John Quijada and Ithkuil Article
John Quijada, creator of Ithkuil and Ilaksh, has achieved prominence in the conlang community as well as international acclaim. A new article from the Russian magazine Komputerra has been been posted in PDF format to the Magazine section of The Conlanger’s Library. Although the interview appeared in Komputerra in April 2009, the original interview took place in 2004. John has also graciously donated a transcript of the original interview as well as a follow-up and this is also available at TCL.
Universals. We have Universals.
We have a new link to Dr. Greenberg’s Universals at the Internet Resources page. This database from the Universität Konstanz is a great place for browsing or searching for specific linguistic characteristics and finding what naturally occurs so you can include it in your conlang (or do the exact opposite, if that’s what you wish). Enjoy!
The Buzz
The big buzz in the conlang community right now is about James Cameron’s film Avatar due to be released on December 18. Of course, the reason for the buzz is the language of the Na’vi created by University of Southern California professor Paul Frommer. The language has only been glimpsed briefly from articles and interviews, but the known corpus is growing. Here is a collection of articles and websites to whet your appetite. Whether you plan to see the movie or not, Avatar has definitely brought artlangs front and center again. Personally, I get a kick out of the authors of some of these articles falling all over themselves in fascination that someone can create an “entirely alien language”. 😉 What a shock!
What can we say from a wordlist?
The language of Avatar revealed
Skxawng! You don’t matter!
USC professor creates an entire alien language for ‘Avatar’
Brushing up on Na’vi, the Language of Avatar
USC professor gives Avatar aliens a voice
New Newspaper Article
A new article on the Na’vi language of James Cameron’s Avatar has been posted in TCL’s Newspaper articles section.
Another article of note has also been found online, although this isn’t a conlang so it won’t be added to TCL. This one has to do with Cockney rhyming slang on bank machines. The article, from the Times Online, has a great image of the machine’s screen with choices like “Sausage and Mash with Receipt”.
Enjoy
An Article and a Link
Two new resources have been added to TCL:
The first is an article from the University of Minnesota’s Minnesota Daily newspaper posted in Newspaper Articles. It’s about the local Minnesota company that wrote the app for the Klingon Dictionary (but also include information about d’Armond Speers’ 3-year “experiment” in speaking Klingon to his son).
The other resource, posted in the Linguistics Online Resources page, is a handy online tool for converting IPA characters into HTML: θæŋk ju
Enjoy
James A. Garfield, Part II
Yes, that James A. Garfield. A while ago, The Conlanging Librarian posted some information on James A. Garfield. Well, something that many people don’t know about the man who would become the 20th President of the United States was that the courtship with his future wife, Lucretia “Crete” Rudolph, began (in a series of letters) as a back-and-forth discussion on the value of studying ancient languages and why the “diversity of languages was given”. You’ll now find relevant quotations from these letters, dating from January 1854, posted at The Conlanger’s Library in Quotations under Language and Specific Natural Languages. Enjoy!
New Book Added to Sci-Fi
I came across a new “old” book recently and have added it’s Google Books page to the Sci-Fi section of TCL. The book is by Frederick Spencer Oliver and was published originally in 1894. The Atlantean or Poseid language is featured in it. For more details:
Frederick Spencer Oliver
A Dweller on Two Planets or, The Dividing of the Way
[Atlantean or Poseid language]
This novel, first published in 1894, purports to be the biography of the author’s past live as an Atlantean names Phylos.
New Movie Added to TCL
From some recent posts on CONLANG-L and the LCS, a new movie with a conlang in it has surfaced and been posted at Films:
Youth Without Youth (2007)
starring Tim Roth, directed by Francis Ford Coppola
[unnamed artificial language]
This film was based on the book by Mircea Eliade. To get more information about the artificial language (created by Dr. David Shulman) check out the official site under the “Languages” section of The Production.
Latin comes to Facebook
The Conlanging Librarian has been lax in his duties, and this news item was too good to pass up. Although Latin is decidedly not a conlang, it is an inspiration to many conlangers, both novices and advanced practioners. Latin…it’s not just for Cicero anymore!
Conlangers Extraordinaire #3: Marc Okrand
Marc Okrand
This third in the conlangers extraordinaire series highlights one of the best known “professional” conlangers. As a side note, having an email exchange with Dr. Okrand was one of the coolest things about creating the Esperanto, Elvish, and Beyond exhibit
Marc Okrand is Director of Live Captioning at the National Captioning Institute (NCI) in Vienna, Virginia, near Washington, DC. Celebrating his 25th year at NCI in 2005, Okrand is a pioneer in the use of closed-captioning for live television broadcasts. He has a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, where he specialized in Native American languages. His dissertation, a grammar of Mutsun, remains a seminal work in the study of Costanoan languages. He taught linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and was a post-doctoral fellow in the Anthropology Department of the Smithsonian Institute.
Dr. Okrand’s link to conlanging came about through a chance meeting in California while on assignment for NCI’s first major live captioning event, the 1982 Academy Awards. Okrand met a long-time friend for lunch who was working with Harve Bennett, Executive Director of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The movie needed a linguist to create some dialogue in Vulcan to be dubbed over Leonard Nimoy and Kirstie Alley speaking English. Okrand was recruited for the job and remembers driving home from the set one day thinking, “Oh, my God, I just taught Mr. Spock how to speak Vulcan!†Those four lines in Vulcan were to be just the beginning.
Two years later, Bennett was working on Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and called upon Okrand’s expertise again. The assignment this time was to create a language for the alien warrior race of Klingons. James Doohan, who played Star Trek’s Scotty, had actually coined a few words of Klingon for the first Star Trek movie. Okrand took the sounds of those words as a starting point and created the language known today as Klingon. On set for the filming of Star Trek III, Okrand had veto power over takes (although he learned to use this power sparingly) if the actors mispronounced their Klingon lines. During this process, the language evolved into a “real†language. After the film, Klingon took on a life of its own. Okrand wrote three books about the language (including the essential Klingon Dictionary), recorded language learning audiotapes, and worked on a CD-ROM game related to learning Klingon. He also shows up from time to time at the Klingon Language Institute’s annual qep’a’
In addition to Vulcan and Klingon, Okrand also created the Atlantean language for the 2001 Disney animated feature Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Atlantean is based, in part, on Indo-European roots to give it an ancient quality. Okrand also got to work with Leonard Nimoy again on this project. It is rumored that the character of the linguist in the film, Milo Thatch (voiced by Michael J. Fox), is based on Marc Okrand because the filmmakers didn’t really know what a linguist should look like and decided to use Dr. Okrand as a model.