Invention Of Language Research Articles

ANHA DOTHRAK CHEK ASSHEKH: THE RENDERING OPERATION OF THE INVENTED LANGUAGE DOTHRAKI INTO BAHASA INDONESIA IN GAME OF THRONES SEASON 6

This research is conducted to observe the rendering operation of L3 translation applied of Game of Thrones series Season 6, specifically focusing on two objectives: identifying the types of rendering operations used and explaining why these operations are chosen. The research adopts a descriptive qualitative approach. Corrius and Zabalbeascoa's theory on L3 translation rendering operations serves as the framework for addressing the research questions. Data analysis employs Spradley’s componential analysis method, and the researcher verified the findings with an expert. The study identified 175 instances of Dothraki language in Game of Thrones Season 6, leading to the discovery of three distinct types of L3 translation rendering operations. There are 6 Delete L3ST (3,5%) in which the L3 in ST is omitted in TT, 16 Substitute L3ST → L2 (9,1%), which is divided into 2 conditions. There are condensation and inappropriate translation. The last is 153 Substitute L3ST (87,4%) which is divided into two conditions, defining the plot and emphasizing the characters, identity and story. The data shows that the most dominant rendering operation of L3 translation applied by the subtitler is Substitute L3ST because it is considered to be the most suitable operation that can be used as a solution in translating invented language. It is also because the subtitler accurately translated the third language into the target language, as evidenced by the consistency with the dictionary, dialogues, and scene narratives. The second finding of this research shows that there are 2 kinds of nature and degree of L3 presence. In this research, the researcher found 22 data (12,6%) of Lost which is divided into 6 causes, i.e: lack of duration, no full translation, accidental error, incorrect translation, unnecessary scene and unclear words. Also 153 data (87,4%) of Kept which is divided into 4 conditions; to define Khaleesi, define Dothraki, define Game of Thrones and define the context of the story. This means that the subtitler still wants to retain the meaning and the style of the third language.

A methodological proposal for conlang evaluation

Abstract Intentional language creation is a mainstay of the modern world, having gained widespread notoriety in popular television shows and films, and even finding a home in academia in the form of undergraduate courses on invented languages. In this paper, we argue that constructed languages deserve more careful consideration than they currently receive either inside or outside academia. We provide guidelines for developing evaluative criteria to be used with constructed languages of various types and ask readers, whether academics or not, to consider the role they play as audience and critics in the unfolding of a new art form: the art of language invention.

构建生命共同体

Richard Powers is well known in the contemporary American literary world and he has been hailed as “America’s most promising novelist”. One of his novels The Overstory (2019) is an ode to nature. It is based on eight stories in which humans and trees depend on each other and save each other, presenting a vast, long and subtle world of trees and human society with alienated relationships, and then thinking about the relationship between man and nature. The novel, with its clever design and inventive language, won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was a New York Times bestseller. Therefore, this article tries to use Lefebvre’s spatial theory and Tennis’s concept of community to analyze the process of building a community between man and nature in The Overstory, excavate the social root behind the superficial contradictions in the story, and explore the significance of building a community of life in modern life.

Artaud et l’expérience des langues: les glossolalies comme performance thérapeutique

After taking part in an art therapy experiment in 1943, Antonin Artaud started to include in his writings passages of an invented language that he connected to the tradition of glossolalia. I argue that the polyglottic dimension of this glossolalic practice is essential. After expounding the relationship of glossolalia to linguistic diversity, I will demonstrate how Artaud’s glossolalia conveys the poet’s linguistic experience. More specifically, I will emphasize the importance of the Raramuri rituals, which Artaud witnessed in Mexico in 1936, for the definition of his glossolalic practice. The Raramuri vision of an embodied and performed therapy inspired the poet to reclaim his agency in the process of art therapy. Artaud’s glossolalia corresponds to an art performance thought as such a therapy. This practice attempts to rebuild Babel, to simultaneously refound language and body.

A Hong Kong Scholar’s Troubled Identity in Dorothy Tse’s <em>Owlish</em>

Owlish is a part-realist part-surreal tale of a disgruntled professor in Hong Kong’s fictional double Nevers who unexpectedly falls in love with a ballerina doll. The novel’s plot unfolds against the backdrop of the growing pressure on Hong Kong’s freedoms and its very identity resulting in protests – events concealed by the veil of Dorothy Tse’s inventive language but still unmistakably discernable. This essay approaches Owlish as an academic novel i.e. literary work concerned with university professors and the vicissitudes of their lives within and outside the campus walls. The novel's protagonist, Professor Q, appears to be a brilliant cosmopolitan intellectual on the surface. Yet, deep down, he grapples with conflicting identities, mirroring the predicaments faced by Hong Kong itself. This essay’s focus lies in examining the portrayal of scholar in Owlish and comparing it to those depicted by the PRC and Sinophone writers. By doing so, the essay traces the different traits that construct Hong Kong scholar’s troubled identity, for instance, traditional Chinese literatus, renaissance-esque free-spirited thinker, and overloaded contemporary academic. Elaine Showalter observes that the best works of the academic fiction genre are not merely literary accounts of academic routine but boldly play with the genre itself and comment on pressing contemporary issues. Accordingly, the essay’s primary emphasis is on how Hong Kong professor’s identity crisis reflects the precarious state of the city’s intellectual sphere and what the outcome Tse warns against in her academic narrative.

<i>Du Iz Tak?</i>

This paper presents the results of the introduction to a project inspired by the éveil aux langues approach with the storytelling of the picture book Du Iz Tak? by the American/Canadian author Carson Ellis (2016). This propaedeutic activity was a multimodal input given in an unknown language to all children, namely an invented language. The aim of this study is to bring more evidence on how the development of metalinguistic awareness at a young age can help pupils meet their learning needs, especially pupils with SEN. Results show that telling a story in a invented language through the use of multimodal resources to convey meaning not only captures the attention of all pupils in the class, but leads them to observe and manipulate this language by making and developing hypotheses about languages, especially pupils with SEN.

Endocranial volumes and human evolution.

Enlarging brains have been held up as the classic (if not the only) example of a consistent long-term trend in human evolution. And hominin endocranial volumes certainly expanded four-fold over the subfamily's seven-million-year history, while on a very coarse scale later hominids showed a strong tendency to have larger brains than earlier ones. However, closer scrutiny of this apparent trend reveals that it was extremely episodic and irregular, a fact that argues against the notion that it was driven by social interactions internal to the hominin clade. In addition, an overall tendency to brain volume increase was expressed independently and concurrently within at least three separate lineages of the genus Homo - suggesting that, whatever the exact influences were that promoted this global trend, they need to be sought among stimuli that acted comprehensively over the entire vast range of periods, geographies and environments that members of our subfamily occupied. Significantly, though, the dramatic recent shrinkage of the brain within the species Homo sapiens implies that the emergence of modern human cognition (via the adoption of the symbolic information processing mode, likely driven by the spontaneous invention of language in an exaptively enabled brain) was not the culmination of the overall hominin trend towards brain enlargement, but rather a departure from it.

The role of translingual peer involvement in resolving understanding troubles in the English medium of instruction classroom

The internationalization of educational settings has been increasingly leading to wider recognition of English Medium Instruction (EMI) in higher education institutions, and a growing number of studies have investigated EMI policies of universities with diverse research foci. However, only little attention has been paid to classroom interactional dynamics with a particular focus on actual teaching/learning practices, and an examination of translanguaging as a pedagogical resource in multilingual learning environments has not been an exception. Although previous studies have explored lecturers' translanguaging practices in EMI classrooms, students' translingual contributions seems terra incognita. In this regard, using multimodal Conversation Analysis, this study closely examines translingual peer involvement through students’ multilingual and multimodal repertoires that become observable while resolving troubles in understanding. Based on the video-recorded classroom interactions in an undergraduate program on Mathematics and Science Education at a state EMI university in Türkiye, the current study demonstrates how students actively participate in ongoing interactions to resolve understanding troubles. The findings show how translingual peer involvement emerges across English and Turkish languages, and an invented language, and creates space for the lecturer to enhance learner contributions. The study brings new insights into EMI classroom discourse in an emerging context.

Was Hebrew invented? : Do letter, number, and word-games in the Torah imply that Biblical Hebrew is an Invented Language?

In this paper, I present a straightforward secular (non-religious, non-theological) theory: the Hebrew in the Torah is an invented language, akin to Klingon or Elvish, that was designed to write the Torah. Under this theory, the letters, words, grammar, and key terms and phrases of the Biblical language were selected, co-determined, and creatively bootstrapped as a sort of language game. The invented language may have been designed, like Esperanto or Basic English, to include elements in common with known natural languages; nevertheless, the details and final form of the language were bespoke and under the control of a creative author. In the invented system, some anagrams were defined to mean related concepts; letters were assigned number values so words and phrases could “add up to” interesting numbers (“Gematria”); and the author planned a text that would include a density of word-games like pangrams (sentences that use all letters of the alphabet), lipograms (sections of the text that are missing one particular letter), and particular numbers of letters and words throughout. However, all signs of seemingly deliberate language games might instead merely be the result of cherry picking of interesting findings. In this paper, I present analysis and new approaches that might help distinguish whether the apparent language games in the Torah imply an intentional invented language or, instead, only result from over-analysis and were not intended by the author to be present in the text.

Dubbing multilingual movies into Persian: a case of invented languages as the third language

ABSTRACT As a result of globalization, multilingual movies have grown in number since the late 1980s. Following this increase, the issue of the third language (L3) has been a momentous challenge in translation, particularly in dubbing. It becomes even more challenging when L3 is an invented language. To shed light on this issue, the translation strategies employed in Persian dubbed versions of multilingual movies were investigated. By adopting Corrius and Zabalbeascoa's model of L3 analysis, six invented languages selected from two movies, Avatar and The Hobbit, were examined. These languages were Na'vi, Sindarin, Quenya, Khuzdul, Ancient Dwarvish, and Black Speech. In doing so, all the available Persian dubbed versions of the selected movies were taken into consideration to scrutinize possible translation strategies. The results revealed how the strategic operations change vis-à-vis the priority of the third language visibility. Moreover, among three possible primary operations for translating L3, namely repetition, deletion, and substitution (with L2), repetition of L3 had the highest frequency. We hope to raise awareness about the importance, challenges, and practical considerations of translating invented languages as L3s in audiovisual products.

Mia CoutoSea Loves Me: Selected Stories by David Brookshaw Eric M.B. Becker

Mia Couto Sea Loves Me: Selected Stories Trans. David Brookshaw with Eric M.B. Becker. Windsor, Canada. Biblioasis. 2021. 399 pages. “SEA LOVES ME,” the title story of Mia Couto’s latest collection, brims with secrets, seduction, and the wisdom of ancestors. Zeca Perpétuo, the widowed narrator, is pining for his voluptuous neighbor, Dona Luarmina, daughter of a Greek sailor and Mozambican mother. But before she’ll succumb to his charms, Luarmina insists Zeca divulge his most private memories. And so, he begins to weave together tales—of his fisherman father, who dove into the sea to rescue his mistress and resurfaced with the eyes of a shark; of his wayward wife, Henriquinha, who mysteriously vanished off a cliff; and Maria Ballerina, the whirling dervish of a dancer who caught fire one night and was turned to ashes. The more Zeca recalls, the weepier he gets. “A tear is the sea caressing your soul,” Luarmina explains. “That little speck of water is us as we return to the womb we came from.” Mia Couto, winner of the 2014 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and author, most recently, of the novel The Sword and the Spear (WLT, Autumn 2020, 90), has been writing bewitching tales like this his entire career. Sea Loves Me, in fact, includes work from two previous collections, The Fire and The Waters of Time, as well as thirty -six stories that appear in English for the first time. (Eric M.B. Becker has translated the stories of The Waters of Time; the rest are by David Brookshaw, Couto’s longtime translator. Both have done masterful jobs rendering Couto’s inventive language and imagery into English.) Taken as a whole, the stories offer a kaleidoscopic vision of Couto’s world, deeply rooted in Mozambique but imbued with an ethereal, otherworldly quality. Often in just a few pages, Couto is able to breathe life into a variety of characters that range from war refugees, witch doctors, and cross-dressing apparitions to birddreaming baobab trees and blind fishermen . Rural villagers, stuck in time, jostle with newly arrived city dwellers. Africans, Portuguese, Indians—and combinations of the three—fall in love across communities, even species. In “Bartolominha and the Pelican,” a lonely woman shares her bed with a pelican, hugging its wings so that “her body would learn to fly”; while in “So You Haven’t Flown Yet, Carlota Gentina?” a condemned man confesses, “Inside me, I’m not alone. I’m many. . . . That’s why, when I tell my story, I mix myself up, a mulata not of races but of existences.” Sea Loves Me is a thrilling addition to Couto’s extraordinary body of work, bringing together new and old stories that evoke past and present Mozambique, memories and dreamscapes, natural and spirit worlds. War, race, sky and sea, death and desire—these are just a few of the eternal elements Couto uses to mold his wise, enchanting fiction. “As I rowed a long return,” thinks the solitary boatman in “The Waters of Time,” “the old words of my grandfather came to mind: Water and time are twin brothers, born of the same womb. I had just discovered in myself a river that would never die.” Anderson Tepper New York Mieko Kawakami Heaven: A Novel Trans. Sam Bett & David Boyd. New York. Europa Editions. 2021. 192 pages. FORTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD Mieko Kawakami refuses to trivialize the agony of adolescence ; instead she bears witness to it. She has described her own childhood in Osaka, Japan, as a hellish experience. Her father often went missing, and she was forced to find work in a factory to help support her family. She pursued adulthood with a gritty determination. She tried singing but gave it up when she was told she couldn’t write her own lyrics. She turned to writing, and her novels and poems, which often play fast and loose with experimental bursts of prose, have catapulted her into international fame. Kawakami concedes, “I try to write from the child’s perspective—how they see the world. Coming to the realization you’re alive is such a shock. One day, BOOKS IN REVIEW 80 WLT SPRING 2021 ...

Balaibalan: An Artificial Islamic Language?

Abstract Balaibalan is a sacred invented language developed within the ḥurūfī sect in the 16th century. Not much is known about this language, but a religious text in Balaibalan has been transmitted. What emerges from this text is an original vocabulary, inserted in an Arabic-like syntax. This paper aims to provide an historical and linguistic overview of Balaibalan, especially in relation to Bausani’s studies on the language, and ultimately describe its features in relation to those of the three languages that inspired its linguistic structure, namely Turkish, Persian, and Arabic. The objective, with reference to Bausani’s controversial definition of “Islamic languages”, is to attempt an outline of Balaibalan as a language used both in the Muslim world and by Muslims. In describing the language, we will thus address aspects of orthography, pronunciation, and word-formation, finally accounting for how Arabic, Turkish, and Persian have been used as landmarks in the arrangement of specific aspects of the language.

O gênero poetry slam: reexistência e construção da identidade negra como um grito das vozes do sul

Partindo do poder de intervenção e invenção da linguagem (ROCHA, 2006, 2014), este trabalho objetiva compreender o poetry slam como gênero discursivo contemporâneo de reexistência (SOUZA, 2011) que ecoa vozes de sujeitos subalternizados sócio-historicamente – especialmente jovens negros das periferias – nossas vozes do sul. A proposta teórico-metodológica foca-se na análise discursiva do poema-slam intitulado "Século XXI", do slammer carioca Weslley Jesus (WJ), disponível no YouTube. As análises apontam para posicionamentos de resistência aos discursos hegemônicos que legitimam a necropolíticas voltada para jovens negros das periferias brasileiras. Essas vozes apropriam-se da linguagem como instrumento estético-político-ideológico produzindo resistência ao racismo e a outras formas de opressão. Os resultados apontam para a importância de outros estudos sobre slam de modo a aprofundar as análises acerca desse gênero de reexistência, trazendo para o centro do debate vozes e demandas de sujeitos apartados da produção de conhecimento.

La dimension sonore de l’écriture

Qu’est-ce qu’un roman dont l’écriture peut être qualifiée d’« antiraciste » ? Comment l’antiracisme s’inscrit-il dans le matériau scriptural d’une œuvre afin de faire entendre, dans la reformulation des énoncés du racisme ordinaire, la voix unique de celui qu’ils excluent ? Ces questions viennent immédiatement à l’esprit du lecteur qui tombe sur les premières pages d’Éboueur sur échafaud, roman d’Abdel Hafed Benotman publié en 2003. Ce récit d’enfance raconte l’histoire de Fafa, enfant de parents Algériens qui fait tout pour s’intégrer dans une société française qui l’exclut. Dans une perspective sociocritique, cet article interroge la langue, complexe et inventive, que Benotman invente à partir d’une socialité du « mal écrire » ou du « mésécrire ». Il a pour hypothèse centrale que la langue audacieuse de ce roman contemporain correspond à une langue aux origines multiples et donne forme à un rapport à la société et à la littérature foncièrement subjectif, dans lequel le lien social, fondé sur le racisme, se disloque pour faire apparaître l’immédiateté de sa violence et les exclusions dont il se paie.

Between Indignant Cartoons and Comic Satire: Representations of the Rwandan Genocide in Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda

The question of how to represent the weighty subject of genocide in Africa’s popular cultural and literary genres without minimising, distorting or romanticising this emotive subject has taken centre stage in African scholarship. The problematics of this representation are projected in theoretical arguments that insist that the creative imagination stylises narratives of genocide and in the process gratuitously sanitises the pain that flows from the harm of genocide. Although this argument has merit to the extent that language is the only cultural resource through which humanity can register its agonistic experiences, there is no escaping the reality of preserving the memories of pain through the language of invention. In recognition of these paradoxes, this article seeks to critically interrogate what cartoons and comic strips do to the pain arising from genocide. This article uses the genre of the graphic novel/cartoon tale/cartoon novella as represented in Stassen’s work titled Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda to suggest that it is perhaps liberating to multiply cultural sites from which the subject of genocide can be debated.

Figures of Speech: Six Histories of Language and Identity in the Age of Revolutions by Tim Cassedy

Reviewed by: Figures of Speech: Six Histories of Language and Identity in the Age of Revolutions by Tim Cassedy Sean P. Harvey (bio) Keywords Language, Cultural history, Linguistics, Speech, Writing Figures of Speech: Six Histories of Language and Identity in the Age of Revolutions. By Tim Cassedy. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018. Pp. 296. Paper, $40.00.) In Figures of Speech, Tim Cassedy examines the political, social, and cultural significance of the view, axiomatic in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, that languages shaped the minds and characters of their speakers. It is a cultural history, informed by the history of the book and media studies, that focuses on the lives of five men and one woman who "put language at the center of their identities and lived out the possibilities of their era's linguistic ideas" in an era of political upheaval (6). The book's first chapter focuses on Nicholas Dufief, a young aristocrat who fled revolution in France and St.-Domingue. Taking refuge in Philadelphia, he established himself as a teacher of French and writer of pedagogical texts by inventing, publicizing, and selling a mode of instruction that aimed to replicate the way children learned language. Chapter 2 [End Page 364] contrasts the orthographic reform efforts of Noah Webster and the Scot–Caribbean Duncan Mackintosh. Where the linguistic separatist Webster urged U.S. citizens to adopt spelling reforms to make American English distinct from that of the former mother country, Mackintosh, after the British invasion of Martinique in 1794, urged Anglophones across the world to standardize English pronunciation through use of his elaborate system of diacritical marks. While both projects failed, Cassedy shows that most Americans were more sympathetic to the "linguistic unionism" that animated the latter (72). English was a "technology of imperial assimilation" (88) for British subjects, but Americans rejected linguistic distinctness "to preserve a connection to values, thoughts, and feelings that they did not want to lose" (111). The third chapter focuses on the East India Company employee John Gilchrist. Best known as the philologist who introduced the company and other Europeans to the most widely spoken vernaculars of the sub-continent (Hindi and Urdu), he spent several decades devising a universal character that could represent sounds in all languages, casting it in type, and designing a remarkable "abecedarian clock" that would have mechanically produced each sound when its hand struck the character that Gilchrist had assigned it. Gilchrist intended his inventions to achieve political reform in Britain through the "diffusion of rational liberty, commerce, morality, and religion" (132). Chapter 4 centers on the English typecaster Edmund Fry, who produced a collection of specimens of more than two hundred modes of writing. The effort, which Cassedy estimates entailed some 10,000 hours of skilled labor in carving and casting type, illustrated the proficiency and range of Fry's typecasting business, but Fry also pitched it as a philological tool (147). In severing "the shapes and sounds of language" from meaning, Cassedy argues, Pantographia (1799) pushed its audience to affirm pre-existing opinions about peoples (151). The final chapter focuses on Mary Willcocks, an abused Englishwoman who, for a time, successfully posed as Caraboo, a kidnapped and stranded Polynesian princess, by speaking and writing an invented language that fooled Bristol officials and the local gentry. Although eventually discovered, the ruse allowed her to avoid institutionalization, gained her a patron, and provided the basis for a brief but sensational stint as a celebrity in Philadelphia and New York. These brief descriptions do not do justice to the textured accounts of lives and linguistic projects that Cassedy provides. Figures of Speech is a wonderfully written and deeply engaging study of linguistic lives in the [End Page 365] Revolutionary-era United States and British Empire. The book is also well structured. Examining discrete lives in separate chapters provides the reader with rich, compelling accounts of how individuals used language toward idiosyncratic ends, and Cassedy frequently pauses to draw surprising connections between his subjects or to lead the reader through points of comparison and contrast. Cassedy, and University of Iowa Press, must also be commended for taking the effort to reproduce his subjects' several orthographies. The...

Syntaxes Of The Self: The Neo-Baroque In John Rechy's City Of Night

Chicanx literary production has been a respected field of scholarly critique since the early twentieth century, constituting a site of cultural rupture and new articulations of the national. Though frequently associated with Ethnic Studies or English department canons due to the use of the English language, Mexican-American author John Rechy and his breakout novel City of Night (1963) must be conceptualized as a vital link connecting Latin American and U.S.-based literature canons. In order to do so, City of Night should be read as a major contribution to, and historical extension of, the Neo-Baroque aesthetic and cultural tradition. By looking principally to the theories of Mabel Moraña, César Salgado, and Angela Ndalianis, the Neo-Baroque is shown to be a postmodern movement-cum-trope of resistance popularly practiced in Latin America that includes the use of inventive language tricks, emphasizes the role of the performative, taboo, and sexualized body, and is a tactic oft incorporated by "out" gay writers who critically observe from society's margins. Neo-Baroque traits can be seen in City of Night's foray into politico-linguistics, such as the use of neologisms, arbitrary capital letters, lack of apostrophes, and the particular use of colons and em-dashes, but also in the use of narrative fragmentation, abject decadence, and the Bakhtinian nonhierarchical "ordered chaos" of the carnivalesque. Lastly, when read through the lens of Gloria Anzaldúa's concept of mestiza consciousness, City of Night exemplifies how Chicanx identity politics may factor into literature of the Neo-Baroque in the mid to late twentieth century.

"He Constructed a Language L and Another LL": Diachronic Aspects of Tolkien's Early Philology

"He Constructed a Language L and Another LL":Diachronic Aspects of Tolkien's Early Philology Christopher Gilson (bio) On November 29, 1931, J.R.R. Tolkien read the essay he called A Secret Vice to the Samuel Johnson Society at Pembroke College, Oxford. In it he presented his ideas about the invention of private languages, the reasons that people make them, and the different kinds that can be made, ranging from simple word-for-word codes closely based on one's native speech to elaborate art-languages with their own sound-patterns and rules of inflexion and syntax. Tolkien exemplified all of this with samples from the invented languages he had learned from other children, shared in making, or invented on his own, the last including the Qenya and Noldorin that he imagined to be spoken by the elves and gnomes in the private mythology that he had also invented. Among the motives for language invention that Tolkien discussed in the essay, in connection with the description of an earlier private language Naffarin, he appealed to "pleasure in articulate sound, and in the symbolic use of it, independent of communication though constantly in fact entangled with it" (Vice 18). This was similar to what Tolkien would write much later to W. H. Auden, when asked for "human touches" about how The Lord of the Rings came to be written (Letters 211) , explaining that he was mostly aware of his own "linguistic conditioning" and that his learning Gothic was decisive to this because he "discovered in it not only modern historical philology, which appealed to the historical and scientific side, but for the first time the study of a language out of mere love: I mean for the acute aesthetic pleasure derived from a language for its own sake, not only free from being useful but free even from being the 'vehicle of a literature'" (Letters 213). That Tolkien recognized his pleasure in both Naffarin and Gothic to be separate from but entangled with their use in speech or writing suggests that the impulse he felt to devise words to fill in the gaps in the attested Gothic vocabulary must have been connected or came to be intermingled with his urge to create new languages. Tolkien shared his linguistic predilections, at least to some extent, with his schoolmate Christopher Wiseman, who later recalled: [End Page 75] Reading Homer with Cary Gilson sparked off in me what in Tolkien was already well alight, an interest in Philology. In fact John Ronald got to the point where he constructed a language L and another LL representing what L had become after a few centuries.1 In this paper I will take a closer look at what these recollections by Tolkien and Wiseman imply about Tolkien's creative activities while at school and during the following decade, considering how the invention of multiple languages ranging from Naffarin to Qenya and Noldorin intersected with each other, and how they were influenced by his study of languages such as Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Gothic, Finnish, and Welsh. I hope that examining the origins of the family of languages attributed to the Elves in the personal mythology he eventually constructed may contribute to understanding the extent to which this was (as he later said of The Lord of the Rings) "an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real" (Letters 264). Naffarin Tolkien recorded the only surviving example of Naffarin to illustrate how its invention reflected his "phonetic taste in individual phonemes" at that time, and he noted in particular certain sounds of English "(w, þ, š, ž, etc.)" that were intentionally absent from Naffarin.2 O Naffarínos cutá vu navru cangorluttos ca vúna tiéranar,dana maga tíer ce vru encá vún' fartaonce ya merúta vúna maxt' amámen. He explained that in constructing this language "the influences—outside English, and beyond a nascent purely individual element—are Latin and Spanish, in sound-choices and combinations, in general word form" (Vice 20). This can be seen in the first line of the poem where for instance the relation of Naffar...

O que eu Significo Diante Disso: ação artística com espectadores teatrais

Resumo: O artigo trata de processos de criação artística realizados com o público a partir de espetáculos teatrais, com o objetivo de evidenciar elementos que constituem uma poética do espectador. O público é convidado a se debruçar sobre a cena assistida tendo em vista o impacto ocasionado pela obra. O que se busca, a partir da criação artística proposta aos espectadores, é a possibilidade de invenção de linguagem, de elaboração de enunciados que escapem dos modelos repetitivos.

Pragmatism and Historicity

Abstract This paper provides a straightforward argument that demonstrates the irreconcilability of pragmatism and transcendentalism, by way of Darwin’s failure to account for the emergence of the human self or person and the existential and historied import of the human invention and mastery of language. On the Darwinian issue, I examine the implications of Darwin’s having neglected the most important phase of the evolution of Homo sapiens – the invention and mastery of natural language, which account for the self-transformation of the human primate into a self or person (with the acquisition of competences that appear nowhere else in the animal world); and which signify a novel transformation of the evolutionary process itself – the hybrid entwining of biological and cultural forces in the formation of the self. It’s a consequence of the invention of language that accounts for the historied nature of the human form of life. I treat history and historicity as existential constraints on the human form of cognition, which introduces an ineliminable but benign form of skepticism, which I show to be incompatible with Husserl’s transcendentalism and his attempt to accommodate historicity. I take pragmatism to be committed to an existential treatment of history and historicity, in the context of reviewing George Herbert Mead’s analysis of history and historical time. The two arguments converge on the incompatibility of pragmatism and transcendentalism.