Elvish as She Is Spoke [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Elvish as She Is Spoke [pdf]

elvish.org

72 pointsBerislavLopac23 comments

The title’s a pun on a legendarily bad English phrasebook English as She Is Spoke: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/pedro-carolino_jose-da-fon...

All your base, but in 1855 Portugal instead of 1991 Japan.

E.g. with phrases such as "Let us go and respire the air"

(which I am now keen to use in an actual conversation)

The reason for this choice is explained in the article. It is a highly apt analogy.

For some context, the author later became the language consultant for Rings of Power, therefore having to fill a very similar role to David Salo, whose work gets much critique in this essay. Makes you wonder if the ideal of "don't translate English to Elvish" was preserved when faced with the reality of the series production.

So apparently the Elvish spoken in the Peter Jackson movies is as far from the language imagined by Tolkien as the famous Portuguese-English phrasebook is from natural English. That's one childhood fantasy broken. What about the Klingon spoken in Star Trek movies?

The difference is that tlhIngan Hol was created to be spoken in movies and shows, not just to explore the parts of language development that were interesting to the creator. So usually, the tlhIngan Hol used in Star Trek movies and shows is about as good as it's going to get. Sometimes the actors have terrible pronunciation, and sometimes the writers make up names for people and places that aren't actually possible in tlhIngan Hol phonology and we have to just roll with it. And modern Star Trek shows have mostly done a better job than the classics, because they bother to have a Klingon language consultant on staff (I was gobsmacked when in ST: Starfleet Academy they used "qeylIS" and "Qo'noS" rather than "Kahless" and "Chronos") . But unlike Quenya or Sindarin, you can have an actual natural conversation in Klingon, as long as you avoid topics for which the Klingon Language Institute hasn't developed vocabulary.

> they bother to have a Klingon language consultant on staff

I realize there's a fair bit of money to be made, and also that many people are super invested in their favorite science fiction series, but the fact that "a Klingon language consultant" is a real thing still makes me think "wow!".

I'm currently reading a book written by the guy who created the Dothraki and High Valerian languages for Game of Thrones. He had to make what already existed in the books for, so there were a few things already set.

He was a consultant in the show as well as he was the one who had to get the actors to speak it well.

The book is called The Art of Language, and if you have an interest in conlangs, you should give it a try.

>Sometimes the actors have terrible pronunciation

I'm sure this could be easily dismissed as a regional (planetary?) accent.

Today I learned what a kenning is. I have encountered them many times before (to a foreigner, Finnish seems chock full of them) but I never knew they had a name. I love them!

First there was kerning, then there was keming, now there's kenning. When will the madness stop.

Kenminimuming?

I think we also need kenming and kemning at a minimum.

Kennings are different from normal compound words (which Finnish as a synthetic language is full of, like German). They're poetic/metaphorical synonyms for existing standard words for things, whereas something like tietokone (lit. "knowledge machine") is the standard Finnish word for computer. There's actually no kenning tradition in Finnish, it's more of an Old Norse thing.

As an aside, a fun exercise (for some values of fun) is to come up with English compound words that are not compound in Finnish. The first one that comes to mind is "lighthouse" – "majakka" (borrowed from Russian маяк).

That's why I qualified with "seems" "to a foreigner"! I know tail-star (comet), ice-cupboard (fridge), fire-stick (match), etc. are real words, but since I read them as their literal translations into my language, they become kennings in my brain.

Yeah, that’s fair.

The compound for the Finnish computer reminds me of a whole bunch from different languages, but I do enjoy Mandrian's "electric brain" as computer and "shadow box" for TV.

I think sähköaivo "electric brain" was also one of the words used in Finnish back in the 50s, before there was a standard word for computers.

But my favorite neologism for "computer" is probably the Icelandic tölva, a portmanteau of the words tala (number) and völva (a prophetess in Norse mythology).

Ooo! As a big fan of the sagas, I like that very much! Thank you for sharing.

From the Conclusion:

> Does this mean that it is futile or meaningless to attempt to compose Elvish sentences? Well, no. [...] it is indeed possible to produce written Elvish that so far as anyone now can tell conforms grammatically and idiomatically to the exemplars and statements that Tolkien provided to a very high degree (for example, by relying only upon attested elements and derivational mechanisms, attested grammatical devices, and attested syntactic patterns that can reasonably be thought to belong to the same conceptual phase) — though I very much doubt that anyone will ever be able to do so quickly enough to use Elvish as a spoken language, for any but the most trivial sorts of declarative sentences.

I hate to be the one, but I haven't seen anyone else refer to them: how good are LLMs at following patterns of invented languages, in either direction (ie. inventing a translation from English to Sindarin and then, separately, translating the invented Sindarin back to English)? It's a usage where "hallucinations" are basically required, but also, the consistency of hallucinations has to be high.

I believe that we have witnessed the ultimate in prescriptivism.

more terse than an actual tolkien book

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