Daily Dose of English 142
Conlangs
Daily Dose of English 142
Intermediate
Hey everyone! My name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about conlangs. Conlangs. And unless you're somebody who's specifically interested in languages and conlangs, you almost certainly will not have heard this word before. Most native English speakers won't know it either. It's not a very common word outside of its specific niche, you can say. A niche is... What's a good way to describe a niche? Like a small group of, but not, hmm, not really a group though. It's more like a specific interest, I would say. And so video games could be considered a niche, right? Because a lot of people don't play video games. Special interest in technology is kind of a niche. Conlangs are a niche, as another example. So conlangs are actually, the word, let's break down the word first. The word comes from constructed, which is the con part, and then lang, which is a language. And then the S is just making it plural in general. So a conlang is a constructed language. And a constructed language means that it didn't happen naturally. Those are called natural languages that we use to communicate, right? English, Spanish, Chinese, every language that is spoken natively by people is usually a natural language, a natlang for short. And those are usually the languages that you'll find people learning, right? You're learning English, I'm learning Czech, those are all natural languages. Constructed languages, though, are languages that people, usually hobbyists of some kind, have built for some reason or made usually for fun. It's usually something that people do because they're interested, not really for any other purpose. A really good example is when they're used in movies or TV shows. because sometimes you want to add a language to a world in order to make it feel a little bit more real. One of the most famous conlangs, for example, is Klingon, which is from the Star Trek series. Somebody made this language, they built it to be and feel and sound sort of alien. And it does, right? They added a bunch of consonants and things that feel and sound alien. Let me actually look up Klingon. But it is, in a way, like a language. It's not a language that humans speak. It uses things that would never be used, if that makes any sense. And there's a lot of sounds that don't really make sense for human languages and that sort of thing. like things that make it not real, but they're like are things that have been chosen to happen in the language and like it was built, right, if that makes any sense. Let's see, I'm trying to find something interesting about it. Right, they built, they made their own writing system, that sort of thing. Klingon is an example of a language that humans can learn though. It's a little bit, it definitely sounds weird. You can hear it if you look it up. But it has human-like stuff in it so that the actors could use it, essentially. And there are some people that speak it, right? There are some usually nerd people, nerds that have learned Klingon because they find it interesting and cool and they like the idea of learning a constructed language. Sorry, I just ate some peanuts and so I have stuff in my teeth. Yeah, so that's an example of a constructed language. There are plenty of these constructed languages that are used in TV show and films or books or whatever. Klingon is one of the famous ones and there's also Dothraki, which is made for the Game of Thrones. made for the Game of Thrones TV shows, or I guess TV show, it's one TV show. And that one also I think is a little bit even more popular because it's a little bit more fleshed out, you could say, so it's a little bit more in-depth, because the person that made it has been making languages for quite a while, so he's a bit more experienced in making them feel a bit more real, that sort of thing. And then there is also Na'vi, which is a language used in the Avatar movies, the big blue people. And that is a language that also was created to feel and sound a bit alien. And there's actually a whole bunch of the movie in it, I think. Not most of it, like there's like several scenes, like the actors use it and that sort of thing. The last one that I think is really famous is the Elvish language, which I don't remember the name of it. that is used in Lord of the Rings. But yeah, that one's also pretty well known. And I think that, I don't know if it's actually true or not, but some people say that J.R.R. Tolkien originally was interested in conlangs and was building conlangs this elvish language, sort of in his free time, as an interest thing, and then started to want to expand it and make a world, and then arose the Hobbit books and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Not sure if that's true, but I could totally see somebody starting out as being interested in languages, trying to get a mosquito in here, okay, trying to, and then writing something from that. But not all conlangs are necessarily made with a purpose of fun. They can also be used for, or attempted to be used for intercommunication. So for example, there is a language called Esperanto. There's also a couple other ones that are similar, where the idea is to make a language that is actually really easy to learn so that more people can learn it and communicate more quickly. So for example, Esperanto has a lot of very similar words to languages from a lot of different parts of Europe. It is very regular. So once you learn a rule, it always applies. There's no variation there. And there's a lot of coding in it, if that makes any sense. I think all verbs end in I or something like that to make it very clear. If you look at a word, you know exactly what it's doing without any extra thinking. Natural languages do not do this, so it ends up being a bit weird, but these languages are made to be easy to learn. Or they can might be used to interconnect some languages. So for example, Interslavic is a language that exists and the idea is to connect all of the Slavic languages in a way that is easier to understand. So somebody who speaks in Interslavic, theoretically, any speaker of a Slavic language can understand them fairly well without even like studying anything. So If an inter-Slavic person meets a Russian person, a Czech person, and a Polish person, they could say sentences that all of them would understand relatively well. And there's some of these like inter-Latin, I think, like they exist in different parts of the world, but they're not really actually used. Pretty much none of these constructed languages actually have caught on to be used by a large amount of people. I believe that there are some groups that use Esperanto, but it's mostly for fun or for learning because it's interesting or whatever, like that community. There's also some other languages that are made to be like for to do more almost like a a philosophical point or of some kind like for example somebody trying to make a an impossible language a language that is that is explicit in every single thing um in a way that humans can't think or thinking about okay what if language this language doesn't uh i don't know doesn't have I mean, that's also made for media. So in the movie Arrival, there's a constructed language. It's a good movie, you should watch it. But the language that the creatures use is very different than anything humans could even think about, if that makes any sense. And so that's another example of a constructed language that does something very different than what is possible. But my favorite one and the one that I'm most interested in is called Toki Pona, which is supposed to be the sort of opposite. It's a language that is so simple in terms of what it is, is that you can't really have any conversations without context. And it often simplifies your ideas. And so there's only 125 words that exist. and that's it, which is not very many. Most languages, like real languages, have tens of thousands of words. And Toki Pona is the idea that it's very simple, very quick to learn, but what it does is that it means that you have to simplify your thoughts down, right? There's only, there's like one word for animals that are sort of cuter and one word for animals that are a bit more like lizards or whatever. And so you have to sort of simplify your ideas down, right? You can't say cat or dog, you can kind of just say fuzzy animal as like one word, or you can't really count, right? There's one, two, and many, I think. I don't know exactly, I don't speak it. I plan to learn it later on, but that's a different thing. It really simplifies your thinking and your thoughts because context is so important. That's what I'm really interested in. I think it's really cool. I will let you know once I have learned it, but I'm doing that for a bit of a marketing thing. You'll see that hopefully later this year. That's all that I have time for today. I have been talking for about 10 and a half minutes. If you're interested in conlangs, I would love to hear your thoughts, or maybe have you ever played around with doing them as a kid or something like that? I'd be curious to know, but, oh, excuse me. That's everything that I have for today. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you again tomorrow. Have a good one. Bye-bye.
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