommended that "Boys and girls ... should as a rule use a period when they are tempted to use a semicolon." When the California State Board of Education adopted this textbook three years later, the mark's capitulation was perhaps inevitable. Harper's could decry the semicolon as "almost forgotten among proofreaders" in a 1924 article titled Our Passion for Haste, and the Atlantic that year could bemoan the "spot plague" of periods. So, too, in 1943, when the Times editorialized against "the war that is being waged in some quarters on the semicolon." Their favored villain was now "the writer of action fiction. ... The semicolon is the enemy of action; it is the agent of reflection and meditation."

The semicolon has spent the last century as a fussbudget mark. Somerset Maugham and George Orwell disdained it; Kurt Vonnegut once informed a Tufts University crowd that "All [semicolons] do is show that you've been to college." New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia's favorite put-down for egghead bureaucrats who got in his way was "semicolon boy." And though semicolons have occasionally made news—tariff bills have imploded over their misplacement, and a 1927 execution hinged on the interpretation of a semicolon—the last writers to receive much notice for semicolon use have been a New York City Transit employee and the Son of Sam. In 1977 the NYPD speculated that "the killer could be a freelance journalist" because of his "use of a semicolon" in his taunting letters. (Decades later, columnist Jimmy Breslin still marveled that "Berkowitz is the only murderer I ever heard of who knew how to use a semicolon.")

Semicolons do have some genuine shortcomings; Slate's founding editor, Michael Kinsley, once noted to the Financial Times that "[t]he most common abuse of the semicolon, at least in journalism, is to imply a relationship between two statements without having to make clear what that relationship is." All journalists can cop to this: The semicolon allows woozy clauses to lean on each other like drunks for support.

Yet semicolons serve a unique function, so it's tempting to think that some writers will always cling to them. When grading undergrad final papers recently, I found a near-absence of semicolons, save for one paper with cadenced pauses and carefully cantilevered clauses that gracefully stacked upon one another, Jenga-like, without ever quite toppling. Yet English was not this student's first language.

He was an exchange student—from France.
Paul Collins teaches nonfiction at Portland State University. His latest book is The Trouble With Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine.

A Native American's Last Testament: Opera

A Native American's Last Testament: Opera
By Sasha Khokha
NPR Music

Weekend Edition Saturday, March 29, 2008 - Joseph Mondragon was just 8 years old when a man with an olive-green soldier's coat came to live in his family's basement in Monterey, Calif. The year was 1929.

"Grandma said she knew he was coming," Mondragon said. "She felt it; she had a premonition that he was coming to open the gates for our people and let the Caucasians know the Indian way, the history of our people, which nobody knew for a long time."

The man was John Peabody Harrington, a linguist from the Smithsonian who spent four decades gathering notes on native languages spoken from Alaska to South America. He'd come to record the oral history of Mondragon's dying grandmother, Ascencion Solorsano de Cervantes. She was a famous herbal healer and the last known fluent speaker of Mutsun, the language of the Amah Mutsun tribe that lived near California's central coast.

Today, her grandson Joseph is 86, and he's sharing his own memories of Ascencion Solorsano with a different sort of translator: an opera singer.

Mezzo-soprano Helene Joseph-Weil is a music professor at Fresno State. She first learned about Ascencion Solorsano 20 years ago, when she saw a picture of her in the San Francisco Chronicle.

"I was so moved by it," Joseph-Weil says. "And there was something about her photo that just mesmerized me, that I suddenly said: 'I have to sing her. How can I sing her?'"

Along with award-winning composer Benjamin Boone, a fellow Fresno State professor, she is working to put Ascencion Solorsano's oral history into a piece called Ascencion. They're calling it an "ethno-historical cantata."

"She trusted Harrington," Joseph-Weil says. "She said in one of our direct quotes to him it's a curious thing that the Americans waited until all those that are dead and finished to find out about the tribes and their language, and they just scribbled down any old thing. But she said, 'Together, you and I are going to make that right.'"

In a scene called "Lamentation," Boone tries to express the horror of Native American genocide through wide leaps in the choral parts — dramatic sounds that are almost discordant.

The work has won the praise of historians and Native American scholars like University of California-Davis professor Martha Macri. She's spearheading an effort to digitize the oral histories Harrington collected. She says that setting these histories to opera is an innovative idea — and one that she thinks Joseph-Weil has handled respectfully.

"It's not someone trying to imitate native culture and pretend," Macri says. "She has really taken her great respect and regard for Ascension and translated it into an art form that is her art form. It can seem quite incongruous, but in fact she's presenting Ascension's life and words to an audience that might not otherwise come across it."

For the song of Ascencion Solorsano's death, Joseph-Weil and Boone made the first recording of the bells at Mission San Juan Bautista in California, and arranged them for a chorus. Ascencion Solorsano was buried at the Mission cemetery, home to some 4,000 Native American graves from different tribes.

Ascencion Solorsano's descendents say they hope the new cantata will help people learn about her tribe. Today, there are some 600 members, and they're still struggling for federal recognition.

Internet fuels newly invented languages

From the Los Angeles Times
COLUMN ONE
In their own words -- literally
Step aside, Tolkien fans and grunting Klingonists: Newly invented tongues are creeping into the public domain, thanks to the Web.
By Amber Dance
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

August 24, 2007

In any language, Sonja Elen Kisa was depressed.

The world was overwhelming, and the thoughts that swirled through her mind in French, English, German or Esperanto echoed that.

So Kisa, 28, a student and translator in Toronto, decided to create her own language, something simple that would help clarify her thinking. She called it Toki Pona -- "good language" -- and gave it just 120 words.

"Ale li pona," she told herself. "Everything will be OK."

Kisa eventually sorted through her thoughts and, to her great surprise, her little language took off, with more than 100 speakers today, singing Toki Pona songs, writing Toki Pona poems and chatting with Toki Pona words.

It's all part of a weirdly Babel-esque boom of new languages. Once the private arena of J.R.R. Tolkien, Esperanto speakers and grunting Klingon fanatics, invented languages have flourished on the Internet and begun creeping into the public domain.

The website Langmaker.com lists more than 1,000 language inventors and 1,902 made-up languages, from `Ayvárith to Zyem.

The language inventors have, of course, created a word to describe what they do -- "conlang," short for constructed languages.

The awareness of invented languages has been driven in part by their use in popular films, such as Ku, a fictional "African" language spoken by Nicole Kidman in the 2005 film "The Interpreter."

Created languages may have no hope of supplanting the real thing, but for most conlangers, that is hardly the goal. Hobbyists like Kisa find it a fun or therapeutic practice. Linguists can use conlangs to dissect how real language works. For a select few who write fiction or work for Hollywood, conlanging can even be a moneymaker.

But to most linguaphiles, conlangs are simply art. Their palette holds not paints but the buzz of the letter "z," the hiss of an "s," the trill of an Italian "r."

And sometimes the howl of a Klingon scream: "Hab SoSlI' Quch!"

"Your mother has a smooth forehead!"

In this realm of art, Toki Pona is white canvas with scattered brushstrokes of primary colors.

Kisa created Toki Pona as an exercise in minimalism, looking for the core vocabulary that is necessary to communicate.

With only 120 words, a Toki Pona speaker must combine words to express more complicated ideas. For example, the Toki Pona phrase for "friend" is jan pona (the "j" sounds like a "y"), literally "good person."

Kisa, who is studying speech language therapy, tried to focus Toki Pona's vocabulary on basic, positive concepts.

"It has sort of a Zen or Taoist nature to it," Kisa said.

Tolkien liked to call invented language his "secret vice." He spent hours at the solitary hobby, designing grammars and modifying words from Latin, Finnish, Welsh and others for his languages.

Eventually, his languages needed tongues to speak them, and those speakers needed a place to live. And thus Middle-earth was born, with Tolkien's languages becoming the Sindarin and Quenya of the elves, the Khuzdul of the dwarves, and the Black Speech of the orcs.

People have been inventing languages since at least the 12th century, when the nun Hildegard of Bingen developed a rudimentary conlang she called Lingua Ignota, Latin for "unknown language."

No one knows its purpose. All that survives is a short passage and a list of 1,012 terms arranged from the highest form, "God," to the lowest, "cricket."

None of the invented languages has had much sticking power except Esperanto, which was created in the late 19th century by Polish doctor Ludovic Zamenhof.

His dream was to give humanity a common international language that would be simple to learn. Esperanto's vocabulary is small, word order does not matter, and there are no irregular verbs.

"Gi estas iom lingvo idealisma," said William B. Harris, director of the central office of the Esperanto League for North America in California. "It's somewhat of an idealistic language."

Today, as many as 2 million people speak Esperanto, which conlangers call an "auxlang," or auxiliary language. Among them are about 1,000 native speakers, who learned the language as children.

Learning is the easy part. Actually creating a language is a task only for the very tenacious. It took Kisa a year to put hers together, and her language was built to be basic.

It is not enough to simply replace existing words with invented ones. To a conlanger, such a construction would be a mere code.

The conlanger considers many factors, starting with the sound of the language.

Linguists call it phonaesthetics; Germans call it Sprachgefühl -- "speech feeling."

Tricky to define, it's that certain quality that makes French the language of love, and German the language that "makes you want to conquer Poland," said John Quijada, a Sacramento website developer and creator of Ithkuil, who attended an invented language conference at UC Berkeley this summer.

If the conlang is to be a language for nonhumans, the conlanger also must consider their biology -- if speakers lack teeth or vocal cords, the language's sounds will be constrained accordingly.

The conlanger must then ponder the grammar. For example, will the word order be subject-verb-object, as in English, or perhaps object-subject-verb, following the example of Yoda?

There are rules to this game. Human languages -- known as "natlangs," for natural languages -- follow universal linguistic patterns. For example, very few human languages use the raspberry sound, but all have an "ah" sound. To create a pseudo-natlang, the conlanger also should follow those rules.

Of course, there are instances when one doesn't want to follow the rules. In creating Klingon for "Star Trek," Marc Okrand, 59,said, "I looked at all those kinds of rules and then violated them on purpose."

He chose the rarest of grammatical structures, object-verb-subject. A Klingon would say, "The Enterprise boarded I." And Okrand purposely picked sounds that would never be found together in the same human language.

All this has added up to one alien manner of speech.

The challenge has not deterred serious Klingonists, who number perhaps a few hundred worldwide. Djörn X. Öqvist, 33, a Swedish linguistics student and founder of the Klingon Academy, said you must be creative with Klingon's 2,600 words.

For example, he said, there is no way to say "Park the car." No problem. Klingon speakers "dock" their vehicles.

The difference between "park" and "dock" illustrates how languages can talk about similar things but conjure subtly different images.

The phenomenon was noted by early 20th century linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. They proposed a theory that language had the power to broaden or constrain a speaker's thoughts. That is, it is hard to think about concepts without the specific words to express them.

For Sarah Higley, 50,an English professor at the University of Rochester, the language she created when she was 10 had the power to conjure a private universe.

She created a language she called Teonaht (TAY-oh-noth) for a race of winged felines, in a universe that was uniquely her own. Teonaht gave her words for her own personal feelings, the thoughts that no one else could ever fully appreciate. "It was a way to access a spiritual world that I didn't want to share with anybody," she said.

In 1955, sociologist James Cooke Brown came up with an idea to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. He would train students in a new language and look at how their thinking changed.

He knew he could not use a natlang -- it would be impossible to separate language from the influence of culture. One cannot learn French without, at some level, thinking about crêpes and ratatouille.

So Brown invented a cultureless language, Loglan -- short for "logical language."

Just as scientists use mice as a model for the human body, Loglan would be a model language for his laboratory of thought.

Brown borrowed vocabulary from English, French, German, Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, Russian and Japanese -- the eight most widely spoken languages at the time.

Loglan was designed to be free of irregularity and ambiguity. The Loglan lexicon, containing more than 10,000 words, is made up of five-letter root words and one- or two-letter modifiers. The roots can be combined to make new words.

He included words for the mathematical Boolean variables such as "and," "or inclusive" and "or exclusive" to encourage clear, logical thinking.

As it turned out, creating the language wasn't the hardest part. Like many successful conlangers, Brown struggled to maintain control over his creation.

He founded the Loglan Institute in San Diego in the 1970s to bring others into the project, but then was upset when they didn't agree with his ideas.

"In 1984 there was a knock-down, drag-out battle over this," said Bob LeChevalier, 53, who was a member at the time. The institute fell apart, and Brown was never able to conduct his great experiment.

LeChevalier and others developed Lojban, a language built on principles identical to Loglan's. LeChevalier estimates there are 500 to 1,000 Lojban speakers.

Kisa too has wrestled with the growing pains of her creation.

Once a language is released from the notebooks and index cards of its birth, other speakers may use it for purposes its creator never intended.

Since Kisa let Toki Pona loose on the Internet in 2001, it has spread from Toronto to speakers all over the world.

She has received e-mails from Russians learning Toki Pona and a Finnish therapist who wants to teach it to his depressed patients. MIT routinely offers a seminar about the language.

Occasionally they offer criticism as well as praise. Some want to express complicated thoughts in Toki Pona, running counter to its design.

She has given in to a few complaints. It's only natural for language to evolve, she said.

"Tenpo ni la toki pona li kama suli. Jan mute li kepeken e ona," she said."It's like a living thing now."

amber.dance@latimes.com

Book Review: Origin and Evolution of Language

NYT
August 1, 2007
Books of the Times
Language Evolution’s Slippery Tropes
By WILLIAM GRIMES
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THE FIRST WORD
The Search for the Origins of Language
By Christine Kenneally
357 pages. Viking. $26.95.

All branches of science search for origins. Biologists want to know how life on earth began. Astronomers want to know how the universe got started. Even in mathematics, questions about how different numerical systems came to be constitute a legitimate line of inquiry.

Linguists are different. In the middle of the 19th century, the main professional bodies governing linguistic research formally banned any investigation into the origins of language, regarding it as pointless. The topic remained disreputable for more than a century, but in the last decade or so, language evolution has eased toward the front burner, attracting the attention of linguists, neuroscientists, psychologists and geneticists. Their search is the subject of “The First Word,” Christine Kenneally’s lucid survey of this expanding field, dedicated to solving what she calls “the hardest problem in science today.”

One nut to crack is the nature of language itself, and here Ms. Kenneally introduces the unignorable presence in virtually every linguistic debate, Noam Chomsky. Mr. Chomsky and his many adherents regard language as a uniquely human endowment, centered in a specific area of the brain. It gives every living person the ability, unsought, to generate infinite strings of sentences in infinite combinations. Animals, in this view, do not have language, nor do they think. The reasons that humans speak, or how language might have made its way to the human brain, do not matter. It may simply be that in a linguistic version of the big bang, a language mutation suddenly appeared, and that was that.

This view now faces many rivals. The big-bang theory has been countered by linguists who believe that just as the eye evolved to meet a need for vision, language evolved to meet the need for communication. Ms. Kenneally ushers onto the stage researchers who have discovered that many animal species possess languagelike skills previously unimagined and, without benefit of syntax or words, have a complicated inner life. They believe that the study of animal language and gestures could shed light on a possible protolanguage stage in human development.

The idea that language is restricted to a specific area of the brain has been more or less discarded. Brain researchers now believe that language tasks are assigned throughout the brain. Moreover, some linguists now believe that language is a two-way street. It’s not something emanating from the brain of a communicating human. It actually changes the processes of the brain. Stroke victims suffering from aphasia, a condition involving language loss, do not simply find it difficult to communicate, they also find it more difficult to categorize, remember and organize information.

One of Ms. Kenneally’s most intriguing scientists, Simon Kirby, a linguist at the University of Edinburgh who works with computer models, has proposed the idea that language might be a self-evolving phenomenon. Somewhat like a computer virus, it changes and adapts to survive.

Ms. Kenneally, a linguist trained at the University of Cambridge, covers an enormous expanse of ground as she brings the reader up to date on developments in a wide variety of disciplines touching on language evolution. At times, she lapses into a somewhat mechanical recitation of experiments, papers and positions, which she tries to enliven, in vain, by inserting long, unedited quotations from her interview subjects that could just as well have been paraphrased.

On the plus side, she explains difficult ideas concisely and clearly, and she maintains a firm grip on the steering wheel, moving the overall argument along in a straight line. Above all, she is scrupulously fair-minded. Although obviously taken with the idea of language evolution and language acquisition as a continuum seen in primitive form in other species, she gives Mr. Chomsky his due, despite his withering scorn for most of the ideas she presents, and defends him from his most vehement detractors.

Best of all, Ms. Kenneally zeroes in on a host of fascinating experiments. What happens when one ape trained in sign language meets another equally proficient ape for the first time? Not communication, it turns out. “What resulted was a sign-shouting match; neither ape was willing to listen,” Ms. Kenneally reports.

Mr. Kirby, the computer modeler, devised an experiment in which subjects were shown objects on a screen along with words describing the objects in what was represented as an invented alien language. The subjects were asked to learn the language. In testing one student after the other, however, Mr. Kirby added new objects to the ones already shown, whereupon the subjects unthinkingly generated new words and combinations. These changes were added to the core list and passed along to successive subjects who, trying to master the language created, in part, by each of their predecessors, made their own additions and changes.

“Except for the initial random language given to the first subject, there was no alien language, only the contributions of each individual, which were culturally transmitted from generation to generation,” Ms. Kenneally writes. “Each subject in the experiment believed that he was simply giving back what he had learned, but instead the language was evolving.”

In similar fashion, researchers have been looking at Internet sites that generate their own protolanguages and linguistic structures.

Ms. Kenneally concludes with a little experiment of her own. She asks many of the subjects she interviewed to imagine a group of infants stranded on the Galapagos Islands, provided with all the necessities of life but no access to speech. Would they create a language? How many babies would it take, what might their language be like, and how would it change over the generations?

The answers range from no language to sign language to a full-fledged language in three generations. The real point is that Ms. Kenneally could gather 15 linguists willing to think about the problem. Onward to the first Neanderthal dictionary.