Name: 【TED-Ed】Are Elvish, Klingon, Dothraki and Na'vi real languages? - John McWhorter
Uploaded: 2014-08-26T08:20:10.000Z
Duration: 5 min 21 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

is that the inhabitants of the Dothraki Sea

of the real language that the Na'vi speak in "Avatar,"

And let's not forget the Elvish languages

in J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy,

especially since that was the official grandfather

Conlang is short for constructed language.

of fabricated slang like the Nadsat lingo

It helps, of course, to have a lot of words.

Fans on websites have steadily created more.

After all, you could memorize 5,000 words of Russian

and still be barely able to construct a sentence.

A four-year-old would talk rings around you.

As people speak, they drift into new habits,

"Urne gedaeghwamlican hlaf syle us todaeg."

conlangs like Elvish split off into many.

When the Romans transplanted Latin across Europe,

over time their ways of speaking grow apart,

Tolkien made sure Elvish did the same kind of thing.

While that original word kwendi became pendi

among the Avari, who spread throughout Middle Earth,

The Elvish varieties Tolkien fleshed out the most

And as you know, real languages are messy.

and change has a way of working against order,

Real languages are never perfectly logical.

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【TED-Ed】Are Elvish, Klingon, Dothraki and Na'vi real languages? - John McWhorter

people

change

language

plenty