nuq-Daq yuch Dapol?

[andrewducker]

[Poll #1550650]

Comments

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

Were you watching QI on Dave last night perchance? And if so, why is Panglish not on the list?

[andrewducker]

Nope, not seen an episode of QI in a couple of years now.

I was discussing mandated common keyboards with a friend and Esperanto came up.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

I have copy-edited Star Trek books.

[neuralbuddha.livejournal.com]

According to someone I know with a PhD in linguistics, Klingon is the better crafted language and has more speakers.

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

I can't speak for how well crafted it is but Esperanto has orders of magnitude more speakers.

[andrewducker]

100,000 - 2 million for Esperanto (presumably depending on the meaning of "fluent". Klingon - 12.

[neuralbuddha.livejournal.com]

I'd ask for a source on this but I could probably track down six or seven speakers on my own. Hell, I could download a phrasebook and learn myself.

[neuralbuddha.livejournal.com]

And if it's QI, they change their answers from week to week. Try watching back to back repeats if you don't believe me.

[andrewducker]

"All the fiuent Klingon speakers can comfortably go out to dinner together," Lawrence Schoen, director of the Klingon Language Institute, cheerfully admits. There are about a dozen of them;

From

I don't depend on QI for my information. Not that I've seen an episode in a couple of years.

You may be able to track down 6/7 people who can speak a few phrases - how many of them are actually fluent?

[zornhau.livejournal.com]

Can we have one for Celtic languages now?

[andrewducker]

If I knew anything about the subject. Gimme a list and I'll chuck one up tomorrow...

[zornhau.livejournal.com]

Same survey, just Klingon vs Welsh and Gaelic.

[andrewducker]

What about Irish, Breton, Cornish and Manx?

[zornhau.livejournal.com]

Kill them all! God will know his own!

Oh, hang on, wrong persona.

I mean, yes, why not? It would be an interesting survey.

[crm.livejournal.com]

erm... Breton ascide, those are all dialicts of the same languge, one is more or less made up, one was dead for about 40 years and you got the name of one wrong.

[meaningrequired.livejournal.com]

Well, I've seen signs in Gaelic, I wish I'd seen signs in Klingon.

[meaningrequired.livejournal.com]

Klingon Sign would probably say "only a man with no honor would park here between the hours of 9am and 5pm!"

[sageautumn.livejournal.com]

If I could learn a.. erm.. not popular/not immediately useful to me... language... it'd be one of the Celtic languages.

[zornhau.livejournal.com]

Medieval German would probably have to come first for martial arts reasons, but yes, there are poems and chronicles in Welsh that I'd love to read in the original.

[seph-hazard.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid if it were me I'd learn Tolkinean elvish, but that's because I am very very sad.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Ah, but would you learn Sindarin (more useful for everyday conversation) or Quenya (the more beautiful an scholarly)? And even then there are dialect choices. :-)

[sageautumn.livejournal.com]

... sad there isn't more Tolkinean elvish/there aren't more books to it?

[feorag.livejournal.com]

Carson a'bheil thu ag iarraidh an poll seo?

Disclaimer: might be garbled due to excessive recent use of 日本語 getting in the way of everything.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Hm. I was surprised to discover that I voted for esperanto but not klingon -- although that probably ought to be the case in general, I expected that I, and that my friends, would find Klingon more often. I'm interested to see everyone else did.

(I assume if -- as unlikely as it seems -- you could vote for both, you should not vote, or vote for whichever was useful more often.)

Of course, there might be times when it might be useful to know EITHER, eg. to keep notes which are not trivially decodable by someone else :)

[lpetrazickis.livejournal.com]

I would expect Klingon to be more useful for the purposes of indecipherable note-taking. I understand that Esperanto is somewhat similar to Romance and Slavic languages in its grammar and vocabulary.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Indeed, I nearly said it but didn't go that far.

[andrewducker]

Yup, whichever was _more_ useful.

And I've never encountered Esperanto in the wild, while I have watched several TV shows and movies which include Klingon.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I have watched several TV shows and movies which include Klingon.

:) I have too, but I assumed (?) all of them were designed to have their optimum artistic effect when you find out what the Klingon means when and only when there are subtitles, and have no reason to doubt that, which means that even though I might have understood more, I wouldn't have said it was useful.

Whereas I have -- very very very rarely -- heard something in Esperanto without translation.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Have you seen Gattaca? A lot of the background speech is in Esperanto.

Also, have you read any of Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat books?

[andrewducker]

Good counterexamples!

I hadn't realised the background speech in Gattaca was Esperanto - and I have read the SSR books, and had completely forgotten about the Esperanto in that!

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

I'd rather like to learn to write Arabic -- but that's mostly a matter of wanting to do the ornate calligraphy myself, for which a keyboard (even plus PhotoShop for shaping-to-fit-spaces) seems to be simply inadequate. Not that I ever mastered (or accomplished much in) the "grass script" sometimes used in Japanese poetry manuscript, mind you.

[cybik.livejournal.com]

For a while my brother was learning Manchu..

[kashandara.livejournal.com]

I've been in a couple of relationships that I'm pretty sure the other party would have taken the break up hints better/faster if I could have given them in Klingon. This is not true of Esperanto...

[chuma.livejournal.com]

My boss is some higher up in the Esperanto society, so probably would just about be more useful than a language I would never need to use.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

This poll needs a third option, for "I have had an equal number of occasions" - in my case, zero for both.

[luckylove.livejournal.com]

There's a wonderful episode of Frasier where speaking Klingon turns out ot be very important. I think it's my favourite episode.

a more serious poll

[remush.livejournal.com]

see http://www.freewebs.com/international-languages/
results at http://multivote.sparklit.com/poll.spark/3142


3072 voted on " Which language should be the world's official common language? "

Results today (2010-04-14)
324 English
1964 Esperanto

247 "newly developed language"

Klingon should be mentioned here a few times
(adding your 43 votes here won't change much)

Re: a more serious poll

[remush.livejournal.com]

Sorry,
Klingon should be mentioned under
"Other existing constructed language" (100 voters)

Re: a more serious poll

[andrewducker]

I find the idea of an official common language pretty silly, to be honest. If there is a common language then it will happen slowly, and will sprout dialects as it does so. I find it incredibly unlikely that there will ever single unified language spoken by everyone.

Well, maybe binary :->

Re: a more serious poll

[remush.livejournal.com]

Thanks for your honesty.
"[...]happen slowly [...]"
You are right... much too slowly.
"[...] sprout dialects"
This is assuming that a language like Esperanto will evolve like natural languages did: thanks to illiterates. Analyze how Esperanto evolved during the last century, and you will notice it does follow another pattern.

A common language (as Esperanto) would be a blessing for humanity (well...assuming the values Esperantists are cherishing are taken with the language.)

Re: a more serious poll

[andrewducker]

I find the idea that anything other than a tiny proportion of people will switch to speaking Esperanto also rather silly.

Something like Globish as a second language seems rather more likely.

Re: a more serious poll

[remush.livejournal.com]

"switch to speaking Esperanto rather silly"

As silly as switching to the Euro, or more?

"Something like Globish"
or like Basic English, or Kitchen French or Vulgar Latin?

Why would a complete language not suit you as worldwide second language?
What is missing is the political will.

However, something like Mandarin Chinese is even more likely. The disadvantage is that you must start learning now, or your grand children will be left behind.

Re: a more serious poll

[andrewducker]

A currency is a tool - it's not a system that people have learned from birth. To switch from one currency to another requires only minor effort, and it's not possible to continue to using the old currency when everyone else switches to the new one.

A language, on the other hand, is something that people would continue using, and you couldn't simple mandate that everyone switch to a different language, they'd simply continue with the old one. Any government that tried to tell people what language to speak would find itself out of power very quickly.

languages

[mankso.livejournal.com]

Mi parolas Esperanton jam de pli ol 60 jaroj, kaj neniam havis okazon paroli la Klingon-an au ech interesighi pri ghi.
Auskultu foje podkaston en Esperanto che Radio Polonia:
http://www.polskieradio.pl/eo/
au vizitu chiu-jaran kongreson:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Congress_of_Esperanto
The point is 'universal bilingualism' - YOUR ethnic language for you + non-ethnic Esperanto for all, NOT 'one language for the world' as is presently happening with World English!
Tá mé ag foghlaim na Gaeilge anois - tá sí teanga an-dúshlánach. There's some Irish for you too!