The language of Community-Artificial (Languages in general)

Member Name: Cammij

Product:	Languages in general
Date:	10/07/02 (345 review reads)
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Advantages: Only people liek you speak it, Its the language of your community, It is secret

Disadvantages: nobody has any use for it

When I was a kid I used to watch all the Hispanic kids speaking Spanish to each other and I was jealous. Not exactly jealous of their ability to speak another language, but that they had each other to speak it to. I mean, I can't really imagine what they talked about, probaly boasting about how many bushels of tomatoes their octagenarian uncle could pick in one 17 hour day, or talking about what hubcaps they would steal that night. The fact is I couldn't know what they were saying and that made me angry. Of course I could speak German and Afrikaans as well as they could speak Spanish, but I had no one to talk to except my grandparents and a couple other kids. But we had no community or fellowship like all those Mexicans.

As I got older I was fascinated with languages and linguistics. I was able to learn how to learn languages. Yet I still lacked that fufillment that language with cultural ties would bring. I kept going back and forth to Germany and Holland (actually if you can't speak good Dutch just yell the words very loud in German and all Dutch people will understand you) but no matter what I was only an outsider that had managed to violate the privaty of these people's lingos, I realized that I was accursed, the 25% Danish, 45% German, 15% Dutch, 4% Swedish, 10% Irish, and 1% Spanish bloodlines{I just learnt this yesterday, damn the internet and genealogy sites, I am part guinea!!!! For the record all this confusion is courtesey of my Dad's fathers side, none of my other great grandparents aside from my dad's father's lineage were born in this rathole America) all added up to the fact that I was nothing but a common typical yank.It hurt me to know that I would never have my own group of people to call my own.

I fought for the Serbs in Bosnia. I learned to speak Russian and married a Russian girl. She has all these Russian friends here and I am the only husband that can speak any Russian. The other Russian girls
are outright astounded when I say something to them or worse yet some dumb whore (a Ukrainian) asked my wife in front of me if I was the same husband that she had seen in the pictures my wife had shown her last time. We have a kid and she speaks English to me and Russian to my wifey. Nevertheless I am just a novelty to these people that run my world. I wanted something more to call my own.

My cousin got to learn Irish when he got put in a place he calls the "Maize", whatever corn has to do with prison. The place we wrote on the envelopes said "Long Kesh" which must mean Corn in Irish. He said that all the other prisoners spoke Irish too and it was a way to feel connected. I kind of envied him for feeling that close with some group of people even if they were all prisoners.

So I looked all over the internet and AOL chat rooms and I sit in the foreign chat rooms and watch people speak Taglog, Cypriot Greek, Farsai, Arabic and other stuff that I don't know what it is and then American computer geeks come in the rooms and start in about how hot they think that groups women are and how they want to get with one. Then the fruit-vendorish men get mad and the women get annoyed and the Americans say mean things about the respective nation and leave.

I have decided to learn Basque. I can take the classes from distance learning from teh University of Reno. I don't know why. I met a Basque guy once in Ireland and there was a connection between what he felt and what I feel like when I try to be Irish. So I paid $575 to take some college class but at least my employer will pay me back if I get a C. maybe I can try to be Basque or something if I learn the language.

Wrong. One summer my mom made Popeye and me go get jobs at Cedar Point. We were talking about black people in German because we did not like how this guy looked. So the guy turns around and starts yelling at me in German since he had been in the Airf
orce at Ramstein or something and knew German. That did not make him German, that couldn't make him feel what I feel when I put on my new Adidas Micheal Ballack T-shirt I bought gestern. Worse yet the head person at Cedar Point came out and she was German herself (Katja-Ann Koepke) and wanted to know what the problem was. That was a wild coincidence that she was there by personnel. But anyways I learned that learning a language does not give you a culture or heritage.

So what can you do?

I found the answer today. I was looking up Esperanto and Sol-re-Sol, two artificial or constructed languages. I came across some huge sites that just dealt with constructed languages. The usual academic attempts at making a new and improved lingua franca for the world; Esperanto, interlingua, Universal and loglan. Then you have Sol-re-Sol, an attempt by a frog to use musical tones to create words. Just for the record 850 words are how many words are in a pidgin, immigrant sounding tongue codified as "Basic English" where a person can pretty much say what they need to say. But the beauty of Sol-re-sol was that it didn't need to be translated, the notes had a meaning not a word assigned to them. I can't expect Brits to fathom this concept; a land that produced Jethro Tull and the Spice Girls can't understand tonal quality.

But the real fun of languages, and the place I need to go is the ficticious languages, the ones from Diseney's Atlantis, Tolkien and Star Trek.

Think about it, my scenario. Two guys are speaking German, one is a black guy from Mississippi and the other one learned German from his rabidly fascist Danish grandfather. There is no connection there. None at all. But now take two people speaking Klingon (they have both gone to the trouble of learning an imaginary language from a sci-fi TV show where no books and aids previously existed) I garuntee both of the speakers do not like to go out and dance,
do not like contact sports, don't date much or are not married and they don't have kids. Furthermore they like going to medieval faires, they like looking for naked pictures of Natasha Yar online, and think Natalie Portman is cuter than carrie Fisher. You see? DOOYOO SEE? I can find my own culture in lnaguage!!!!!

There are lots of languages with websites. Some Volkspraak (all germanic languages merged kind of like a retro move back to 1100 C.E. and surely a language for Neo-fascists to learn). Gargish, the language Gargoyles in Ultima speak a language for acne faced computer game obsessed dweebs. or a langauge called "OK" based on some Robert Heinlein book. You know that everyone who speaks it will be a sci-fi obsessed twit who wants to talk about UFOs. There are hundreds of these imaginary languages listed where a lost soul like myself could find a community.

Look at history, how many tyrants have seen the danger of langauges? Why did Stalin forbid the use of Estonian yet teach the Gorets to all write their languages in Cyrillic script? What explanations do employers in America give for banning Spanish in the workplace (subversion). Why did cockney rhyming slang come about? Langauge is power, language is the tie that binds people. Respect that.

In summation, I was lucky to be born into the English speaking world and hence there is no reason for me to learn any other language than English, as the other people should have to learn my language since all useful knowledge, books, programs, music and technology are in English. But if I want to find my own niche and cloister, my own "people" it is neccassary to learn a new language that is what makes a "club" into a "people". I, a normal looking white man has failed miserabley to get my own new ethnic group to feel part of. But now I can hook up with a tiny group of people by learning a language from Star Trek or a Tolkien book. I am happy. <
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Check out these sites

www.uea.ac.uk/~jrk/conlang.html
www.langmaker.com

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