o to be a blogger

[calimac]

1. Many of my readers will want to see this one: an article about invented languages. With a fair amount about Tolkien, yes. Makes the point that Tolkien used his creative imagination on reconstructing gaps in Anglo-Saxon texts in the same way that he used it to create the Elvish tongues. The article is a review of a book by the linguist who's inventing languages for George R.R. Martin. Doesn't discuss the oddity of a supposedly creative author contracting this intensely personal task out. Describes the linguist's act of modeling secondary-world linguistic history on primary-world examples as "cultural interpretation" in a vaguely disapproving tone. Not sure if the author realizes that Tolkien did the same thing.

2. Thoughtful article on Governor Jerry Brown's even more thoughtful decision to sign California's end-of-life option bill. This is governing as it should be: where a genuine moral choice meets the practicalities of public policy.

3. Movie I haven't seen entry 1: What the new Steve Jobs movie leaves out: how he became The Man while still thinking of himself as an iconoclastic rebel.

4. Movie I haven't seen entry 2: This article argues that The Martian is not "competence porn" while providing extensive evidence that it's exactly that.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I've been on a couple of panels with the guy who came up with the languages for Martin's world. The one I found most striking was the one where I cited Anthony Burgess's invention of nadsat for A Clockwork Orange as an impressively clever bit of linguistic invention (I particularly like the pun of "horrorshow" as a term of approval, from khorosho), and he could not imagine how anyone could find such a thing interesting; he wanted languages invented from first principles, not as imagined results of historical changes from real world languages.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Interesting, and it maps intriguingly onto the aesthetic differences between this guy and the one who wrote the article.

Again, Tolkien did something similar to Burgess, though working in the opposite direction: at least initially, he imagined his invented ancient languages evolving into, or at least influencing, historical ones.

[andrewducker]

So far as I understand, he invented the languages for the TV show, based on the fragments in the books. There's far more of the language in the TV show than in the books, because in the books you get the translated version (mostly), while in the TV show you tend to get the original language (with subtitles).

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That makes it better. The TV show is inherently a collaborative process in a way the books are not.