I Was a Teenage Language Geek: the official website for the LOTR films has several international counterparts. One is for Finland, and there we find out that "Lord of the Rings" in Finnish is "Taru sormusten herrasta" Now Finnish has always been a fascinating language to me, being that it is so different from Indo-European languages. (It is a member of the Finno-Ugric family of languages.) I figure that "herrasta" must mean "lord," or maybe "lord of" -- Finnish has fifteen different cases, as opposed to the mere four in German or six in Russian, and the case a word belongs to is shown by the suffix appended to the word, which suffix often causes a change in spelling and pronounciation of the rest of the word, etc., etc. -- because "herra" is how you say "Mister," which probably once had the designation "Master" or "My Lord." My interest in Finnish and other odd languages predated my discovery that respectable grownups like Tolkien could have similar interests. Growing up in Miami, I got to hear a lot of Spanish, and they had already instituted mandatory lessons in that language in the public grammar schools down there. The consequence was, for me, to become bored with Spanish specifically (I have never learned to speak it very well), but I became interested in other languages, especially ones that were different from Spanish and English. When I enrolled in junior high (they call it "middle school" everywhere now) I started taking German. The next year I added French to my list of foreign language classes, and then Italian when it was offered in my high school. I took a couple of semesters in community college of Spanish, finally. I don't really know that my intentions regarding the use of all these languages were realistic; I had some vague idea of becoming an interpreter and leading a glamorous life of international travel and intrigue. (That was before I had ever really been anywhere.) Unfortunately, I have let my knowledge of the vocabulary of all these languages slide, but phrases still come back to me from time to time, and I don't find subtitled movies to be the headache-inducing inconvenience that other people seem to.
Posted by Andrea Harris at January 1, 2003 02:20 PMWhen I was a young teen, I tried to invent my own alphabet. I figured that was the first step in inventing languages. I was going to have the voiced and unvoiced versions of consonants differ only by some stroke---a bar or something. Occasionally I would decide the alphabet would be made "logically" of only straight lines, or only of arcs. All went smoothly until I got to the vowels, where it dawned on me that there were approximately an infinite number of ways to make vowel sounds. Eventually I sort of gave it up.
When I got into college I took a semester of Russian (further semesters conflicted with my physics classes), and when we got to the sound "bl" (sort of), I saw how foolish my attempts at finding letters for vowel sounds was. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined "bl".
Posted by: Angie Schultz at January 1, 2003 at 02:49 PMIt's sort of like the "i" in "it," as I recall. Only not. (I have one of those "Teach Yourself Russian" books from when I had ambitions of teaching myself Russian.) Anyway, when I was inventing languages, I decided to limit my vowels to the English ones, and my language to sounds approximating Spanish, or something like that. My language, my rules!
[Note: this comment has been corrected. "Ambissions"? Sheesh, I need a nap.]
Posted by: Andrea Harris at January 1, 2003 at 03:02 PMWell, my Russian teacher was a Swede, and it was more than twenty years ago, but I seem to remember that she said that bl was pronounced "ooh-ee". Keep saying that with less and less space between the syllables until there's only one syllable. Or, as I heard it described later, pucker your mouth as if you're going to say "ooh", but instead say "ee". I can make several sounds like that, so that's hardly helpful to someone who hasn't heard it.
But your note about "i as in it" brings up a point I made before, then deleted. Another frustration was pronunciation guides which would say things like "pronounced like a as in father", except I pronounced it "a as in rather". This left me wondering if there was a vowel sound between father and rather. And then is ah different from aw? And is that different from short o? And so on, ad infinitum. I wanted to be complete, you see. I must have been reading about proposed universal languages, or something.
Mind you, there are no doubt answers to these questions, but in Rat's Ass, Missouri, we didn't have the resources to look them up.
Posted by: Angie Schultz at January 1, 2003 at 04:07 PMEven in Miami back in the day language resources were hard to come by (except for Spanish). Now we can go to Border's and buy language software and tapes and everything in anything from Bantu to Welsh, or order stuff over the internet.
Posted by: Andrea Harris at January 1, 2003 at 04:17 PMIn one of Shaw's plays, he has a Polish protagonist explain how to pronounce her name by having the others say fish church(for the SHCH written as SZCZ combo in the first part of it).
Posted by: Frank C at January 1, 2003 at 07:14 PM