Hello everyone and welcome back to Geek Time. Hi, Lulu.

Hello, Brad.

What are we gonna talk about today?

I thought today in Geek Time let's talk about languages.

I thought we usually talk about geeky stuff.

Well, languages can be really geeky.

What do you mean?

You know I'm a huge language lover, right? And it's not just the real languages that attract me. It's also the fake languages.

What do you mean fake languages?

Have you ever watched Game of Thrones?

Of course.

You know, like Dothraki or Valerian, these are fake languages, right? They're not real languages. They don't really exist in the world, only in the show, only in the book.

I wouldn't say that they don't really exist. There's a lot of these languages are constructed. And some people actually speak some of these languages.

Oh really? So they're not called fake languages?

No, they're called constructed languages, or Conlangs.

Conlang is constructed languages.

Right!

Exactly what is a conlang if it's not just fake language？

A conlang is really something that has been created to be a stand in for a language. It's not something that's been evolved over thousands of years. When you look at any language, whether it's English or Chinese, these have been evolving over thousands of years, people have been speaking them for thousands of years. And things change in the language. And the sounds, the grammar, the writing changes.

Yes, so it's basically real languages they developed more organically, more naturally. And constructed languages are just made up or constructed.

Yeah, they're constructed, they're made by geeks like us. So it's not really like a code or anything like that. These are not just made up words or anything like this. These are completely new languages. They may be based on a language, or they may just be something completely new.

But why do people create conlangs? I mean, obviously, I know it's, you said being geeky, and then people like me who are just language lovers. But there must be a reason why conlangs exist.

When you're telling a story, you wanna have that story seen authentic. So when you look at like J.R.R. Tolkien's the Lord of the Rings, he actually created a whole language for the elves in that.

Elvish.

When people are writing stories, they want their story to seem authentic. So, they may change the vocabulary to make it sound like it's from another world. Or they may create a whole another language if it's like another species from another planet, or like another species like the elves or the dwarfs and a fantasy story.

Usually fantasy Sci-fi stories, they have this kind of conlangs. But it's not just for writing or for movie and TV for that matter. Sometimes it's also to make common language for certain regions. Right? If they speak different tongues.

Yeah, it could be a regional thing where they try to create a language for a regional area where maybe the languages are very similar, but they're different enough that people can't really understand it. So they create something that's somewhat in between, maybe like a Creole kind of like between French and English, and Louisiana.

I see. So conlangs actually they do serve a purpose. I thought what would be interesting is we take a look at some of these very famous Conlangs. And for those of you who are interested in Sci-fi or fantasy films, you would be able to tell what these are.

For those of you who are Lord of the Ring's fans out there, you should recognize this is Elvish. What about this one? I think, Brad, you would know.

Ok.

Yes, that's Klingon, just like ‘Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam’, Today is a good day to die. That’s my Klingon.

Today is a good day to die.

When people are creating a Conlang, they really go into a really deep detail. Like the Klingons are a very warrior race. And often times when you think of a warrior race, you think of like this guttural language, and that's what they've accomplished and what they've created with the Klingon language.

Very booming.

Yeah. So they have a lot of fricatives like “haka” like these types of sounds in their language, like they're almost spitting but, like ‘Qapla’that means success, “Pek hak” a weirdo.

If you watch things like the Big Bang Theory, this Sheldon speaks quite fluent Klingon. Is that like something in the geek community? Is it like a stereotype that people who are into this kind of Si-Fi genre, they like to learn Klingon?

Yeah, Klingon is definitely one of the languages that people in the geek community are going to maybe gravitate towards. Klingon is probably one of the more famous of the older geeky languages. I mean you mentioned like Dothraki in high Valerian. These are more recent additions to it. But when I look back at my life, people really didn't start learning Elvish until the Lord of the Rings movies came out. But up until before that really it was all about Klingon. There were lots of books out there about Klingon language and how to learn Klingon.

Yes, they're even tutors on the internet teaching you Klingon. In that way, I think Klingon is a very very successful Conlang. And I’ve actually heard that they are quite a number of people in the world fluent in Klingon.

There's quite a few people who are fluent. One of those people actually tried to raise their child as a Klingon native speaker. It didn't quite work out the way they expected it. They actually had to stop the experiment. But when the child was born, they basically spoke Klingon to the child. And that's what the child was learning as throughout the first few years of their childhood.

If your parents are trying to raise you as a native speaker of a constructed language, I think that is a very daring experiments, not necessarily good for the child I would say.

No, when it comes to a language like Klingon, I definitely wouldn't do that. That's one of those things where there's not really any native speakers. So who are you going to talk to or who's gonna help you out?

Exactly. And what about this one?

Definitely Parseltongue from a Harry Potter. I love harry potter.

And like Harry Potter and Voldemort, they're both fluent in Parseltongue, it's a lot of like hissing sound. It's basically the language of a snake. How we translated it into Chinese.

Definitely.

And two of my favorites from Game of Throne. (Dothraki clip, Game of Throne) this would be dothraki and (Valerian clip, Game of Throne) this would be valerian. It's very interesting that these two languages, these two conlangs were actually created by the same linguist David Peterson for the TV show. And it's really interesting that he managed to create an entire language based on probably a few phrases, a few sentences from the original book.

It's something like that. I think it would actually be easier if it was just one person creating the language. When you have like two languages within one world. If you had more than one person creating that language, it would probably create a lot of disconnect. So it's still kind of difficult. But, overall when you think about it, it's not that difficult when you are a language expert and you understand the concepts involved in language.

Earlier on you were talking about fictional and real conlangs, the real conlangs that like, for example, Esperanto?

Yeah, Esperanto is one of the international languages. There's a few other ones, but Esperanto is probably the most successful of them all.

You say it's successful, I remember there was a fad back in the days. I think my dad was trying to learn Esperanto, but it really never took off as they wanted it to.

It definitely didn't take off as they expected it would. However, there are some people who speak the language natively, and there is a very large community of people who speak the language. And so it may not have taken off like they expect it to. But there is a chance that in the future, as things become more international, people might start picking it up even more.

And that was purely created to make international communication easier. Right? To find a language that's easier to learn than English, say?

Because when you look at some languages are definitely easier depending upon the region you come from. But when people create the conlangs for the international community, they try to do it in a way that makes it easier for the majority of people to kind of learn the language.

Yeah. But that sounds very difficult. Sounds like quite a Challenge because languages are so different, especially if they're in different language families. By the way, so I thought it would be interesting to see how to build a language, essentially how to do Conlanging. So first you start with individual sound, right?

That's usually the best thing. You start off with some sort of sound system, because every language has their own sound system, the way they put consonant and vowels together. We like in English, we have a lot of consonant clusters, whereas some languages don't really have those. So when you create a language, you have to decide what type of sound system you're going to have.

And so vowels, consonants, and then you have the idea of syllable, and then perhaps to decide whether you have stress or tone. So English is a stress language. Chinese is a tone language. I think that's why sometimes it's very difficult for Chinese to get the stress right. And for example, for an English speaker learning Chinese to get the tones correct.

I've basically, I forgo using tones when I speak Chinese for the most part. It gets me into a little bit of trouble here and there. But people can generally understand what I'm talking about. But it's, I’ve studied probably I think, six languages now. So there's just so much different language going on in my mind that it's really hard to get the tones.

I think sometimes it happens to me when I'm trying to recall a word, for example, in Japanese, sometimes another language pops into my mind. So first of all, the sound system and then you have vocabulary.

After you create the sound system and you understand how the sounds are gonna link together. You've gotta create some vocabulary. And you want to start off with the very basic verbs run, walk, carry, take, eat, and then you make sure you get all the very basic nouns, the things basically use in your everyday language. When you look at like for example, like English to read 80% of English newspaper, you need to know about 2000 words. So if you kind of think about that, you can speak the majority of the language just looking at 2000 words. Some languages are a little bit more vocabulary heavy, so you might need to know a lot more vocabulary. But basically when you're creating a language, you might wanna start off with like something like between 500 to a thousand words. But then as you start growing, you might add more and more to describe things in more detail.

Yeah. And I would probably also say depending on if you're creating, let's say, conlang for fiction, you're writing, then depending on the specific race or species that is going to use that language, you will add in different like specific verbs. For example, if it's a race or a species that is really into killing, then you probably would add words like slay or slash into the basic verb families.

And definitely you also wanna think about slang words as well.

It's really fun because you add character to it. Then you have things like syntax and grammar. How would words relate to one or another. But we're not gonna go into details of that. So to finish off, let me ask you, have you ever thought about creating your own Conlang?

I've actually thought about it a few times. I've got an idea for kind of like a future version of our like, basically a Si-fi story that would involve an alien race. And so I was thinking about how to create a language for them. I thought about it. I just haven't really gone that deep in down the rabbit hole so to say.

For me, I think my sort of geeky target would just be to learn Dothraki. I've seen online, some people who can do amazing imitation of Dothraki, that does sound very interesting. All right, on that note, I think we're gonna wrap up. Share with us in a comment section any Conlangs that you have heard of or any Conlangs that you are interested in, especially relating to these movies we have just mentioned. So let's see if we have fellow enthusiast in constructed languages. Thank you, Brad, for coming to the show.

No problem. Qapla or success.

We will see you next time. Bye.

See you. Bye bye.

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