That’s definitely not true for Germany, where almost all study courses are still held in German. I couldn’t find a statistic, but for perspective a cite from a German site for general information about studies in English (especially addressed at foreign students):
As you can see, English study courses in Germany are very much the exception.
Tengwar is a script; Quenya is a language that is sometimes written in tengwar.
Tengwar is not officially part of Unicode but there is an unofficial standard (the Conscript Unicode Registry) that encodes it in part of the Private Use Area. The CUR also has encodings for Cirth (Tolkien’s “Dwarvish” script), Klingon, and a few dozen other scripts that are not (yet) officially part of Unicode.
I am not talking about the University of Heidelberg. I am talking about e.g. the International Jacobs University in Bremen. My friend, who works there, told me that about 75% of the students were not German (this is by design), and that many or most of the courses were in English.
I myself have visited “normal” research institutes and universities in Germany, and yes all the courses and seminars were in German
Not that it has not even been suggested, but from the get-go they ran into the problem that the Tolkien Estate claims copyright on all of the Professor’s invented languages and scripts and has explicitly refused permission to release it into the public domain to the extent required for it to be encoded, nor do they want it encoded.
You could of course claim that none of their claims are legally enforceable, but who wants to fight with them and has the resources to do so, just to submit a proposal that will probably get shot down anyway?
Unicode does keep adding random stuff; for example, we have the lime emoji :green_square:, the Chinese character 𤅐, and the Ninja
Although the website is hosted by the uni of Heidelberg, it’s general information about studying in English in Germany. Let’s just agree that English studies in Germany are possible, but not the norm.
What makes for a good language? Hundreds of language inventors have put forward their ideas. Obviously each must disagree with the others about that answer. Some aspects were generally agreed upon: regular verbs, pronunciation matches spelling, emphasis on universals. Historically, though, most of these were created by Europeans out of European languages, so “universals” actually ignored the majority of the world.
That’s an issue with Esperanto. Another huge problem with Esperanto is that it is less a living language and more of a religion. It didn’t take long for acolytes to turn heretic and devise “better” versions than the original. Look at the history of Ido, just one of the more popular versions of “Reformed Esperanto.”
Bottom line is that no invented language can compare with a major living language. English has a corpus of 100 million books, a zillion movies and tv shows, and a trillion website pages. The world and a large percentage of it most brilliant and creative people increasingly thinks and expresses itself in English. What does a conlang have to offer compared to that?
Yes, Zamenhof was Polish, and, yes, real languages evolve (though one can make a case that Classical Esperanto has had some impact, whereas who the fuck speaks Ido…)
Depending on where you live, it may be hard to grok this but many people prefer not to default to speaking English all the fucking time. You could switch to Latin, French, or Classical Chinese, but a conlang at least offers the promise of being slightly more culturally neutral than any major living language. So the main point of Esperanto is not the details of how plurals are formed, who gives a shit, but that it is not English or French or Mandarin, plus people have heard of it.
China used to have 400,000 Esperanto speakers, or so they say, but is now down to only one small university offering an Esperanto major. So it goes.
Reality doesn’t care much about personal preferences. To use your line, it may be hard to grok this but many people are also not all that happy about being forced into social media. But that’s the truth of this world.
Trying to make Esperanto work is like trying to make airmail letters work. A tiny number of people may go to the time and expense but the world will go on with its business and never notice.
Some are, although not all. Conlangs are very spread out between different types, but the languages you mentioned are legitimate. Kay(f)bop(t) is an example of a joke language, and its made as such, but the conlangs you’re talking about are mostly IALs and englangs. They are a bit underused as most people don’t know about them. Sadly, its quite a niche community /:
It’s not my place to tell people what to do. I have no inside information about what went down in San Marino, just what they said about the authorities originally seeming interested, San Marino at the time having no university, but soon afterwards dropping them like a hot rock. Also the main guy (who wanted the academy not to be mixed up in any way with the “Esperanto movement” religion, even balking at prominently mentioning the name “Esperanto”) died, and that was pretty much the final nail in the coffin.
It’s a lot more not-Mandarin than it is not-English or not-French, though. For a language that’s supposed to be global and culturally neutral, it’s got a heck of a lot more European language influence than anything else.
Sounds like the Shaw (Shavian) alphabet – the creation of George Bernard Shaw, who I suspect came up with it while writing Pygmalion.
I have a copy of Shaw’s play Androcles and the Lion printed in the Shaw alphabet. It takes up a lot less space on the page than the English equivalent (one of its selling points), and after a little practice it’s easy to read and interpret, too.
There are folks devoted to this, as there are for Esperanto. I don’t think there are as many of them.
I don’t particularly care for the use of this, or for any phonetically-based writing system, largely because it divorces the language from its roots and history. If you see a word spelled you can see what other words it’s linked to and often deduce some of its history. That will be lost if you go to something like the Shaw alphabet. Worse, people with different accents, who now share a common written language (except for things like colou/colour or connection/connexion) will have different Shaw lp?written languages. How does THAT hek
Related to Shavian. I recently looked through the variety of proposals to improve written English to see what seemed the most “practical”. For me, “practical” would mean that it’s reasonably easy to read for someone who has already learned to read and write English and it doesn’t require writing differently for dialects, minus extreme circumstances.
I’d never heard of it before but I’d personally suggest that people start pushing forward on Interspel:
The problem with proposals to create a “phonetic” spelling system for English is that there are many different English dialects, and some words are pronounced differently in each dialect. A phonetic spelling system is going to favor one of those dialects, and speakers of the others will have to learn a new system that to them is just as non-phonetic as the current one.