Clik here to view.
Ave Na’vi
By now, most earthlings have at least a passing familiarity with James Cameron’s fantasy–sci-fi film Avatar, and if you’ve seen it you’ll have heard its original language Na’vi, named after the giant...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Tolkien on language invention
J. R. R. Tolkien’s deep interest in language is evident to his readers and to anyone familiar with the broad facts of his professional life: as well as being a famous and well-regarded author, he was a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How the Klingon language was invented
For Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984), linguist Marc Okrand was asked to develop the Klingon language. Most of it he made up, but there was some raw material to begin with: Klingon names,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The invented languages of Ithkuil and Blissymbols
Joshua Foer has a long and interesting article at the New Yorker on Ithkuil, an original language with “two seemingly incompatible ambitions”: to be both maximally precise and maximally concise, so it...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Centring around phonetic alphabets
Over at Macmillan Dictionary Blog, I’ve been writing about idioms and alphabets, specifically centre around and “SaypU”. In Centring around a usage disagreement, I discuss the phrase centre around and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Incubus: a film in Esperanto with William Shatner
On a walk in Galway once I met a Polish couple poring over a map. We were going the same way, and fell into step. They were in town for an Esperanto conference, and when the man – an Esperanto...
View Article
