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Awake Since 04:20
Nov. 19th, 2009 07:35 amI checked the time when my eyes opened this morning. 04:20. The rest was one long slog, lying there staring at the ceiling in the dark until my alarm went off at 06:30.
You know what I was mithering about? Languages. Specifically, the ones I'm trying to teach myself. I found myself mithering about learning Japanese from NHK Radio MP3 downloads, bookmarking the Firefly / Serenity Pinyinary which I found somewhere once and kind of forgot to bookmark back then, and of course tlhIngan Hol.
It appears geeky to the uninitiated, learning a foreign language. The traditional image is of someone sitting on the bus, listening to headphones and suddenly blurting out "Na shr shenme? Na shr cha. Wo xiang yao na ge" for no apparent reason. Monoglots looking on think "Nerd" in their heads. It's like the man who has no grasp of the Tao, who will laugh when he hears of it. It's in their nature to judge polyglots as geeks. Monoglots can't help but think such judgmental thoughts, even though they're dead wrong. Hell, even if they can't even fully grasp the one language they know.
Incidentally, I don't have headphones to hide behind. I sit on the bus, reading my book, and talking in Mandarin Chinese (occasionally Japanese, Latin or Klingon) to myself. Blame my overactive Vishudda chakra, and my utter lack of anything resembling guilt.
When I logged on here this morning, the first thing I noticed was someone commenting on how one D'Armand Speers, a gentleman of my acquaintance from my association with the Klingon Language Institute (KLI), software developer, author and qualified linguist, taught his child Klingon for three years. Universally, the comments ranged from "geeky" to "Couldn't he have taught his kid a useful language?"
And here's where I get to the point of this post.
A language is useful if people can communicate with each other through it. Even if only two people know the language, such as what siblings sometimes develop in isolation, it is still useful as long as it is being used to communicate.
Ironically, tlhIngan Hol was not developed as a communications tool, but rather as Marc Okrand's personal Klingon dialogue generator; its sole purpose being to be able to translate lines from a screenplay written in English into their equivalent in Klingon, so that the actors portraying Klingons in Star Trek III would have some suitably alien lines to speak. However, it has expanded beyond the boundaries of its initial concept and evolved into that which it is now - a fully fledged language in its own right. No longer a mere dialogue generator, Klingon is a communications tool like any other language - albeit one with a very small, very tight knit, occasionally fractious, community of speakers.
Klingon's evolution beyond that initial remit, from dialogue generator to communication tool, is thanks in no small part to Simon & Schuster, publishers of The Klingon Dictionary. I suspect they had absolutely no idea what they were letting themselves in for when they launched the first Little Blue Book way back in the Eighties. They must have known something was up, because they relaunched it as a bigger white covered trade paperback with an Addendum in 1992, thus cementing its presence ineradicably in popular culture once and for all.
But is it any use? Yes, actually, it is, because it is being used to communicate.
A language is of no use unless and until one can communicate with someone else, and obtain meaningful feedback from the listener. Whatever the medium, it is not dorky or geeky to want to use a language. It is a hallmark of sentience, hailing back to the earliest days of humanity when our Broca regions were forming and the concept of language was just being born.
That's not to say that language learning is easy. It's useful to learn "Mo yukkuri hanashite o-negai shimasu" (Please be so kind as to speak more slowly) or QIt yIjatlh. loQ tlhIngan Hol vIyaj neH (Speak slowly. I only slightly understand Klingon) early on when learning a language, but you must learn to be able to listen as well as to speak. Native speakers won't stick to the textbook, and there are regional accents, colloquialisms, contractions, hums and hars and ers, and nobody's perfect - even the most florid and fluent speaker, a master of poetry, may occasionally slip up and say the wrong thing or stumble even over the simplest word.
And here is where it became personal for me this morning. I want to make my own personal language skills useful. I dearly need to give my language muscles some real exercise. All of them.
So the only thing I can really do is what I have learned to do best. Social networking, the old fashioned way - by walking around, patrolling, putting out feelers and letting people know my email address and telephone number. I want foreign language speakers to approach me. I need them to approach me. I want to be able to speak, to listen, to communicate. Even if I have nothing to say, I can still learn and contribute.
And it is this need, this urgent drive that emerged within me to reach out and make friends of foreign language speakers, that got me mithering in bed this morning.
You can't really blame me, can you? :)
College later. Let's see what I can do there to satisfy this growing urge within me.
You know what I was mithering about? Languages. Specifically, the ones I'm trying to teach myself. I found myself mithering about learning Japanese from NHK Radio MP3 downloads, bookmarking the Firefly / Serenity Pinyinary which I found somewhere once and kind of forgot to bookmark back then, and of course tlhIngan Hol.
It appears geeky to the uninitiated, learning a foreign language. The traditional image is of someone sitting on the bus, listening to headphones and suddenly blurting out "Na shr shenme? Na shr cha. Wo xiang yao na ge" for no apparent reason. Monoglots looking on think "Nerd" in their heads. It's like the man who has no grasp of the Tao, who will laugh when he hears of it. It's in their nature to judge polyglots as geeks. Monoglots can't help but think such judgmental thoughts, even though they're dead wrong. Hell, even if they can't even fully grasp the one language they know.
Incidentally, I don't have headphones to hide behind. I sit on the bus, reading my book, and talking in Mandarin Chinese (occasionally Japanese, Latin or Klingon) to myself. Blame my overactive Vishudda chakra, and my utter lack of anything resembling guilt.
When I logged on here this morning, the first thing I noticed was someone commenting on how one D'Armand Speers, a gentleman of my acquaintance from my association with the Klingon Language Institute (KLI), software developer, author and qualified linguist, taught his child Klingon for three years. Universally, the comments ranged from "geeky" to "Couldn't he have taught his kid a useful language?"
And here's where I get to the point of this post.
A language is useful if people can communicate with each other through it. Even if only two people know the language, such as what siblings sometimes develop in isolation, it is still useful as long as it is being used to communicate.
Ironically, tlhIngan Hol was not developed as a communications tool, but rather as Marc Okrand's personal Klingon dialogue generator; its sole purpose being to be able to translate lines from a screenplay written in English into their equivalent in Klingon, so that the actors portraying Klingons in Star Trek III would have some suitably alien lines to speak. However, it has expanded beyond the boundaries of its initial concept and evolved into that which it is now - a fully fledged language in its own right. No longer a mere dialogue generator, Klingon is a communications tool like any other language - albeit one with a very small, very tight knit, occasionally fractious, community of speakers.
Klingon's evolution beyond that initial remit, from dialogue generator to communication tool, is thanks in no small part to Simon & Schuster, publishers of The Klingon Dictionary. I suspect they had absolutely no idea what they were letting themselves in for when they launched the first Little Blue Book way back in the Eighties. They must have known something was up, because they relaunched it as a bigger white covered trade paperback with an Addendum in 1992, thus cementing its presence ineradicably in popular culture once and for all.
But is it any use? Yes, actually, it is, because it is being used to communicate.
A language is of no use unless and until one can communicate with someone else, and obtain meaningful feedback from the listener. Whatever the medium, it is not dorky or geeky to want to use a language. It is a hallmark of sentience, hailing back to the earliest days of humanity when our Broca regions were forming and the concept of language was just being born.
That's not to say that language learning is easy. It's useful to learn "Mo yukkuri hanashite o-negai shimasu" (Please be so kind as to speak more slowly) or QIt yIjatlh. loQ tlhIngan Hol vIyaj neH (Speak slowly. I only slightly understand Klingon) early on when learning a language, but you must learn to be able to listen as well as to speak. Native speakers won't stick to the textbook, and there are regional accents, colloquialisms, contractions, hums and hars and ers, and nobody's perfect - even the most florid and fluent speaker, a master of poetry, may occasionally slip up and say the wrong thing or stumble even over the simplest word.
And here is where it became personal for me this morning. I want to make my own personal language skills useful. I dearly need to give my language muscles some real exercise. All of them.
So the only thing I can really do is what I have learned to do best. Social networking, the old fashioned way - by walking around, patrolling, putting out feelers and letting people know my email address and telephone number. I want foreign language speakers to approach me. I need them to approach me. I want to be able to speak, to listen, to communicate. Even if I have nothing to say, I can still learn and contribute.
And it is this need, this urgent drive that emerged within me to reach out and make friends of foreign language speakers, that got me mithering in bed this morning.
You can't really blame me, can you? :)
College later. Let's see what I can do there to satisfy this growing urge within me.
