The title of the movie fits the expat’s linguistic experiences

Nope,  not the film with Scarlett Johansson.  My life, rather the life of living abroad and being lost in translation with languages.

Recently I’ve been thinking  about language barriers and how much that magnifies culture shock and how much really is lost in interpretation.

Lost In Interpretation

I began studying Spanish when I was 9 years old in school.  We had a teacher who would come by our elementary school classroom and give us Spanish lessons three days a week.   We had those classes until the eighth grade.

When I attended highschool, I had just turned 13 years old, yes I was 12 when I started, and I was the youngest person in my highschool at that time.  I swore that I wasn’t going to take another Spanish class.  Why?  I grew up in a small town (9,000 people) that was 60 percent Latino, so I heard Spanish all day long everywhere I went. It wasn’t unique or special to me.  It was very practical and a necessity. When I wasn’t listening to Spanish then I heard its cousin, Portuguese everywhere else, because that region of California has a large population of people from the Azores.   I didn’t care about Spanish or Portuguese, so I took French instead.

After I graduated from high school my mom took me and my little brother to Mexico during the summer before I started college.   I could have really used Spanish then.

When I started my freshmen year in college I studied French from a Dutch teacher who spoke 16 languages.  Looking back on it now, that was not a good idea.  He frequently code-switched in class from French, to Spanish, to Russian.  As far as grammar and orthography went, he was a great teacher.  Hooked-on-phonics, French style, was his down fall.

I lived in France and Geneva, Switzerland as a part of my college education.  After all, I was getting a degree in languages.  My frustration was being able to understand 90% of what was being said to me and NOT being able to express myself.  That gets old very fast.   In my zealous insanity, I took 21 units/credits while I was getting part of my BA while living abroad.  Yes, that exactly as stressful as it sounds.  21 and I had classes from 7am until 5 pm.  Apparently, I enjoyed torturing myself.  I wept everyday over my grammar exercises at the ripe age of 18 and I ate chocolate and got fat.  I had a teacher who was French by citizenship and Italian by ethnicity, who tortured me everyday in class.  He would tell me that it was my fault that I didn’t understand the subjunctive tense and that most Americans don’t understand their own grammar so how could I understand French.   I cried and ate more Swiss chocolate.

To make matters worse, my dear roommate was from Puerto Rico and didn’t speak a word of English or French.   That is when it helped that I had spent years immersed in the Spanish language and even though I had rebelled against learning it in a proper format, I understood what my roommate was saying.  When she first moved in the dorm, I pretended that I couldn’t understand Spanish.  Not because I was being mean, it was simply to avoid confusion.  I didn’t think it was possible to have enough room in my brain for French and Spanish.   Every night she rattled on in sing-song Puerto Rican Spanish and would ask me questions.   I didn’t want to be rude and she was so friendly so I gave up and talked to her…every night.

Languages made my brain hurt, even if they both come from the same source, Latin.   I could feel my brain begging me for mercy.  Everyone on my floor came from Latin America or Spain.  My RA (resident assistant) was Argentine.  The next door neighbors were Mexican and Brazilian.  The people across the hall were Dominican and Irish/Honduran.  Another girl was Mexican and we had some ladies from Spain.  How would I learn French with all these people speaking Spanish?

Somewhere between the tears, Swiss chocolate, and fat I managed to learn how to speak French.  Literally one day, I was unable to properly articulate myself and the next day I was spouting out full paragraphs and completed ideas in French with ease.

U.S. Citizens don’t learn other languages…well

Why can’t U.S. citizens learn a second language and speak it well?  I have friends from the Sweden, Serbia, France, Mexico, Argentina, Turkey and Germany who speak English very well.   I always ask them, “When did they start teaching you guys English, when you were two years old?”

Their response, “No I started learning English when I was ten or eleven.”

WHAT!?!?!    Why can’t U.S. citizens learn another language?  What is wrong with us?

And then there was Fa’a Samoa

When I was in New Zealand, I took Samoan language lessons.   In my opinion, Polynesian languages are the easiest languages to learn on Earth.  The Samoan alphabet consists of 14 letters, I was in heaven.  Tongan wasn’t harder.  The idioms and expressions weren’t difficult to grasp.  Phonetically it was easy to pronounce and the grammar was a piece of cake.

I stopped learning Samoan for two reasons:

1.  It’s not a commonly used language.  If I’m ever stranded in Russia, France, Brazil, Mexico, Egypt, or South Africa for some reason, the chances of running into a Samoan speaker is highly unlikely.  It’s not an official language of the UN, NATO or Interpol.

2.  When I moved back to California, I would have to travel to San Francisco or Daly City just to be around Samoans to speak with.  That was an hour out of my way. Due to gentrification, most of the Samoan community was moving to Sacramento or Los Angeles anyway.

Still it would be nice to be able to speak in Samoan so that if I needed to say something to someone in privacy, we wouldn’t have to whisper in public.  That would have been nice.

Another positive thing is that it’s not a difficult language to learn.

Farsi Attempts

Between 2004 – 2007, I was obsessed with learning Farsi.  I bought the Rosetta Stone software, hired a tutor, and practiced the writing/calligraphy.   My tutor was Armenian and had lived in Iran for many years and the tutor didn’t like Iran or its people.  How much of his dislike was transmitted when he taught me the language?

After a while, I decided that I needed a better tutor who was actually from Iran and I didn’t like Rosetta Stone.  I found Rosetta Stone annoying because it claimed that I was learning the language the way an infant learns its native language.  The problem is that I’m not an auditory learner or a visual learner.  I have to write it down or emulate it in an activity.  I can’t stare at a screen and repeat the word for dog and cat over and over again in Farsi, while an image is displayed.

I put the Farsi lessons on hold.  Besides, did I really think that I could safely visit Iran anytime soon on my U.S. passport?

 ქართული ენა

I moved to Georgia (Saqartvelo/საქართველო) and was plunged into a crash course of Kartuli, the most commonly used language of Georgia.

I really liked the look of the Georgian alphabet and I still do.  It’s pretty.  I have found Georgian grammar easy but the pronunciation of words to be difficult.  The aspirated ‘K’ is something that my tongue and throat cannot utter.  I have tried and tried and I can’t do it.

Some people can’t roll their r’s when they speak Spanish or Italian.  I’m guessing that the aspirated K is like that with the Georgian language.

I wanted to say many things in Kartuli but I couldn’t do it.  Sorry.

While I was in Georgia, I met a lady from Moscow who volunteered to teach me Russian.  I went to one lesson and never went back.

Why?  I was too overwhelmed with learning Kartuli and the fact that I was sick most of the time when I was living in Georgia.

I found Russian to be the opposite of Kartuli.  The phonology was easy but the grammar was difficult.  Pronouncing Russian words was fun and I enjoyed the way they rolled off of my tongue but the grammar was on a whole other level.

Türk mantıklı bir dildir

Turkish is the one language that was difficult enough to be challenging but easy enough for me to enjoy it and not give up.  I didn’t live in Turkey long enough to really dig into it.

I like the Turkish language because it’s logical.  It’s one of the most logical languages.  There is a set of grammar rules and there are very little deviations and exceptions.   It’s easy for me to pronounce Turkish words.  I like to hear people speaking Turkish.   Turkish is a rhyming language and what is interesting to me is that it seems that the nouns and pronouns are conjugated like the verbs.  My problem in Turkish was that I couldn’t tell if a person was talking to me or someone else, because the endings of the verbs indicate whether the sentence is about me, you, them, us, or it.  It’s also a gender neutral language like Farsi.

How do I know if you’re talking about him or her?   How?

My Turkish friends told me that I had to listen to the whole sentence and then I would know if the person is referring to a male or a female.  What!!!!!

Italiano è figlio del latino

I moved to Italy.   Italian like Spanish is easy.  I’m back in the same boat that I was in with French almost 15 years ago.   I understand what is being said to me but I lack the full vocabulary to respond.  It’s funny because I haven’t been here very long and I’m able to have conversations with people.  Granted, we’re not having philosophical musings but I can have discussions about the weather, food, movies, and even politics.

I’ve noticed that when I’m unsure about a vocabulary word, I’ll say the one that I know in French and Spanish and then pause to see the person’s reaction.  If they nod and repeat it back to me with an Italian accent then I know that word must have the same root in Latin.  I always want to say porque instead of perche or donde instead of dove (there aren’t accents because I haven’t figured out how to make the keyboard put accents.).  It’s funny because I think that my Spanish skills suck but the knowledge has helped a lot in Italy.  Italian spelling is closer to French but the pronunciation is like Spanish.

Eventually I will have to knuckle down and do grammar exercises and drills if I’m going to be proficient in Italian.

Comu si dici in sicilianu?

This brings me to the discussion of Sicilian or Siciliano as it is known.   I really want to learn it and I’ve met many Sicilians on the island, tell me that I shouldn’t learn it.  It’s useless and that I should focus on Italian first.  I agree with that assessment in that I should learn Italian first but I disagree about not learning Sicilian.   Unfortunately due to xenophobia and prejudice from Northern Italians and the influence of the political party, Lega Nord, many people don’t like Southern Italians, specifically people from Naples, Reggio Calabria, Sicily and Sardinia.   It’s really sad because it has caused many people to deliberately unlearn the language spoken at home and in their neighborhoods.

I was sitting on a train from Rome to the town of Nettuno in June.  An older man who was seated next to me told me that Sicilian is not a dialect, it’s a language.   He told me that it’s considered a language because it written, has literature and Sicilian documents.  Italians from Sicily and Northern Italy, tell me that it’s a dialect.   But sometimes I meet people, like the older man, who insist that it’s a language.  I have met some Sicilians who are ashamed when people speak Sicilian.  It makes me wonder if it is viewed in the same negative light as Ebonics in the United States?

I think it’s sad if any language, dialect, or pidgin become extinct.  Maybe that’s just the nerd in me.

My technique

When I’m learning a new language, I want to learn the grammar rules and the pronouns right away.   I worry about the vocabulary words like body parts, buildings, and instruments later on.  They will come in time.

This is why Rosetta Stone and I had to part company.  I’ve met other people who LOVE Rosetta Stone and it effective for them.  To each their own.  Everyone learns languages differently.

Whenever I hear a foreign language for the first time it sounds like gibberish to me with a lilt or rhythm.  I found the link below from youtube about fake languages.  The languages aren’t real, they’re just nouns and verbs put together without grammar and they’re not in sentences.  The person who is saying them is speaking with the accent of a specific language like American English, Spanish, Mandarin, French, etc.    So check out this link and it might help you to empathize with people who are learning a new language.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWGBhdn5kBg&feature=related

And one last thing…

When I was in Istanbul I stayed with my friend, AS.  She had two roommates and one of them, J, is from Northern Germany and he has finished medical school.  He is in Istanbul to do his internship before he begins his residency.   So I asked him if he had studied Turkish before he came to Istanbul. He told me that he hadn’t.  Mind you, he isn’t a German of Turkish ethnicity, so he didn’t grow up in a household with relatives speaking Turkish.   He’s a German of German ethnicity.   I wanted to know how difficult the internship was in Istanbul if he didn’t speak the language when he arrived?  He told me that the language wasn’t too much of a problem and that he found the internship too easy.  He hoped the residency was more challenging.  I tried to keep from reacting, then I wanted to know if he took the exams in German or in English.   Maybe the hospitals and medical establishments in Turkey provided multi lingual exams?   No, he had taken all of the exams in Turkish.

So let me get this straight. He’s German and he didn’t know a word of Turkish when he arrived a year ago?  Then he decided to do the intership program in Istanbul and he thought the program was too easy and he didn’t even speak the language when he arrived?

Wow.  Of course, one year later he is fluent in Turkish.

I can’t imagine going to school in another country without learning the language first, showing up and feeling that the classes are too easy, and doing well in the classes.  All while learning a foreign language and taking the exams in that language at the same time.   The German guy is smarter than the rest of us.

Can you say Gangsta?  Holla!

Now for those who are not familiar with Chomskyian syntactic theory 1980s style, IP is a fancy term for clause. And [Spec,IP] is a subject position projected off that branch of a tree diagram depicting sentence structure. The construction of sentences starts with the VP, the verb phrase with its head, the verb responsible for selecting the right number and type of noun phrases to make the verb makes sense and any other additional material that is optionally added. Once the VP is complete, In English, a Noun Phrase, NP moves to this subject position to make it grammatical.

I ‘borrowed’ this image for UCLA to demonstrate the basic structure of a sentence diagrammed as a tree. Now see the node, IP and on the left of it is an NP eventually labelled subject? This is the site of English subject NPs. I like many others would suggest that this NP though was originally lower down in the first left branch of VP and had to move to that higher branch.

Ok let’s get to Yoda English

The pattern VOS is now often conceptualised as predicate fronting. That is the V+O part of  the structure detaches from its home position and moves to a place higher in a tree structure.

This means we can schematise the structure as in the picture below. Note that I have labelled two elements in the tree FP for functional projections. In the stolen picture above these might be equivalent to CP and IP. These FPs are parts of syntactic structure that are assembled after the VP and are involved in the making of grammar, VP is really just about verbal semantics.

We can use this to understand such structures as the ever-famous help you I will.

Syntax begins with the building of the verb phrase.

• [I help you]

Let us then build a functional projection above the VP which houses the AUX, in this case the modal will.

• [FP will [VP I help you]]

The subject moves out of the VP and into this FP

• [FP I will [I help you]]

The next FP is projected which must be filled by the VP (remember the subject has already moved, so we don’t hear words that have the strikethrough

• [FP [VP I help you] [ I will] [I help you]]

Having these two phases of movement (and here I use the term phase non-technically) derives the appropriate word order for Yoda English and follows some proposals for VOS and VSO order in human languages. So Yoda English is not so extraterrestrial as we might first have thought. Rather rare, though it is, there are human speec h communities who show these kinds of operations to produce their preferred word order.

http://www.wapt.com/video/24967422/detail.html

Quiet in the cheap seats or I’ll Klingon death grip you.

You can read about the opera here

http://www.u-theopera.org/

Of particular interest is the message sent in Klingon to the star Arcterus, the home solar system of the Klingons according to Star Trek. The message was voiced by Marc Okrand, the creator of the language himself.  I wonder if he felt weird doing it.

Esperanto was constructed in order to help bring understanding between people who spoke different languages, in the hope that this could bring peace. Lojban was initially made with the idea of testing the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis; that language, ordinary socially constructed natural languages, influenced thought.

Lojban was based on an earlier language designed for logic, Loglan. Loglan was designed to be machine readable, parse-able by machines like computers. As such it had very strict form and was very regular. (Read more on Lojban history.)

Lojban differed from Loglan in that, like many natural languages used by human speakers, Lojban included the point of view of a speaker. It’s a bit of a kludge, but it works okay. We often like to structure our sentence according to who said them. It’s a major way to give otherwise perfectly logical statements meaning. (See Peircean Logic and Biosemiotics.) Mathematical logic after all is just a set of clever tautologies.

The grammars of many European languages are structured around who said what, and to whom, whether these theys are socially inferior or superior (formal/informal). Or what gender speaker/spoken to/spoken of are, or even what gender non-sexed things are, as ascribed by sex based noun-class systems. Esperanto has this ‘gendering’ in vestigial form. In response, non-gendered versions like Ido have forked–> see Gender Reform in Esperanto).

I’d learn Lojban ahead of the others, and have started in a small way, except is it really that far from learning Klingon?

I’ve been learning Polish over the last year or two and I just can’t stand the crap in the natural languages, the irregularities, the exceptions, and the stupid bits like gender. Polish, like some other Slavic languages even conjugate the past tense of verbs according to the gender. Considering that the subjunctive (could be, might be) is based on these past tense forms it just a massive #fail for me as an adult. Ethnicity, identity is based on this crap? We’re proud of it because we are all idiots together.

Great.

Now I don’t want any language to disappear, go extinct, but really? Who gives a flying what gender I am when I say I might go to town tomorrow?

There’s an argument that languages have the grammar they do because babies learn languages and they like regularity but do not tend to judge the sense of that regularity, nor notice that all those exceptions make the regularity a fractal type of thing. Babies just don’t care what they learn. No discrimination, no style control.

So I am in favour of constructed languages, so long as they are not stupid. Tolkien’s Elvish and Klingon are stupid. Fun for a little while but I wish they would go away.

French is a curated language, it’s completely stupid, because political forces are trying to maintain a natural language. Polish is similar to French but it’s not curated so much as fossilized by historical forces.

Yes, English is stupid too, all natural languages are a pain to learn as an adult because of all the irregularities that babies just don’t care about.

Yes, I am blaming babies for the mess. (Can’t find reference as yet).

But what to do?

Lojban is a good start, but I feel like forking it, by starting with the point of view of the speaker, not kludging it on to a substrate of “mathematical logic” (as Peirce would call it).

The inteprenant focus, yeah, and I like those natural languages that structure some of their grammar not according to gender/noun-classes (what a waste of mental processing power!)  but on how the speaker acquired the information, i.e. structuring according to the quality of the information, the meta-information.

The meaning not the logic, but logic ahead of irregular crap.

A well structured grammar, IMHO, would be based on the point of view of the point of view.

Babies just don’t care about that.

Crossposted at spacecollective.org

And I don’t mean ancient languages like Sanskrit or Latin because they are real. Because they are the forefathers of modern languages. Because even if they no longer live and breathe, they used to live and breathe. Esperanto has never lived or breathed even if it has hoped to (and the word actually means ‘hoping’ or ‘the one who hopes’). I don’t believe a language is a living language unless it grows out of a culture.

If I want a truly international language, I already know it. It’s English. It is also one with cultural roots.

Since the end of the 19^th century a number of languages have been created by enthusiastic geniuses with the aim of uniting the world. The most well-known ones include Esperanto, Volapuk and Interlingua. While browsing the web I also chanced upon this impressive effort to create a pan-Slavic language: www.slovio.com. There are communities of speakers of these languages. According to estimates, there are up to 2,000 native speakers of Esperanto in the world today, i.e. those who learned it from their parents (one of them being George Soros, interestingly enough!), and a lot more people speak it as a ‘foreign’ language.

Now I do believe that every human is free to get their kicks from any fad they choose as long as it does not represent a hazard to other humans, so I am glad those people have found their passion. I’m glad they have a reason to get together, talk in their language, sing songs in their language, write and read magazines in their language, maybe even shoot films in their language. I don’t mind if they advertise their passion in any way they choose. It’s just that I will never join their club.

If I were asked to explain very briefly why, I would put it like this: The difference between a real language and an artificial language is like that between a human and a cyborg. I would never befriend a cyborg, not matter how perfectly designed and how masterfully put together it is. There are so many humans around.

Na'vi fandom is global and fueled by imagination

We recently embarked on a project to record Na’vi phrases into Mightyverse. Na’vi is a constructed language created by James Cameron and Dr. Paul Frommer for the movie Avatar. Due to the popularity of the movie, it’s estimated that Na’vi is already the fourth most popular constructed language, after Esperanto, Klingon and Elvish (from the Lord of the Rings).

I’ve been fascinated by the community that’s sprung up around Na’vi and the people who are learning it. It has the potential to become a relatively popular language, with events where people communicate solely in Na’vi, teaching it to their children and translating texts like Shakespeare and the Bible. In the face of the decimation of indigenous languages worldwide, friends of mine who are following Mightyverse have questioned why we would spend anytime documenting Na’vi while so many worthy, incredibly vital languages need to be recorded.

That’s a fair and thoughtful question.

My own feelings about the movie are complicated. I thought it was ultimately a violent revenge fantasy cloaked in a peaceful message film. Kind of Dances with Wolves all over again, with a weird Pocahontas story woven in. I’m not a big fan of the film and felt kind of yucky after seeing it. But I like weird stuff and I’m clearly not the intended audience for the film anyway. I have to confess though that I was absolutely entranced by the craft of the film and the exquisite production that it represents. Cameron has no equal in the universal spectacle of Hollywood film. And his work has now spread across the globe to places more refined stories will never reach. It’s a true phenomena of human storytelling writ large.

So, here are the reasons why I felt Na’vi recordings could be important for the evolution of Mightyverse.

- Na’vi is international. I love the fact that people all over the world are learning Na’vi and in the process sharing a love of language across cultural borders.
- Na’vi learners are obsessed. It’s amazing how many incredible resources have been produced so quickly, and how they are evolving daily. They’ve escaped beyond the confines of the film and are now creating their own world far more interesting than the limits of Pandora.
- Na’vi excites children about language and other cultures. Children are the key to the future of language survival. If they learn about adpositions, topical, dative and genitive cases through Na’vi, well that can’t be too harmful.

Finally, if people learn about Mightyverse through a link somewhere to Na’vi phrases, well, that would be very nice as well.

To start, a year-old post at Living Languages discusses the growth of Modern Irish teaching in the United States. Apparently a New York radio station has a weekly broadcast in learning the language, while a growing number of universities offer courses. Neat. It ought to be noted that the University of Sydney offers a brand-new course in the language in our Celtic Studies Department.

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On the subject of language learning, Confessions of a Language Addict raises an interesting question. Discussing conlangs such as Tolkein’s elvishes and the Na’vi language from Avatar, he points out that many language-learning tools are heavy on grammar and vocabulary and light on fun. This is especially problematic for conlangs, which only exist to be learned for fun. (Or because you are a crazy person.) On the other hand, the Na’vi language site features a fun (apparently) little workbook with crossword puzzles and the like.

It made me pause. I have at least begun to learn Latin, Old English, Old Norse, and Old Irish. Of these, Latin had the most available resources for obvious reasons, being commonly taught at university and even in some few Australian high schools. This latter means that Latin crossword puzzles, ridiculous cartoons, and silly adventures are available for translation. The first Latin text I encountered was the simplified version of Plautus’ Aulularia (an hilarious slapstick comedy) in Jones & Sidwell’s Reading Latin. For the other medieval languages, the work was much more serious, focused on translation of progressively more difficult texts.

I actually prefer to learn my languages this way. I enjoy slowly translating, becoming faster as the grammar becomes natural and the more common vocabulary starts to sink into the mossy bog which is my brain. I wonder if it would be difficult to come up with methods that are less… I’m not sure. Less focused, I suppose. Especially for Old Irish, which is extraordinarily difficult.

How do you prefer to learn languages (whether living, dead, or reviving)?

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Finally, I offer a poem from the High Plains Drifter:

Hringas þríe       þéodnum Ælfa,
allra ældestum,     ofer eormengrunde.
Hringas seofun     innan sele stænnum
Dwergdryhtnum.     Derc heara hús.
Hringas nigon     néote Moncynn,
hláfordas méra     mégas déaðfæge.
Heolstres Hearra     hring ánne weardað
in dryhtsele dimmum     on dercan þrymmsetle
þér licgað scedwa     in londe Mordores.
Hring án gewalde,     hring án gefinde,
hring án gebringe,     hring án gebinde
þéoda swá þéowas     in þéostrum tógedere
þér licgað scedwa     in londe Mordores.

Some readers may recognise a Modern English form of this poem from Professor Tolkien’s translation of the Red Book of Westmarch. This version was found on the manuscript known as St. John’s College Library, Cambridge, MS. B 971. A MnE translation and commentary on the poem can be found here.

I recently learned that there are folks working on constructing languages for these two cultures, through people who also lack the usually requisite nerd-shame. This is fantastic! For all that Klingons are a fierce warrior people, &c. &c., the Vulcan obsession with logic is far more interesting to me as a scholar. Romulans are even more interesting; somewhat mysterious, Paramount has not done much with the race beyond their use as vaguely treacherous and yet occasionally honourable bad guys who are nonetheless widely despised. Also, they are passionate Space pseudo-Romans. Learning that there are folk willing to expand out these tidbits into an artificial language or two warms the cold recesses of my heart.

It is an often overlooked fact in SF world-building that planets -continents! island chains!- are rarely monolingual. Europe is a pretty small area on the global scale and yet has dozens (hundreds?) of languages and dialects covering the continent in a patchwork. A throwaway line justifying multiple fan iterations of ‘Vulcan’ by pointing this out got me thinking. At present, the various Romulan and Vulcan projects appear to be disconnected, with no linguistic similarity between them at all. Furthermore, each is concentrating, rightly enough, on a single dialect of each language. I thought, ‘Wow, wouldn’t it be fun to design an entire family tree for these languages?’ After all, the Romulan and Vulcan peoples share a common ancestor- surely their languages must do the same. The saner parts of my brain tried to shout me down but alas! my insanity will not be denied.

If we look at a single language group within the Indo-European (IE) family, that of the Romance languages, we can see for ourselves how quickly languages may change. From the early years of the first millenium CE to the present day, Latin has evolved into French, Spanish, Italian, and Romanian. If one were to squint and look sideways, it is possible for one to see how the languages retain a common ancestor. Using the example phrase ‘She always closes the window before dining (or having dinner)’ from Wikipedia, we can see this:

Going further back, one may compare entire language groups. As an example, take Old English (a Germanic language) and place it alongside Old Irish (Celtic) and Latin (Italic) to clearly see that all three are closely related IE languages. Below are a handful of words which mostly serve to demonstrate the sound changes that have occured since Proto-Indo-European:

Indo-European Family Tree; Wikipedia

Yet, particularly in the case of Old Irish, each is definitely distinct from the others. Special enough to satisfy the most energetic and enthusiastic creator of conlangs, and yet unified enough for the family tree idea I propose here.

In Vulcan ‘history’, around the 4thC CE on Terra occurred an event known as the Time of Awakening. The Vulcans as we see them on Star Trek -logical, dispassionate- were transformed into such by the teachings of Surak, a scientist-philosopher. The teachings are not entirely relevant to this discussion (not that they are detailed anyway), save to note their emphasis on pure logic in opposition to excessive emotion. Several factions resisted these teachings, and eventually left Vulcan. One such group would eventually settle on Romulus and become the Romulans. This split would also drive language diversity, but in the case of the Time of Awakening/Romulan diaspora there are politically motivated linguistic splits.

Let us call, for convenience, the language spoken by Surak at the Time of Awakening ‘Middle Vulcan’ (MV). It is from this language that modern Vulcan (MnV) dialects descended. We shall all the ancestor of this language ‘Old High Vulcan’ (OHV), which itself descended from older roots. This is vastly simplifying matters, of course, but I hope this is sufficient to demonstrate my point.

THE DISTANT PAST –> Old High Vulcan –> Middle Vulcan (c.400) — {reforms} –> Modern Vulcan (c.2300)

Modern Vulcan will have evolved from Middle Vulcan, but the language reforms introduced by Surak would have served to make the language more logical. Natural languages develop all sorts of weird and wonderful quirks, the most obvious of which are irregular verbs. ‘To be’ is notorious for this; so far as I am aware, ‘to be’ is irregular in all natural languages. Surak’s followers would reform their language to remove oddities such as this, as well as organising noun declensions or the like to work in a more regular pattern. Oddities similar to Latin’s domus would be streamlined. At this point, an organisation (similar to the Terran L’Académie française would be set up to monitor the language and ensure it remains logical- languages behave like living things and have a tendency to evolve in odd directions without guidance. All this would result in MnV behaving quite oddly as a language, being akin to a natural language evolved from OHV in places and yet like a conlang in others.

Naturally, there would be several dialects, possibly even languages, evolved from this. Vulcan was not completely unified during the Time of Awakening, and it is unlikely that a single language would be established as dominant very easily. Different groups interpreted Surak’s teachings in different ways and would evolve their languages from MV accordingly. Furthermore, with the eventual development of universal translators, why would one language become necessary? Logically it would be better to allow individual cultures to retain their autonomy and languages in order to further the diversity of Vulcan literature. Perhaps there is a dominant form, an international language or one used in diplomatic interactions with the Federation- or perhaps not. Star Trek is set in the 24thC CE, and two thousand years is more than sufficient time for languages to develop in a multitude of fascinating ways.

The people who became Romulans deliberately turned their backs on Surak’s logical reforms, preferring to remain an emotional and militaristic people. Diane Duane wrote several Star Trek novels centred on the Romulan people, and detailed how they developed their language. In order to differentiate themselves from their cousins on Vulcan, Romulan linguists artificially aged an older form of their language in a ‘different direction’. If we presume that what we have called OHV is the root language used, then ‘Middle Romulan’, the language developed by the reform, would differ considerably from Middle Vulcan, and yet be clearly related. MV would have a broadly similar patterns of noun declension and verb conjugation in order to be more easily learned, although artificial sound changes would lend the language an entirely different ‘feel’. The sound change from IE to proto-Germanic is a good example of how such changes could work. The problem would be constructing the language so that folk could easily adjust to it, and yet was distinct from MV.

Old High Vulcan — {artificial aging} –>Middle Romulan (c.500) –{evolution} –> Modern Romulan Dialects (c.2300)

The recent Star Trek movie (NuTrek) mentions in passing that there are three principal dialects of Romulan. I rather suspect these are languages rather than ‘dialects’ although I concede that the terms overlap to a certain extent. This is certainly reasonable, for a language family that has developed over almost two millenia (NuTrek is set in the 23rdC) almost certainly without the strictures of a language academy, but I think it would be fun to have only two of these languages be developed from MV. The other, which I shall call Low Romulan (LR) developed more directly from MV. This is the language of those who never quite adjusted to the language change of MR, although certainly words and concepts would have borrowed quite heavily from the rapidly-dominant Romulan tongue. I suspect LR would have been spoken by the lower classes, those for whom the flight from Vulcan was less a matter of choice and more of following their lords and leaders. All this gives Romulan languages quite a character and provides something for xenophilologists into which to sink their teeth.

I’m an historian, not a linguist; I can go no further with my idea than this. This proposal would require a great deal of work, requiring as it does the development of one conlang (Old High Vulcan) and then the artificial-but-seemingly-natural development for Middle Vulcan and later Modern Vulcan; the artificial Middle Romulan and then the natural development of Modern Romulan (1, 2) as well as Low Romulan. A great deal of work, particularly in dictionaries. My own study of languages enables me to pick up the basics of grammar relatively easily; it is in vocabulary that I always stumble, easily bored by repetitive chanting. Nonetheless, a project such as this would be extremely rewarding, particularly for those who -like myself- are fascinated by historical linguistics.

Who is with me?

The 34th Internacia Junulara Festivalo, an annual festival organized by the Italian Esperanto Youth, took place in Roncegno Terme, a small village in the mountains of the Italian Südtirol.

This is a particularly appropriate place to hold an Esperanto conference because it’s a place where languages have been blurred and where the creation of linguistic-national borders has created serious problems. In the twentieth century alone, the area transferred from Austro-Hungarian control to Italian control at the end of World War One, was forcibly “Italianized” under Mussolini, was annexed by Germany for a brief period at the end of World War Two, and became part of Italy after the war, but with both German and Italian designated as official languages.

Nationalists seeking to create friction used language as a tool, with German-speaking South-Tyrolean separatists organizing a bombing campaign starting in the late 1950s and continuing throughout 1960s, and leading to additional legislation and international treaties with Austria in the 1970s to give the province more autonomy within Italy and to protect the rights of minority language speakers there. Today the region boasts 60% Italian speakers, 35% German speakers, and 5% Ladin speakers (I’m not sure how these figures take bilingualism into account).

In other words, the region itself is a living testimony to why Esperanto is such an important idea. Someone gave a lecture in Italian about minority language rights in the region on the second day of the conference, which was Esperantized by Michael “La Voĉo” Boris, and I couldn’t follow all of it but I was totally jazzed that someone else recognized how interesting this was, even if my inner historian was a little bit cranky about the way they were narrativizing bilingualism.

I will also say that the conference was an interesting social experiment. For the first two days I was completely miserable–I had about 40 hours of Esperanto study before I arrived (by which I mean, 20 hours of class time, and 20 of fooling around on the Esperantophone Internet), and so I couldn’t understand everything that was said to me, and I had difficulty forming responses.

Imagine suddenly being in a social situation where a bunch of (mostly male) nerds can climb the social hierarchy by making elaborate puns in a language that you don’t really understand, and on top of that imagine that you’re an Anglophone in a subculture that is pretty hostile to them, and that is how I felt for the first day and a half of my first Esperanto conference.

But things quickly got better when I figured out that I could have halting conversations with other beginners and we could improve each other’s mistakes without making each other feel stupid, and of course when the music started playing and the alcohol started flowing. By the end of the week I was having far more fluid conversations and able to understand a greater percentage of Esperanto at normal speed. I even made some jokes of my own!

(Hearing that I have a “preskaŭ perfekta germana akcento” in Esperanto, rather than the dreaded American accent, helped too. I tried to ask for clarification almost exclusively in German or Spanish, which is something I would recommend to any Anglophone attending an Esperanto conference: people who revert to their mother tongues while in Esperanto-lando are called “krokodiloj,” and I can only imagine that Anglophones are “ŝarkoj.” Embrace your inner polyglot!)

And now I’m home and can’t wait to return, trying to figure out how I can rearrange my summer travel to get to more Esperanto events!

More on Esperanto very soon–for now, I’ll leave you with an Esperanto classic about young idealists. They say we never get old.

Ni bezonas junajn idealistojn
kiuj donu fajreron al popoloj
Idealistoj neniam maljuniĝos!

Title: Crest of the Stars: Princess of the Empire
Japanese Title: 星界の紋章：帝国の王女 (Seikai no monshō: Teikoku no ōjo)
Author: Morioka Hiroyuki (森岡浩之)
Translator: Sue Shambaugh
Publication Year: 1996 (Japan); 2006 (America)
Publisher: Tokyopop
Pages: 212

I am a great lover of books, and I spend a great deal of my time reading. I genuinely enjoy almost everything I read, no matter what the genre, and rarely do I dismiss something as absolutely not worth reading. It is very easy for me to explain why I like a particular book, or what is valuable about a particular work, but I think that sometimes it’s important to also discuss what is mediocre, and what can be done better.

Morioka Hiroyuki’s Crest of the Stars series was recently held up to me as a paragon of Japanese science fiction. I wasn’t impressed with the translation of the first book in the series, Princess of the Empire, when it was released in the fall of 2006, but I decided to try it again. The series is massively popular in Japan, and it has quite a dedicated fan base in America as well. I have heard it described as a masterpiece of Tolkienesque proportions in several reviews; and, in my mind, there is no higher praise. Perhaps I had misjudged it four years ago.

Unfortunately, upon re-reading the book, that turned out not to be the case. Princess of the Empire starts off with a wonderful prologue, which briefly introduces the main character of the series in an interesting and beautifully described setting before launching into a short but fascinating account of the space journeys that led to the present moment. This history is then interrupted by action! intrigue! betrayal! and emotion! Unfortunately, this prologue is only sixteen pages long. What follows is 161 pages of utter garbage.

The teenage hero of the series, Jinto, arrives at a spaceport, where he is met by a beautiful blue-haired space elf named Lafiel. Lafiel takes Jinto to a space elf ship which will transport him to the space elf academy (Jinto, although genetically human, is politically an honorary space elf). The ship is attacked by a human group that seeks to oppose the space elf empire, and only Jinto and Lafiel escape. The ship is destroyed, and the unlikely pair (well, actually, very likely, considering that there are no other characters) is stranded on a small backwards planet. The end. Oh, and if you guessed that Lafiel is the princess of the space elf empire, you win a cookie.

You might be thinking, well, if Morioka spins 161 pages out of relatively nothing, then he must be a fairly talented writer with an eye for detail and a talent for dialog. Wrong. The Crest of the Stars series is known for its world building, and what Morioka has given us is 161 pages of almost unmitigated world building. The space elves are called Abh, they have a space empire, they have strange breeding practices, and they are genetically engineered to be beautiful, blue-haired, and psychic. That’s right, they are psychic space elves – which would perhaps be forgivable if there were more to them. Unfortunately, Morioka’s world building reads like a world history textbook written for fourth graders. Even when delivered in speech, the tone of this information is uniformly dry, essentialist, and uninteresting. Population statistics and general government details are provided, but nothing is said about culture, religion, art, lifestyles, political factions, diversity, philosophy, attitudes towards technology – or anything that the reader might actually care about. The clunky constructed language that annoyingly pervades the text is substituted for any real imagination. The almost complete lack of any visual imagery makes the book seem almost sterile, which I don’t think is a deliberate choice on the part of the author, whose writing is incessantly puerile:

Sure, Jinto had experience interacting with girls – he’d made a point on Delktou, in his own way. However, older women were still a complete mystery to him – especially gorgeous older women who were commanders of interstellar battleships. He couldn’t get his heart to stop racing.

In other words, instead of building a fictional world gradually while pulling his readers deeper into said world through plot thickening and character development, making them increasingly curious about the universe in which the characters live as they become increasingly attached to the characters themselves, Morioka completely forgoes plot and character development in order to construct his setting, which quite frankly feels like a cliché mix of Star Wars empire-and-princess driven space opera and Star Trek alien-culture-of-the-week episodic exploration adventure. The fact that the Abh are long-lived, pointy-eared, and dismissive of humans does not make Crest of the Stars Tolkienesque, unfortunately. In his postscript, Morioka states that he hopes “to make shameless sci-fi fans groan.” I’m pretty sure “groan” is the operative word here, since even Troy Denning’s novels set in the Star Wars universe are better written. Alas.

Princess of the Empire is everything I hate about the genre of young adult fiction, which tends to presume that its readers can’t handle complex plots, three-dimensional characters, figurative language, or middle school vocabulary. It could be argued that Japanese light novels are an entirely separate medium than young adult fiction; but still, there are infinitely better light novels out there. One of my personal favorites is Ono Fuyumi’s The Twelve Kingdoms series. A translation of the fourth installment, Skies of Dawn, was recently released a week or two ago, and I am happy to report that the series is only getting better with each successive book.

If it’s Japanese science fiction you’re looking for, then popular mainstream writers from Abe Kōbō to Ōe Kenzaburō to Miyabe Miyuki have successfully tried their hands at hard science fiction at one point or another. If you’re looking for the epic adventure and unparallel world building of Frank Herbert (or China Miéville), then check out Murakami Haruki’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which benefits from one of the most artistic and creative translations I have ever read. If you’re more in the mood for the intellectual short fiction of someone like Ray Bradbury (or Tim Pratt), then check out Tsutsui Yasutaka’s collection The Salmonella Beings from Planet Porno. If you’re in the market for lighter fare, I have been especially impressed by several of the translations I have read from an upcoming press called Haikasoru, which is an arm of Viz Media, an established publisher of manga intended for a slightly more mature audience than that targeted by Tokyopop.

In any case, to return to Princess of the Empire, it’s a morass of weak writing and tired stereotypes. Perhaps the Crest of the Stars series deepens in the second and third books, which are also available from Tokyopop, but I would rather spend my time reading all the cool new stuff that seems to be coming out almost every month. For those who want to know what all the fuss is about but don’t have the stomach to brave the light novels, there is always the Crest of the Stars manga trilogy (also published by Tokyopop). The manga are just as mediocre as the books – but at least the female characters provide the service of bending over to reveal themselves every few pages. Which, I suppose, is always a welcome distraction from heavy-handed world building and the overuse of a constructed language.

Look at me learning! "Ne forgesu akuzativon!"

Esperanto is basically a perfect fit for my personality. Shall I list some of the reasons?

• I like traveling, learning languages, and international exchange.
• But I hate nations and nationalisms.
• I like the idea of world peace.
• But I’m kind of lazy and non-confrontational, and the only thing I’m personally willing to do for world peace is read translated literature and have pen pals.
• I already speak three Indo-European languages and am something of a Europhile.
• Esperantists always seemed like the sort of people who played New Games, participated in earnest service projects, and were into group off-key singing.
• Hitler hated Esperantists, so they must be awesome.

During the second weekend, somebody came from the local newspaper to profile our Esperanto instructor as part of a series on people who do volunteer work. He asked a few of the native German speakers about why they were learning Esperanto, and they gave pretty standard answers about liking the idea of constructed languages, so I jumped in with my grand political statement on Esperanto, which goes something like this:

“I’m an American, so I can go almost anywhere in the world and have people speak to me in my mother tongue, so you would think that I didn’t have any need for Esperanto.

But I don’t like speaking to foreigners in English and feeling like I have the upper hand because it’s my language. I like the idea of Esperanto, because it’s nobody’s mother tongue, and we’re always all learners. It promotes equality in intercultural communication rather than language imperialism.”

He said “Interessant,” and I added “Also I don’t like people thinking I’m a stupid American who doesn’t speak any other languages, so I feel like it’s my duty to learn lots of languages, and I like the fact that Esperantists have a history of being pacifists and anti-nationalists, which is about the only language you can say that for,” and did my nervous laughter thing. He took notes, and then he informed me that my German was very good for an American.

I do think the anti-nationalist history of Esperanto is really interesting, and I think there’s probably some interesting things yet to be discovered about the early days of the movement.

(Total tangent, but I’ve also been obsessed with the idea of writing an institutional history of the Goethe Institut for the last few weeks, after some Germans I was hanging out with got into a debate about whether or not the Institut was a form of cultural imperialism.)

But yeah, basically, Esperanto is the FEK, and I will have more to say about all of this when I attend my first international Esperanto congress in Italy in April! How awesome is that?

The examples thrown down here are interesting from a linguistic point of view as well as representing evidence for an analysis YouTube as a site for the development of communities of interest.

The videos here are all subtitled from a bunker scene from the German language movie Der Untergang/The Downfall. The first re-do of the scene apparently was subtitled to tell the story of Hitler being banned from Xbox live. Answer videos include HItler finding out that Pokémon are not real, Michael Jackson is dead, has an academic article rejected, his car stolen. A belated warning taboo words appear below …

The question of whether Hitler is appropriate material to parody rarely seems to raise its head in the comment sections, though according to wikipedia, (Ok I went there to find out a bit about the film and of course they mention the videos under discussion) one answer video about parking problems in Tel Aviv provoked ire among Holocaust/Shoah survivors.

What is interesting to me about these videos is how carefully the subtitlers pay attention to tone, rhythm, and pacing in their work. Despite keeping the original German language audio, the YouTubers have disregarded the meaning of the German text but paid careful attention to the delivery of the lines matching, in the best examples, the intonation, tone and pacing. This means that the messages they are superimposing as it were over the German have to match in tone, tenor and length. No easy task I am sure.

The comic highpoint for each version for me is the sentence that triggers the soldiers’ retreat from the room. So look out for that.

I just finished reading Charles King’s history of the Caucasus, and have two things to keep track of:

1. I will be so upset if somebody takes the “write an academic history of Esperanto” idea before me, I cannot tell you. Here is an example of why:

“In the summer of 1919 members of the American legation to Georgia traveled to Khevsureti to assess the situation there… the old system of village headmen was still in place, only now it had been transformed into a network of men calling themselves ‘commissars,’ all of whom owed allegiance to a particular chief commissar located in one of the larger villages. When the chief commissar formally received the American diplomats… [he] explained the intricacies of Khevshur politics in Esperanto. He reported that he had attended Esperanto congresses in Krakow and Antwerp and was now putting into practice the internationalist and revolutionary message being preached by the Bolsheviks, much to the chagrin of the Menshevik authorities.”

2. I loved the conclusion’s shift in focus from “here are some crazy stories about the Caucasus” to “did you know that being European is fundamentally about the conscious struggle to misremember the past? the Caucasus could join Europe if only it would forget about ethnic conflict and do the same thing!” To wit,

“Trauma can produce three kinds of reactions. One is rugged determination, a courageous commitment to remake and rebuild. Another is nostalgia, a way of recalling the past that is selective and sepia-tinged. The third is creative amnesia, an effort to refashion the past so that it provides a coherent link to the imagined present. This third reaction is a basic marker of modernity, and as such, it is the defining attribute of Blanche DuBois, nationalists, and to a great degree, modern Europeans.”

I’m bothered by the flippancy of the Blanche DuBois reference (you can’t say that having a nervous breakdown after being raped is the same as founding the European Union, or maybe you can, but if so it’s an analogy you need to elucidate), and I don’t know where the Caucasus falls on his scale (there’s lots of nationalists–but why draw the parallel if you’re arguing that the Caucasus is not part of Europe yet?), but I appreciate the argument.

Why? For me history is a necessary discipline because it’s my answer to the question “How do people manage to continue in the face of horror?” I imagine some people answer that question through theology, or literature, or cognitive science and psychology, or through not posing the question at all.

But I’ve been wrestling with it for as long as I can remember, and took to history because I felt it gave me the most satisfactory answers.

So I think theories about how we process trauma are the vital beating heart of the discipline, and this year I want to read everything that addresses that topic that I can possibly get my hands on.

Jessi has recommended Paul Ricoeur, but it makes me smile when the vital questions show up in books about the Caucasus that you read on the beach. I wish it happened more often.

(I also wish I weren’t the kind of person who read books about the Caucasus on the beach, but you play the hand you’re dealt!)

In that play, Czech bureaucrats are forced to learn Ptydepe, a language constructed such that every word will be as different from the next as possible. The higher-ups are worried about secretaries making typing errors–”war” instead of “car,” “tanks” instead of “banks”–and inadvertently causing international incidents.

So in Ptydepe, every word has to be at least 60% different from every other word. Word lengths quickly spiral out of control, with “wombat” clocking in at 319 letters. (The only two-letter word is “gh,” for “whatever,” and “f” is being held in reserve in case “a more general concept than whatever” is discovered and needs describing.) The bureaucracy starts to crumble under the weight of learning this complex new language.

Turkish is not Ptydepe. Shades of meaning in Turkish are expressed by the judicious application of short suffixes. This makes for a very elegant language, but also one where the details can be very important.

Take the words for “I know” and “I do not know.”

“I know” would be “bil-iyor-um,” with “bil” being the stem, “iyor” being the present tense, and “um” being the “I.”

“I don’t know” would be “bil-m-iyor-um,” everything being the same except the “m” part, which is the negation.

All you do to negate a verb in the present tense is add an “m” to the middle.

Similarly, the difference between “I don’t know” and “we don’t know” is not marked off by anything so definite, to this English-speaker, as a separate subject-word. It is merely a glitch in the last letter of the suffix–not “bil-m-iyor-um,” but “bil-m-iyor-uz.” The sort of thing that a diplomat would not want to mess up.

There are other ways that a diplomat might not want to mess up. 

Your distinguished Turkish visitor might ask “What are we doing next?”

“Şarap içiyoruz,” [Sha-rap ichee-your-ooz] you might say, “We are drinking wine.”

Just hope your tongue doesn’t slip towards “Şarap işiyoruz,” [Sha-rap ishee-your-ooz], because in most cultures there’s a big difference between drinking your wine and pissing it out afterwards.

And these are just the potential diplomatic disasters I know about so far.

At the end of The Memorandum, the government introduces a new language, Chorukor, where all the words are similar to each other.

I don’t have the play on me, but I can steal a quote from Wikipedia for flavor:

PERINA: Of course. In Chorukor, Monday is ilopagar, Tuesday ilopager, Wednesday ilopagur, Thursday ilopagir, Friday ilopageur, Saturday ilopagoor. How do you think Sunday is in Chorukor? Hmm?
(Only Kalous moves) So Kalous!
KALOUS: (standing up) Ilopagor. (he sits down)
PERINA: Correct, Kalous! Good point! Isn’t it easy?

Cue chuckles from the audience. Can the human mind really make such fine distinctions several times over in every sentence?

Right now my answer would be a warbled “no.”

But so far as I can tell, Modern Turkish is basically Chorukor, except for the whole part where Chorukor was constructed by an authoritarian state using “scientific principles” to modernize its bureaucracy.

Kolay gelsin!

My prayer is that the Lord would use the difficulties in my life to help encourage others who may be going through hard times.Today is one of those good days again.

2 good articles for Caregivers:

25 Bad Habits Every Caregiver Should Avoid

30 Signs Your Loved One May Need a Caregiver

This link makes me want to renew my skills and to become fluent again in Spanish. I’ve forgotten many vocabulary words and idioms. Constructed languages for prevention of Alzheimers and Dementia I guess Pig-Latin wasn’t so bad after all! We used to get a good laugh out of doing it.

I’ve added some links on the right side of the page for those who want to subscribe to feeds of this blog. Do you want to learn Esperanto? Click here. And for Pig-Latin, click here. They are definitely worth checking out!

Want to leave a comment? Click here.

Have a good Sunday………….David Thomas

Something I’ve noticed is that the world has its own alphabet; messages scattered around various areas of the world. Symbols outside the entrance to Naija’s home, symbols on a slate of rock at the entrance of the city of Mithalas.
I just spent around fifteen minutes to half an hour decyphering it. Most of it. I figure the earliest it’s possible to do so is in Mithalas Cathedral; earlier on, Naija translates the Mithalas sign for the player, giving us the meaning of the symbols representing ‘a’, ‘i’, ‘h’, ‘l’, ‘m’, ‘s’ and ‘t’, but within the Mithalas Cathedral there’s a long message in a room with a save crystal that happens to be just about decypherable with only those known symbols, and a lot of logical guesswork. From seven known symbols, you end up with twenty-two symbols out of a possible twenty-six; the remaining letters never appeared in the message, and might not be used at all, for all I know.
I love those kinds of puzzles. The Mithalas Cathedral message – not the only one in there, but the only sufficiently long one properly translateable, as the other one has a corpse in front of some of the letters – is essentially the Rosetta Stone for the Aquarian Alphabet.

Aquaria is by no means the first game to have done this. Years ago, there was a series of platformers named Commander Keen, the eponymous protagonist basically being a kid whose cardboard box rocket actually worked. The Standard Galactic Alphabet showed up on signs all through the games, and the player either had to cheat and look online for the key (…I was only around ten at the time, I didn’t like these puzzles then) or completely decypher it from nothing, as I’m reasonably certain Keen never read any of the signs for us. He wasn’t supposed to understand them, either.
Perhaps more famously, Final Fantasy X had Al Bhed. Unlike the other two written languages mentioned here, though, they didn’t bother creating a new set of symbols, and just used the standard alphabet; it was pretty obvious it was just substitution when you were looking at it in text. The Aquarian Alphabet and the Standard Galactic Alphabet are basic substitution disguised with an alternate set of symbols, but they’re still just substitution. Final Fantasy X did go that little further and create rules for when certain words were translated or not, and how to pronounce the resulting mess of letters; it did sound like a new language, at least.

There are a couple of games to create (very small) constructed languages, with a small set of (known) words. Ultima Underworld had the language of the Lizardmen (22 words known) – and, come to think of it, the Ultima series had no less than three alternate alphabets AND the runes for magic, too – and Breath of Fire IV had you trying to talk to the Pabpab (27 words known); in these cases, a translation guide was always provided by an NPC.
Or the manual, in the case of Ultima’s magic runes. Those are an interesting case; each spell’s combination of runes roughly describe the effect of the spell.

Creating a language – complete with syntax – is a very difficult undertaking, so it’s no wonder the attempts at new languages are often very small. It’s far easier to just encrypt a message through substitution, whether replacing letters with your own scribbles, or with other letters.
(That’s how you decypher substitution with the English alphabet, by the way; assign every letter a number or non-Roman-alphabet symbol and work it out from there, as trying to decypher messages in a jumbled Roman alphabet is trickier, as you can lose track of what you’ve guessed and replaced thus far.)

So why the bother?
An alternate alphabet is the perfect way to sneak messages to the player; if it’s not necessary to translate it to proceed, at any point, then players who simply don’t care for the puzzle of decyphering such things can simply ignore it and get on with the game, whilst players who do love the challenge can spend time on understanding the meaning of each symbol.
Aquaria uses its alphabet to deepen its world. The message I spent time translating in the Mithalas Cathedral foreshadows the plot of the game, but doesn’t give too much away; it supports a conversation Naija has with someone else soon afterwards, if you complete that area. But in another place, the message scrawled into a wall hints at a fun though pretty useless recipe… and, again, shows someone yearning for ‘escape’. The same alphabet is present not only throughout the City and Cathedral of Mithalas, but outside Naija’s home, on the walls of caves, and under statues of ancient gods. Hence why I call it the Aquarian Alphabet, rather than the Mithalan Alphabet. It’s not, up to where I am, necessary to know the alphabet to continue, but it does add a lot to the world.
Meanwhile, Commander Keen’s Standard Galactic Alphabet, as far as I recall, usually described more concrete elements of the game; ‘pit ahead’, or ‘die commander keen’, for example. SGA’s purpose was primarily to look futuristic, and secondarily to point out things to canny players who could read it; it was rarely or never written by any character in the game’s past, as the messages in Aquaria are. They were really messages from the game and designer; sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile… a proto-GlaDOS.
Finally, in FFX, the Al Bhed language served to highlight the difference between the Al Bhed people and all other peoples in Spira; even the Guado, Ronso and the Hypello people, some of the less human-looking groups in the game, spoke Spiran. Through diligent searching, a player could find a Primer for every letter of the language, causing Al Bhed to be automatically translated in messages; even more diligent searching at the beginning of a game could reveal the method of transferring all those Primers to a new game, so you could understand all the gibberish at the beginning. As always, understanding the language is never necessary for much, and in Final Fantasy X, collecting all Primers is more of an easter egg or useless bonus, as most are pretty deviously hidden and some permanently missable. It’s a sidequest, though the translated language does tell you a little more about the Al Bhed talking, at least.