Star trek dammit jim code#
Star trek dammit jim series#

Surely, since such a small group of people will take the time to learn these “artificial” languages, learning to speak one has to warrant an applicable use, and therefore, the complexity of the languages is sadly little more than window dressing. However complex these fictional languages may be, this complexity doesn’t give account for their place in the real world. Each language forged with such care becomes tied to the world that it exists in, an integral part of the fictional society’s culture just as the languages we speak in the real world are integral to ours. While Peterson didn’t create the world he wrote for, each tongue he creates is unique to the people speaking it, taking into account the deep lore behind them. In Tolkien’s essay A Secret Vice (accessible via Southern Methodist University), he wrote that “… to give your language an individual flavor, it must have woven into it the threads of an individual mythology.” He followed what he preached Middle Earth was created to house his languages, not the other way around. What Peterson, Tolkien, and other creators have done is far above a mere substitution.

Star trek dammit jim code#

It’s also possible to create “language” by switching out each word for one in your made-up tongue, but this is more akin to a code than a new way of speaking. Simlish was created to allow the player to infer their own meaning upon a character, but it’s impossible to translate and could never be learned.

Star trek dammit jim series#

This is the idea behind Simlish from video game series The Sims. While there are certain speaking patterns and inflections that allow foreigners to replicate an accent, if the structure isn’t consistent enough, it sounds like gibberish, according to the Huffington Post.

As noted by Peterson in an interview with Nerdist, your first language is all that “language” means to you, until you begin to study a different one. To answer the question of whether these languages have value, we must discuss the importance of linguistics, both as an academic study and in a broader cultural sense. HBO’s series Game of Thrones has brought the concept further into the mainstream with Dothraki and Valyrian, not fully fleshed out for the books but created for the show by David J. The Star Trek series has both Vulcan and Rihan (Romulan) to offer, both originating from Ancient Vulcan, as well as Klingon. Tolkien isn’t the only one to set his stories apart with “artificial” languages, though he’s arguably the most well-known for it. Rosana Prada/ Flickr Spock, Do Me a Favor and Don’t Say it’s Fascinating What practical purpose could it serve? Are the languages created in these fictional masterpieces nothing more than a curiosity at the end of the day? The Elves alone speak a number of separate languages with multiple dialects and shared ancestries, similar to the relationship between romance languages and Latin, according to Wikia.įrodo’s quote above is the most commonly known phrase from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and it makes me wish I’d been able to take Quenya instead of Spanish for my high school requirements!īut let’s say that I had learned it in high school.

Tolkien was a linguist before he was an author, inventing his first language at the age of 13.īecause of this, the diverse species of Middle Earth all speak fully realized tongues, complete with their own alphabets and rules of diction. For those not up on their Elvish, that roughly translates to read “A star shines on the hour of our meeting,” spoken by Frodo Baggins in the Lord of the Rings. Authors have long been inventing unique languages in sci-fi and fantasy stories, but what value could these made-up languages possibly have in a world where they aren’t spoken?Įlen síla lumenn’omentielvo, dear friends.