Are Elvish, Klingon, Dothraki and Na'vi real languages? - John McWhorter
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- čas přidán 5. 06. 2024
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What do Game of Thrones' Dothraki, Avatar's Na'vi, Star Trek's Klingon and LOTR's Elvish have in common? They are all fantasy constructed languages, or conlangs. Conlangs have all the delicious complexities of real languages: a high volume of words, grammar rules, and room for messiness and evolution. John McWhorter explains why these invented languages captivate fans long past the rolling credits.
Lesson by John McWhorter, animation by Enjoyanimation.
Tolkien was a Philology (Linguistics and its historical and cultural context) professor at Oxford. He knew what he was doing.
THANK YOU SO MUCH. I keep telling people that one day people will study Tolkien and Jung more deeply and perhaps finally understand the existence of elves ^^
So basically he made his childhood hobby into a job. Since apparently he was creating conlangs as a child already so he was very interested in language to begin with. Makes sense...
It only requires a bit of sense to construct an acceptable conlang.
Probably not to the level of Tolkien's, but I think I can pull one off, given time, even though I'm young and have no qualifications related to language or writing.
I've tried making them for fun as a child, and during those attempts, I learned that simply changing the characters and pronunciation isn't good enough. You need to add new grammar, traces of change, slang, etc.
If I can learn this at 13 years old, anyone should be able to in their lifetime.
@@Zaire82 the amount of information you can find on the internet would allow anyone to make a somewhat decent conlang
@@adrianroed2178 Then that emphasises my point. It isn't hard at all.
"Elvish was more of a hobby for Tolkien, so he didn't really finish it."
It should also be noted that he was a little busy creating a separate language for the Rohirrim, one for the dwarves, and a bit of vocabulary for Gondor and Mordor, too. Not to mention whatever language it is that the Valar speak, though again there are only a few words of that, and only in the Silmarillion. So, not being immortal himself, he was probably a little busy to fully create a language.
.... Also he literally spoke it as a child with his sister
well, young
and wrote notes, i believe?
Indeed
May his work live on
Speaking Navi? You mean like "Hey, Listen!" or "Watch out!" or "Look!"
***** three expressions which make me instinctively reach for a fly swatter.
+Dyonus you reminded me of that game, get me the flyswatter!
Epic game! The Zelda universe needs a conlang too.
Dyonus ever watched movie avatar?
The glottal stop in the middle there (Na'vi) is just as much a letter as the other four. Navi and Na'vi are two different words ;P
Are you telling me that Avatar had enough fans to develop a Na'vi conlang? Did people really get sucked into that movie?
Raziel Qwazar Oh yes.. I´m eagerly waiting for Avatar 2, which is coming in 2017.
Raziel Qwazar Srane. (yes)
Raziel Qwazar I think it was just the author who continued that conlang.
Raziel Qwazar From what I heard, the director of Avatar got a linguist to come up with the basics of the language and some vocabulary so that Na'vi had a method to the madness. Then fans then extended it.
Apceh Craft In any Slavic, actually.
Not gonna lie, i learned Elvish, well Sindarin in high school to impress a girl, it ended in true high school disaster, but from that single act i discovered a love of languages. I now can speak 5 languages not counting my basic Sindarin, a bit of conversational Mandalorian and my first language of English.
F
AWESOME PAL, I hope I can find a good source to learn sindarin too.
@@xeno4162 The course that I learned Sindarin through is this one: sindarinlessons.weebly.com/
It's really good and has a free dictionary as well so I really recommend it.
@@totallynoticarus That was really nice of you Muriel, thank you so much.
@@xeno4162 No problem! I hope you have fun learning it. There are more course guides, dictionaries and example stories on the Internet. Let me know if you need anything, I might have something stored away.
I enjoy these videos, but I must object to the placement of a penguin at the North Pole.
Thought the same XD
Steve Bowden
Maybe it was a South Pole "eskimo" (also fairly certain they prefer being called Inuuits. The Danish ones at least.)
there are no people living on the south pole. It's just penguins and crazy scientists xD
you would be correct, inuit is the preferred term as eskimo means something along the lines of "raw meat eater" in cree
Tolkien was insane! Man, I have problems to create good names to my characters, cities and kingdoms, and he just created a fucking language with its variations! God damn it!
You seem to have problems with basic English, what to say of creating a conlanguage.
actually, to create a basic language without many words, and basic grammar is surprisingly not that hard. in a google talk David Peterson created a language in 1 hr, basic grammar to it, and basic word structures and which letter combinations are allowed and not allowed. If you follow his steps, and do some basic research, creating a basic full fledged language is just a matter of making words and sticking to your rules
Well, Tolkien wasn't looking for some language bits to flesh out his stories, he was creating stories (whole histories, actually) to flesh out his languages.
@@soslothful How does trouble with fictional names indicate English problems?
@@mayzhou7273 Not, the names, rather the expletive and the snappy, "God damn."
About the Na'vi language, In the movie "Avatar" Each cast member had to audition in the Na'vi language. That is why they speak it so fluently. They learned the language given to them by a linguist who helped create the language.
when you think about it it just shows you just how amazing Tolkien was as an author. his works are still selling around the world. i mean LotR is over 50 years old and The hobbit I nearly 80 and new ones are still coming out. he really did lay the foundations for all modern fantasy worlds and languages.
He did, and that is incredibly remarkable. I read Lord of the Rings for the first time earlier this year, after putting it off for ages because I just couldn't imagine I would connect to something so old and so removed from my life. I thought I didn't care about... kings and myths and swords and orks.
But I didn't realize how good Tolkien was at what he did. How much the worldbuilding sucks you in, how real and at the same time fantastical it all feels, and how amazing characters can DEFINITELY make you care about the kings and swords and whatnot. LotR is three times as old as I am, it's older than my mother, yet I connected deeply with the story, in a way I haven't experienced in many years.
what makes this even cooler imo is that he wasn't even really writing the stories with the intention of becoming an author, it was just his way of fleshing out his languages lol
He was an astounding world-builder. Having said that, I cannot say he was as accomplished at actually telling the story and world he built. I found the books a bit slow and hard to focus on. I prefer learning about his world to reading the stories.
Why no one care about valyrian?
Poor Valyrian
+Lorenzo Taglietti You mean low Valyrian? jk
That as only created for the TV show, no mention of it in the books and their lore.
Not quite right. There are a few High Valyrian words here and there scattered in the books, albeit mostly personal names (dracarys being a notable exception), so the base is there. Klingon itself started out with a few gibberishesque lines in The Motion Picture and was only expanded for The Search for Spock. I guess you draw a parallel between Klingon and High Valyrian here. Of course, GRRM has noted that the Valyrian that will appear in TWOW will be based on show Valyrian.
+Weeping Scorpion Thanks, the more you know right.
Great, now I feel like learning a fictional language at 1:00AM.
Gee, thanks a lot!
Same
Interesting point: the counter-intuitional changing of kw- into p- in some Elvish dialects is historical fact; Tolkien must have taken this development from the Celtic languages, which are still divided into P-Celtic (Welsh, Breton, Cornish) and Q-Celtic (Gaelic, Irish, Manx). (I know nothing about Tolkien, but I'm up on my British linguistics.)
RobMacKendrick Quenya is inspired by Welsh, while Sindarin is inspired by Finnish.
+Matheus D. Rodrigues I think that its the opposite way around. Quenya by Finnish and Latin; Sindarin by Welsh.
Well, Tolkien was professor of English and Anglo-Saxon at Oxford.
So he probably knew his British linguistics as well.
Most probably he took it from his knowledge of Latin and Greek. The change of kw to p is very Indo-European. We have quinque for five in Latin and pénte in Greek.
@@someinteresting yup, just like in many other Indo-European languages where this sound change happened in the numeral "5": Polish "pięć" & Welsh "pump". This sound change also happened in Romanian numeral 'patru' - "4" originating from Latin "quattuor". It's a very natural development as /p/ combines the features of /k/ and /w/ as it is a bilabial stop.
Welp, I thought Na'vi would be "Listen! Hey!" when I saw this video.
LOL
Just about to comment that
Herangham! (Laughing out loud in Na'vi)
1:50 Actually, Chinese and Icelandic have stayed pretty consistent over incredible periods of time. Such things are pretty rare, though; not necessary for a language, but it’s a bonus for believable history.
True but a mandarin speaker would still have trouble reading old texts like how an American student would struggle to read Shakespeare.
not true, in the case of both chinese and icelandic, their writting systems remained the same, but the spoken language changed a lot.
Don, Chinese have manadarin and Cantonese?
To be fair, Old English is not just an older version of our English. It had a massive infusion of French, as well as some other stuff.
It's similar to modern German, I've found.
Yep. It was basically Anglo and Saxon, which were Germanic tribes.
Old English was heavily influenced by the Danish vikings that raided and conquered most of England for a time.
The thing is, Old Danish (Old Norse) doesn't have much to do with any modern Scandinavian language, but is still relevant in modern Icelandic, which in turn is complete nonsense if you're not a native.
On top of all that, English has had several other Germannic influences, Latin from Rome, a lot of French (and presumably some Spanish and Italian as well), and a tonne of other international influences.
One thing I've noticed is that most rudimentary nouns are basically the Danish word fed through a dialect. So:
Arm -> Arm
Ben -> Bone
Øje -> Eye
Brød -> Bread
Jeg -> I
Vi -> We
Du -> You
Os -> Us
Træ -> Tree
And so on.
Phonetically, think of all the Js as the Y in Yes, and don't bother with Æ or Ø, because they are more or less impossible sounds for most people.
Oh, and the Gaelic and Celtic ancestry shines through some times as well.
Another little tidbit: Scots, and mostly northern Scots, have an uncanny ability to pronounce Danish words. I have a friend from Aberdeen who managed to learn several _very_ Danish phrases in a single evening, ÆØÅ included and everything.
Some of the old english words were made by combining other words in interesting ways. For example, the title of the famous saga "Beowulf" means "Bee Wof," which means "bear." "woman," as many feminists know, means "wife of man." But then, "Husband" means "house bound." These words teach us something about Old English Society.
Just noting that you labeled the entire Iberian peninsula as Spanish, completely ignoring the existence of Portuguese…
a little rough history from what i can remember. The Iberian peninsula as a whole before was collectively known as Hispania or in english "spain." the peninsula was composed of portuguese, castillians, catalans, andalucians, galicians, and basque before collectively known as spanish people. when castille took in andalucia and galicia then aragon of the catalans took in the basques of navarra, the two kingdoms of castille and aragon united through marriage of their monarchs. they renamed themselves spain to describe them hoping to eventually unite the peninsula and take in portugal but portugal stayed independent throughout. ethnically the portuguese are people of hispania but brothers of the present day spanish people. but i think i remember before that the romans called the peninsula iberia, the big part of spain as hispania and some part of portugal as lusitania. but anyways in language theyre all related to each other. portuguese only having few differences with spanish but both have more differences to french and italian
+Yeoj Eztarp Poor Romanian
right? Looks like people always forget about portuguese or even Portugal
+xXxSkyViperxXx you forgot the leonese
He also forgot the Basques and Catalonians... How dare he! *sarcasm*
Valar morghulis.
All men must serve
valar dohaeris
+ghiribizzi Mae g'ovannen
+Sherborne Prometheus Qapla'!
+Sherborne Prometheus Valer dohaeris
I started constructing a new language for a novel I'm fleshing out. I love languages.
Only a true nerd would make a new language, a similar nerd would also be fluent in both elvish and Klingon. Which are you?
Blade 31404 Ah, I'm just the language-inventing nerd. I mean, I'm learning Mandarin Chinese and I've been wanting to pick French up again and learn a few other real-world languages, but I haven't made the time to really learn any elvish languages like I've been wanting to. Maybe I'll pick it up and study it beside Chinese and French over my break!
I'm pretty good at Spanish(about the level of that four year old there but getting better) and I'm also learning Swedish. French for me is extremely easy to speak, but difficult to write because I learned Spanish first. And yes, languages and cultures are my lifeblood and Elvish sounds AWESOME
Milk Tea I'm creating a conlang and learning Chinese too! How is your language called?
As a linguistics major, I recommend you to study some linguistics beforehand. It will make your life easier and the language(s) that you create afterwards will be actually realistic and will seem natural. I say this because this video does a pretty bad job explaining what's really going on while creating a language. I'd recommend you watch the videos of the Dothraki creator on CZcams. He explains the role of linguistics in the process of creating a language.
P.S. I wouldn't say this is a nerdy thing to do if know what you're doing. It requires knowledge and dedication to manage just as any artistic creation.
Elvish clearly takes the cake here
The fact that Avatar came out like 7 years ago but there's already a whole language surrounding it is shocking
other way around. they paid linguists to develop the na'vi language for the movie. All fans have done is add words. The navi language itself was all ready fully fleshed out in the script.
Since nobody seems to care about Avatar anymore, that seems about right. But good on them for getting actual experts in on some world-building.
I really care about avatar. It's just an small corner of the internet. But, there are still a lot of people learning the Na'vi langauge. If you search for it. You'll find the corner. But it is most defenitly there. 9 years after the movie release.
HEY OLD COMMENTS! ARE ANY OF YOU STILL ALIVE!? THIS VIDEO JUST GOT RECOMMENDED TO ME! I'M SORRY FOR CAPS LOCK. THE BUTTON IS STUCK AGAIN, AND I'M TOO LAZY TO UNSTUCK IT AT THIS MOMENT OF TIME.
I'm still waiting for Disney's Atlantean to be fully fleshed out. 😭
Rohirric, Dalish, and Taliska are more real because they're based off of Old English, Old Norse and Gothic.
Hail Tolkien!
Vestu Tolkien hal ! :D!
Rohirric, Dalish and Taliska are translated as OE, ON and Gothic, not based on them.
Again, they are real because many people spoke them. It does not matter what a language is based. SciFi languages are just as real as the other languages. Because they are created for movies and or TV series does not diminish their "reality". ::P who "invented" Norse, Old English, Middle English, Modern English, French, German, etc...? At one time they were just a fringe dialect of some language.
_"are more real because they're based off of Old English, Old Norse and Gothic."_
That is like saying Syldavian is more real because it is based on Marrolsch (the Flemish version of Cockney, so to speak : city dialect of lower class in Bruxelles).
There are more words and more grammar not just to Quenya but even to Sindarin than to Syldavian.
Eih bennek, eih blavek is cool enough, but to me it looks like Hergé took "hie bin ik, hie blijf ik" with inverted spelling for eih and with Marrolsch pronunciation for bennek/blavek. (The Dutch/Flemish means "here I am, here I stay").
(I think that is basically what Hergé did)
And that is why Tolkien was a genius. Not to mention he was a univeristy linguistics professor so he knew what he was doing.
I love Tolkien, his books sparkled my interest for linguistics.
Penguins and Eskimos don't live together. In fact, Eskimos live further away from penguins than the rest of America
Andy Shick
And also I'm sure they don't like being called Eskimos...
numbah16 True. They are Inuit. Eskimo is the white people's name for them. I suspect French because of the old spelling Esquimaux.
Actually Eskimo is an anglicised version of the Ojibwe name for the Inuit.
Allan Richardson Actually, Eskimo was the collective word for the Inuit, Yupik and several other tribes living in the northern parts of what is now Canada and in Alaska (although the other groups are more sub groups of the Inuit and Yupik tribes). That was their own name for their collective group because of very similar culture spread among the various groups. Eskimo has BECOME something of a slur because of its use to describe all of the above people disparagingly.
+sandorsbox I always thought the word has become less popular because it's a word in a native- american language (please don't sask me which one of them!) which means "raw-meat-eater"?
Mh... at least, they told me in school..
Haha, he said Elvish (or Quenya, in this case) was the easiest to pronounce... yet he pronounced "Namárië" incorrectly-- rolling the 'r' is a must in both Quenya and Sindarin... Not only that, but I'm quite certain that "Á na márië" is incorrect. "Namárië" (which is Quenya) is a shortened form of "na márië," from na + márië, literally meaning "to goodness." Since "Á" means 'to' and 'na' means 'to be,' it would literally mean, "to to be good(ness)." A bit repetitive, but I think the elves would get the idea :)
Ah, well. At least he tried :D
+Jennifer Ya Rolling the 'r' I will grant you but to suggest anybody can be right or wrong about the tonal qualities of a language devised by one man is ludicrous. Particularly when said man was recorded speaking the language an extremely scarce amount. A lot of people who study Elvish forget that he changed the languages right up until the end of his life, tweaking and improving them and that much of what we know is logic and conjecture as opposed to hard fact
+hallowedfool Oops, my apologies, I think I used the wrong phrase (and I didn't proofread my comment; I've become a bit lazy and this is what I get), I meant to omit the "and" between "Sindarin" and "it's kind of..."--I meant to just elaborate on rolling the 'r," but it turned out sounding like a separate complaint...
Again, sorry for the misunderstanding, I'll just delete that part :)
Isn't it just a quirk of English that our infinitives contain the same word "to" that we use as a preposition? A similar phrase in French would be "à être bonté." The phrase could be taken to mean "towards the state of being good", rather than just a wish or command that one "be good/well." The movement towards wellness or a place that is well, or whatever concept of good is culturally accepted by the elvish speaker, wouldn't be conveyed without the preposition. Of course it's likely somewhat idiomatic, just as most language's parting phrases are.
Note: Bonté is better translated to interpersonal kindness. Goodness doesn't easily translate into French as far as I know, so I just used it as a close example.
"Since 'Á' means 'to' and 'na' means 'to be,' it would literally mean, 'to to be good(ness).'"
"Á" is clearly the imperative particle here, so "á na" means "be". The assumption seems to be that there's an adverb "márië" = "well", identical in form to the noun "márië" = "goodness", though as far an I know this is unattested outside of the seeming compound "na+márië = namárië". Obviously he'd have done better to use "namárië", but if there is an adverb "márië", "Á na márië!" = "Be well!" isn't technically incorrect.
And this is why Skyrim's dragon language is shit. Just a bunch of words, no grammar.
If I recall, in an interview the man who made up the dragon language used in Skyrim said he took all the words in your average English dictionary and created translations for them. But in the game, the language is practically dead, no one outside of the Greybeards speaks it, so the Dovakhiin would have no reason to learn it unless he were to spend the rest of his days as a Greybeard. That's why they never created a structure for the language, because you never use it outside of a Shout.
So in my opinion, it is a language, there is just no structure that allows you to use it in everyday communication.
But I'll be damned if I can't use it (as a language) in a normal conversation!
Although it would be cool if they had created a structure for it and that you could actually learn it.
Jonathan Harding Actually, just like the elvish, a structure is being made by fans over the internet and it's becoming quite complex. Though is relatively easy to learn since even from the beginning it had an english-like structure. Conjugations are being created, exceptions and even new words.
Yes, it is being updated all the time but that is the morw advanced form, the basic form still follows an English structure. Either way, most people who use the advqnced form can understand those who use the original.
Jonathan Harding I still don't think this is bad. It still has a similar structure as the english language, but many real languages have similar structures and they are barely related.
Pay heed to my last comment.
I want to learn more about elvish! :(
here's a fact. it's loosely based on welsh :) Cymru am byth
There isn't just one Elvish language. Quenya is mostly based on Finnish. Sindarin on Welsh
Why waste your time on a fake language that is completely irrelevant in the real world when you could learn real languages such as Chinese, Japanese, French, Italian, Spanish, Korean, etc.
Thereon Inarek
Why not just get people to speak gibberish words and call it "Elvish" in their fictional story instead?
How is it relevant if you can't use that language in the real world?
If you tell your interviewer that you can speak "Elvish" as a language other than English when they want a non-English speaker, you probably wouldn't get the job.
+usernameUnidentifful out of curosity alone, have you heard of esperanto?
*Inuit not Eskimo (languages, eh?)
+mwalsher You mean Native Americans?
+Ace of Cubic Zirconia So Canada and Greenland aren't things?
*****
What? You do know that Canada is in North America, right? They're Native Americans. Not Native United-States-of-Americans.
+Ace of Cubic Zirconia the term bugs me. If your people are native to Norther Europe and Asia, are they Native Eurasians?
+Sitting on Ceilings Also Cherokee in the US state of Oklahoma, where the Cherokee and other tribes were forcibly relocated from Georgia and the surrounding states in the 19th century (google "Trail of Tears" and "Andrew Jackson" for details). The Cherokee script was designed by one man, Chief Sequoyah, before that relocation, and taught to his local tribesmen, and spread from there.
Á na márië is like "Do far well" It should be Namarië.
*Namárië
+DawnfireGalinndan nope
dawn is right -_-
"Á na márië" is a Vanyarin phrase. Vanyarin is a dialect of Quenya (spoken by the Vanyar). There is also the Noldorin dialect (spoken by the Noldor). "Márië" means "well" (and it is related to "mára", which means "good"). "Na", more usually found as "ná" (pronounced with a long/double "aa") is the Quenya copula (so it is equivalent to the English verb "to be") and is usually translated "is". The first element of the phrase, "á", has no translation or meaning by itself. It is just a particle used to form imperatives in a formal way. Thus, "á na" is the imperative (formal) of the copula. So, "á na márië" would translate, literally, "be well". It is used both as a greeting phrase and, more often, as a farewell phrase, so it usually assumes the meaning of "farewell". The short form "namárië" was used by the Noldor, but I don't know if they used the full form too by the time of LotR or if they didn't. If I was to guess, I would say they didn't.
@@atanvardo5730 *Slow clap* This person Elvishes. Also, "Namarie" (with the teems but no a at the beginning, not sure about the acute accent) appears in LotR when Galadriel is singing goodbye to the Fellowship.
Esperanto has completely consistent grammar rules, and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences has found that it fulfills all of the requirements for being a living language. Under the conditions of this video, though, Esperanto wouldn't be a "real" language.
That's because Esperanto didn't evolve from an earlier language like French (from Latin) or English (from Germanic). It's an artificial language invented purely to be easily learned. It also hasn't had the centuries needed to evolve as much as most languages have.
@@foxymetroid However Esperanto happens to have native speakers. It may not have any evolution to it like Quenya or Sindarin, however its been around much longer than them, and has also been artificially created. And again, people speak the language natively. It's much more real than practically any other conlang.
Yeah, things like varying in time and space and irregularity are parts of actual languages due to the reality that people will speak however they damn well want to, but they aren’t inherent parts of languages the way grammar is.
John Hooyer Well, if The Hungarian Academy of Sciences has put its seal of approval on it, that’s good enough for me!
esparanto was created to fit ease of speaking for a large number of speakers, and many aspects of it are not naturalistic. Sure it is a very capable auxland, and it is a "real language" but not a "naturalistic language". Languages like quenya, dothraki, etc have been designed by taking naturalistic behavior of an evolving language in mind, and that's why they behave sometimes in irregular ways, which is because of the historical evolution.
4:47 Eskimos and penguins will never meet because there are no penguins in the far north :-)
It's inuit
i think having an alphabet is important. grammar rules for word types works as well. this way people can create new words without needing to guess.
I've seen entire Facebook conversations of 30+ comments constructed entirely of memes. If you can use it to communicate - it's a language! :)
Similarly, I’ve seen entire conversations carried out in comments sections using only Big Lebowski quotes. I pointed this out in a Big Lebowski group, and said, “just to prove it, let me give you guys a subject off the top of my head. Chess. Go!” The results were stunning. They were able to talk about much more than the queen in her damned undies.
Miraabilmir conlang'i eyjta!
(Colangs are wonderful!)
I've been constructing a world with a conlang loosely based on Latin, split into several dialects across a continent. Deriving it from Latin, a language I've studied, is much easier than creating a whole knew language group, but it still requires a lot of head-scratching, particularly where grammar is concerned. It's been fun to create new words and phrases, though, and to make it suit the culture. Translating an entire paragraph of text into a new language you came up with and then reading it aloud is a very satisfying experience.
woah sir... we'll definitely like to learn that conlang
I want to learn! (Once when I was a kid, I made up a language that I pretended fairies would speak. I called it Fairysteem. It wasn't that great, but I could converse a little bit if I taught it to someone else.)
Dianna Rodgers Haha, I've been making up imaginary countries, languages and cultures since before I even mastered English.
Tolkien for Life!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I love the idea that Elvish could be a real language. I write books in the realms of fantasy and this really appeals to me.
First of all i'm sorry for my bad English, second, loved the clip, very insightful, i didn't had a clue that these languages, especially Elvish, were so developed, that's awesome! And third, and i'm sorry for this one, you forgot about a fourth country that has a latin derived language, Portugal. In the clip you show a map of western Europe, and i'm sorry to say that Spain isn´t that big. On the western coast of Europe lies a very tiny country named Portugal, and in Portugal we speak Portuguese, the other latin derived language. Sorry for this correction. And again nice clip, very, very interesting!
Rui Rodrigues yes we cant Forget our hellhole here
***** Hi Brian. Yes you are absolutlly right. I shoun't have mention the country. Portugal, as an independent country, was born at 1143. But what i was trying to say, is that Portuguese, besides, Italian, French and Spanish is also a Language born from Latin.
Rui Rodrigues anyway its shit place that the population even calls the goverment main building the palace of liars
Ian Guimarães We have our problems, yes. but it's not a $#&# place, as you wrote, it's a great place! The problem is that the Portuguese don't know how to vote, and keep votting in the same corrupt people time and time again. So, don't try to blame the country.
Cheers!
Rui Rodrigues and the communist party only crtics and isnt able to govern anymore
French, spanish, italian, portuguese, and romanian. Thanks
Ayla Soares romantic languages... something English will never be 😭
Favour Olufemi considering english is a mix of german, french and latin...
***** it has a bit of French in it
So maybe it's a little bit romantic?
Favour Olufemi oui oui mon cheri
+ Catalan, Provençal, and Romansh But those three are dying languages
Many conlangs are often just English with a different coat of paint. It makes sense, as most of the people writing con langs for hollywood productions speak Enlgish first, and make subtitles easy to translate.
Not true at all. Professional conlangers make sure their languages aren't just codes for English. Subtitles are actually pains in the ass to do correctly for the directors and writers.
+SuperAabbcc123456 Conlangers are oftenly aware that others languages use a different grammar, and by that I'm not only speaking about indo-european languages but any language found in the world (isn't that true for the na'vi and it's verbs getting their past tense in the middle ?)
+Shinzhon Like Quenya's grammar is mostly derived from Finnic origins and Klingon shares features with Central Asian and Native American Languages. Neither look anything like English.
+SuperAabbcc123456 'Professional Conlangers' XD
+LoricSwift yes, there are people who do this for a living.
To my knowledge, Qa'pla isn't "Goodbye", it's more of a "Good luck". Though it is used rather flexibly.
+ThatZommy It means "Success" as in success in battle. So essentially good luck, but is often used for hello's and goodbyes as Klingons love to talk of their battles.
if I'm correct, klingons don't have a word for goodbye
Buxsle Probably not.
+ThatZommy qa'pla literally translates as victory. It's as close to a farewell as tlhInganmey (Klingons) come, since it applies to any endeavor. Back in the 80's, I belonged to Klingon Assault Group, a Star Trek fan club based on Klingons.
Cathy Vickers Yeah, I was corrected.
As someone who barely qualifies as bilingual, I massively respect Tolkien for the work he did in creating Elvish. Language is probably one of the most difficult subjects in the world, whether you're learning to read, write, speak or create a whole new one.
Esperanto is definitely considered a conlang. Unlike Klingon, Na'Vi, and Quenya, which are often included in the "artlang" (artistic language) subgroup, Esperanto was actually intended for real use as a worldwide second language, one that would be politically neutral. This makes it part of the so-called "auxlang" subgroup (auxiliary language).
Your comment is absolutely true. Though I have some info to add to it.
Klingon, Na'vi, and Quenya not only fall under the group called artistic languages but also under a more specific group called fictional languages. But ficlangs aren't the only kind of artlang. Another kind of artlang is an altlang (alternate history language), which speculates how natural languages would have evolved if historical events had occurred differently. These include Brithenig (if Latin had displaced the Brittonic languages) and Anglish (if English was averse to loanwords). There are also jokelangs, such as Europanto (an unstructured mix of European languages).
Great video. Very informative.
Very beautiful, very interesting, very educational, and very well animated video! Thank you so much for sharing this! All the best, take care, stay safe, keep up the good work, and many blessings!
2:03
Now:Give us today our daily bread...
Before:Urne gedeaghwamlican hlaf syle us todaeg.
What happened?
Position of the words in the sentence also changed, the old version is "our daily bread give us today". We have the same word order in the German version (Unser tägliches Brot gib uns heute)
I was 8 years old when the first LOTR movie came out, I couldn't understand much, but when I watched it back in HS, I fell in love with it, It blew my mind how the writer actually made up a language! that's crazy!
Dothraki only has like 400 words...I would barely call that a paragraph, let alone a language.
+Mithradates Megas 0:58
+Mithradates Megas I think they actually dont need more words ;D I mean they have three different kinds of the word kill.
3000 words*
Yer Afferis anni
nau, nindyn ph'inlu'thin
skyrim also has conlang potential,not one but many
I was thinking about a book in Skyrim which you get from a quest when you reach level 90 in illusion and is given by your illusion master.the book have some beautiful alphabets but there are only 22 of the,if 4 extra could be invented and added up,you can come with a mysterious language from Skyrim,which only master illusionist can comprehend
+Thereon Inarek I literally skipped to the end of your comment
Elder scrolls
If you're saying there's only 22 letters, there isn't actually a need necessarily to invent more letters. It depends on how many different sounds are used. Hebrew has only 22 letters and works just fine, for example.
Skyrim is a bad example. Although there are several languages in the universe, the only one that we have precise information about is the Dovahzul and it sucks. If you translate theme song (Dragonborn Comes) to English word by word ignoring all the grammar, you'll get correct English that rhymes and contains an idiom. (the idiom of course doesn't make any sense in TES universe)
If I can have a philosophical debate with the language, it is language enough for me.
I remember having a conversation with my brother in Gaeilge ( the Irish language) in Spain on our holidays and we were approached by French and American people who asked us were we speaking Elvish. Let's just say we were not happy but looking back on it I get a good laugh out of it
And in Romanian the word for hand became "mana"... Why you guys always forget Romanian language is a Latin Language?
Daniel Dan A lot of people will get mad and insist that it's Slavic even though it's not.
Everyone speaks a language, so they think they know things about languages, so everyone has an opinion on linguistics and they'll get pissed at you if you tell them they're wrong. Language is intuitive, linguistics isn't.
***** Good point.
***** Actually, Sardinian is lexically the closest Romance tongue to Latin, though like most other Romance languages, it has lost the noun case system of Latin. Romanian is closer grammatically to Latin because of it's preservation of most of the Latin noun inflections. :)
Daniel Dan and a bit of elvish looks like romanian, juice is suc, is - both este and sint
Daniel Dan They were examples...they're not going to go through every one of them.
Now I learned how to make a language for my book, you guys are really useful, thank you a lot!
Me: **sees elvish in title**
Also me: *y* E *s*
That was the wimpiest qapla' I've ever heard. Even the doctor says it with more feeling. :P
Qapla', gentlemen!
If y'all wanna know how to do this kinda stuff (assuming you don't already), I would suggest Biblaridion's series on conlanging. Also, the website Vulgarlang is fun to play with, and will actually construct a language for you if you don't want to go through the process of doing it yourself (although, personally, I could use some more hobbies). Not a spokesperson, but definitely a fan. Anyway, I absolutely love this kind of stuff. Languages are so interesting! One thing he didn't mention, though, is how the culture of the fantasy people can influence slang and metaphors, which is one of the extra layers of fun and complexity that intrigues me.
I got into Star Trek only recently and have also become interested in actually attempting to learn con-langs starting with Klingon.
I once attended an awesome interview at my university where they invited the creators of Klingon and Navi to give a talk: how they designed their fictional languages, influences, how the actors must learn this new made-up language, etc...
...sadly there’s a 3rd language at that interview, but I can’t remember what it was
It reminded me Sheldon trying to give a speech at Howard and Bernadatte's wedding in Klingon. 😅😅😅😅😅
Thanks for this upload. Very informative and very interesting. For the German audience: there is even a published work about Elvish grammar in comparison to German grammar: "Wie kann Deutsch und Elbisch kontrastiv verglichen werden? Tolkiens Versuch der Entwicklung einer Kunstsprache."
I wish TED-talks would go deeper into the conlang scene some time. This was really fun!
Rosetta Stone should make Na'vi, Elvish, Klingon, Huttese, Tamaranian,& more other Star Wars languages. I bet alot of people would love to buy that.
Unfortunately Star Wars is a very linguistically dull universe. The Huts speak pure gibberish and the Jawas speak an south African language sped-up and played backwards.
Grokford nice :)
I would buy Tolkien's Elvish and Klingon in a snap.
KR YW I would like Na'vi, Elvish, Huttese, & Tamaranian
KaramelLolaBunnie91 I hate Rosetta Stone because you don't get to know what the words even mean you just have to guess by the picture
Wait..why is the title in german? Is this a bug?
+Qimodis What? This is portuguese not polish.
Well depending on what country you are in it changes the language of the title?
+TotalMadnessMan I think so because mine is in Dutch.
vliegendegieter Strange.
+TotalMadnessMan Yeah, I was watching Ted-ex videos on a public computer and all of a sudden the titles were in Dutch. Now that I'm watching at home, they're in English again. I guess it looks at the language of your browser. My version of Firefox at home is in English.
Wow! Neat video! Thanks for sharing! I enjoyed it. :D
What an insightful video.
The search for an informative Ted EX video continues.
gotta love Tolkien!
I never knew he diversified the elvish tribe languages so much
This was very informative :D
When a writter constructs so deeply 2 languages as the Quenya and Sindarin .... i think its a bit diferent!!! very nice video!! loved it!!!!!!
allthough the Tone in Elvish is different than u are saying , this video and many others are so great!!!!
Great Job u all!!!!!
But Na'Vi speak Russian and Ukranian!
+Typical Russian Guy (Visit the channel!) I got the joke. Oh gods! I got the joke... ;_;
My ex has won...
Chantal Perez Is it good or bad?
+Typical Russian Guy (Visit the channel!) well played m8
I don't get it :/
Oko Na'Vi is a cybersport team from Ukraine. They compete in international championships in Dota2, Counter Strike, World of Tanks etc.
I'm currently studying Sindarin as part of a linguist study. Tolkein was damn brilliant! Adding rules for genitives, indefinite and definite pronouns... Bruh, this was next level! I'm almost tempted to learn it ahah
กลับมาดูแล้ว ขอบคุณสำหรับซับไทย Thank for Thai subtitle!
OMG John McWhorter, love this guy! Look him up on The Great Courses, great stuff!
The Tengwar spelling hurt.
I do agree on the grammar part, but I don’t think varying in time and space is important in the same way. It is true that real languages vary due to the realities of people speaking as they wish to, but while you can’t imagine a language without grammar, you can make one without variation. In fact, there are some real languages that get pretty close; Icelandic and Chinese, for some, have barely changed at all over hundreds and thousands of years.
Much the same can be said about irregularity; granted, it only really approaches reality in the most pedantic of conlangs like Ithkuil and Lojban, but it is not an inherent or definitional part of languages the way grammar is.
Very interesting :) Though im surprised you didnt mention Esperanto, the original (and most wide spread)ConLang. :)
Esperanto is the biggest, but not the original conlang. Hildegard von Bingen had her "lingua ignota" , and before Esperanto was published, Volapük had a serious amount of followers
AMAZING CHANNEL!!!!!
There is no thank you in dothraki.
It is known
no word for "throne" either if memory serves
Fun story: the creator of the Dothraki language, David J. Peterson, had actually created a word for "thank you" in Dothraki "sanaccho!", but when The Game of Thrones pilot episode came out, he promptly deleted it. XD
How about the dragon language in skyrim?
+KatoMotto xD
+PontifexMaximus
The languages listed in the title, as far as I'm aware, are created to almost as much detail as real-world languages... alphabet, grammar, allophones, so on and so forth. In script writing, the lines would usually be written in English then translated into the language, then given to the actor (presumably with tips for pronunciation).
With Dovah, I had to look this up but there doesn't appear to be enough words to actually call it a "language". There are enough words there for things like taunts in the game, or whatever purpose it may serve when spoken by the dragons to the player, but not enough for two people in the real world to have a casual conversation in it.
+PontifexMaximus Dragons are special also in that they don't conjugate their verbs, they are immortal aspects of the god of Time that IS Time, so they don't understand the concept of Past or Future or even Present as we do. For the Dovah, there is only IS.
+PontifexMaximus Dothraki ins't the only language in game of thrones either. There's valyrian.
***** okay?
幸好有字幕的翻译，thank you😊
1:30 that's why I hate those language apps that teach you words and some sentences, but never mention grammar
Anyone here a linguistics nerd?
2:06 In Old England the baby is missing because of the Plague?
Love the intro, it is so classic
Thank you John, nice.
Ted-Ed: “there’s no such thing as a language that’s the same today, as it was a thousands years ago”
*•-•• •- ••- --• •••• ••• •• -• -- --- •-• ••• • -•-• --- -•• •* (congrats to you, if you understand it)
what about davahzul the language in skyrim
Although the writing and phonology (sounds) are really cool, they sadly made the grammar exactly the same as English, meaning you can translate English to Dovahzul word for word.
Well, mostly like english. Prepositions are a bit different, as well as there being some exceptions in verb conjugation.
The teachers showed us this video on school! I became proud over myself because I knew much of this before!
Love it so interesting!!
When I saw the title first I thought Elvish was a language of Elvis ;P
LOL!
*I S P E A K E L V I S*
I don't get why the elvish language changed. in our world new generation transform a old language. But the elfs don't die....
+hermanPla Rewatch the video from 1:51 - 1:58.
It might explain the lingual shift.
+hermanPla Languages change during our life too. If you consider how people in the 30's used to speak, they now have 80+ years, and for sure they adapted their way of speaking according to the "new rules". Moreover, the main reason why languages change is because of language economy. If you can say something in an easier way (such as removing the final sound) and everybody can understand you, you might find convenient to do so. And this applies not only to the pronunciation but to the grammar too. If everybody understands you if you use "do" instead of "does", you will tend to avoid using "does", and you will say "It don't matter". And so on...
+hermanPla Elves don't die, but they get separated over time. There is a great real-life example of how separation can influence the development of language: South Korea and North Korea. The two Koreas have been separated for only 70 years, but the gap in their languages is so huge that a South Korean and a North Korean meeting for the first time would have difficulties understanding each other. This is because North Korea doesn't have Internet like the rest of the world and therefore communication between South Korea and North Korea is very limited. The same can be said of the elves in Middle-earth and the elves in Aman. They are physically separated for thousands of years without any means of communication. Not only that, elves in Middle-earth interact with many other races, and their language is possibly influenced in the process.
Also, there *are* different generations of elves. Cirdan, the oldest elf in Middle-earth by the time of LOTR, is a first-generation elf, while Galadriel is third generation. Arwen is the granddaughter of Galadriel, so technically Cirdan is Arwen's distant great-great-granduncle. Considering how our speech is different from that of our parents and that of our grandparents, I think five generations and thousands of years of separation was more than enough to change Elvish.
+hermanPla It doesn't matter whether elves die or not. I can almost guarantee that my father didn't say "what's up" or "that ____ is salty af" when he was a teenager. He's still alive. Of course, those are colloquialisms.
Take English-- its been around for a few hundred years (while elves have been around for thousands of years) and it's changed quite a bit. Take British English, American English, Canadian English, Australian English, South African English... the list goes on. And then within those, you have dialects based upon region (the ones I'm most familiar with are the differences in pronunciation of English within the UK and in the USA).
And correction: Elves do die. See the House of Finwë for more details :P
Elves did die, sometimes - there's a book about it called "The Silmarillion"!
gracias por los Subs en español,sigan asi, es un Buen Canal
Ya que no muchos tienen un ingles Fluido En Habla Hispana
I'm REALLY disappointed that Defiance was cancelled - I was looking forward to Castithan becoming a full-fledged conlang like those mentioned in this vid'. It just sounded SO cool when spoken...
How does esperanto fit into this? Or, more generally, how do languages created specifically created to be easy to learn and have as little grammar as possible and with no exceptions fit into this? I mean, it's not like they're not real languages... aren't they?
I always feel like Ted Talks never have a thesis
Is there anywhere on the internet I could learn more about linguistics?
Right. I was just trying to say that know isn't nearly as good of an example of an exception to grammar as Be, Have, or Go, since it still follows a set of conjugation rules, whereas the verbs I mentioned truly are exceptions. But I did get the point that he was making about conlangs needing exceptions.
Are we all just going to ignore the fact that you could play through Skyrim entirely in Dovahzul? Is dragontongue just gonna be ignored?
+Viktor the Creator Is that a thing?? How does one do that and why haven't I heard of it sooner?
***** thuum.org is a resource to learn it and a translator
not sure how to do it
So there's actually no Skyrim in Dovahzul? #disappoint
***** im pretty sure there is but idk you can google it i guess
+Daniel Lodovico The word walls are written in Dovahzuul, and the dragons speak excerpts of it as well, like Paarthunax and Odahviing.
Nice vid, but I'm a bit sad there's no talk about the real languages which inspired these fictional ones. For instance, Finnish and Welsh were languages Tolkien was fascinated by and created Quenyan and Sindarian from them. Na'vi was inspired by dozens of different tribal languages in Asia and South America. Anyone know what real languages inspired Klingon and Dothraki?
Where can I learn Sindarin? I've searched for guides and courses but I'm not sure if I'm getting all that I can (Vocabulary, Grammar, Writting etc.)
@3:50 Know does follow a grammar rule. The same rule applies to throw, and blow. there are just 2 rules for words ending in ow. For example glow follows a different set becoming glowed instead of glew. If you need words that don't follow you're thinking too hard. The most used words are the ones that change and stop following the rules. The verb "To Be" is a good one: I am, He is They/you are. I was. Also "to have", and "go" are words that have unique conjugations.