Teddy Bear, etc.

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Mon Sep 13 23:56:43 UTC 2010


At 8:15 PM +0000 9/13/10, ronbutters at aol.com wrote:
>Well there is Espiranto.

As far as I can determine, L. L. Zamenhof (a.k.a. Lazarus or Eliezer
Samenhof), inventor of (the equally hopeful) Esperanto, had no formal
training as a linguist, although he was an ophthamologist in his
spare time and presumably had some professional schooling along the
way to reach that point.

>And Tagmemics. .

heh heh

Marc Okrand, inventor/discoverer of Klingon, does in fact have a PhD
from UC Berkeley, resulting from a dissertation written almost 40
years ago on an extinct Amerindian (as we used to say) language of
California, using the documentary resources of the Smithsonian and
the significant training he received with Mary Haas and the
insignificant training he received with a very junior
semanticist/pragmaticist and future member of the ADS who vaguely
recalls hanging out in Berkeley in 1970.  Marc's language, whose name
I can no longer recall, bears striking phonological and syntactic
similarities to Klingon, but no genetic relationship has yet been
established.

LH

>------Original Message------
>From: Laurence Horn
>Sender: ADS-L
>To: ADS-L
>ReplyTo: ADS-L
>Subject: Re: [ADS-L] Teddy Bear, etc.
>Sent: Sep 13, 2010 3:49 PM
>
>At 2:26 PM -0400 9/13/10, Mark Mandel wrote:
>>Hija'! Hol 'oHbej thlIngan Hol'e'!
>>
>>Yes! Klingon certainly is a language! }}:-)>
>>
>>This is not to claim that it's a natural language or a fully functional one.
>>
>>tlhIngan veQbeq marqem la'Hom -- Heghbej ghIHmoHwI'pu'!
>>      Subcommander Markem, Klingon Sanitation Corps
>>                Death to Litterbugs!
>>           http://mark.cracksandshards.com/Klingon/
>
>Besides, how many "languages" were created by someone with a PhD in
>linguistics?
>
>LH

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