io9 has a long article up about creating an alien language. It cites two of the most famous examples of fictitious languages; Tolkein's Elvish, and Marc Okrand's Klingon
( Read more... )
"As a rule, languages only split apart, never merge together."
Has the author never heard of creoles? Or English, for that matter - Germanic language with a huge amount of French/Latin based vocabulary...
(Which, to me, seems like a good model for an alien language - if the alien civilization isn't a mono-culture, one should assume that its dominant language should still contain elements borrowed from minority languages. And possibly loan-words from completly alien languages; I imagine, for example, that most of the languages in the ME setting would use the Asari words for advanced technology and related concepts.)
Maybe the author meant in a very broad sense and not in the individual cases of loan-words and so-on? They did qualify their statement with "as a rule", though saying "never" does seem to be too much of a generalization.
Comments 2
Has the author never heard of creoles? Or English, for that matter - Germanic language with a huge amount of French/Latin based vocabulary...
(Which, to me, seems like a good model for an alien language - if the alien civilization isn't a mono-culture, one should assume that its dominant language should still contain elements borrowed from minority languages. And possibly loan-words from completly alien languages; I imagine, for example, that most of the languages in the ME setting would use the Asari words for advanced technology and related concepts.)
Reply
Reply
Leave a comment