Invented Fantasy Languages and ESL Issues

[dr_pretentious]

My new post is up at the Black Gate blog. Before they even get to the invented languages, my students have to fight through a thicket of real English words they probably should know but don't yet. Helping them build their vocabularies up to the point where they can tell a coined word from a mundane one has forced me to question the assumptions I make as a writer about how word choice contributes to worldbuilding.

Comments

[spiffnolee.livejournal.com]

I tripped on this sentence:
The patterns of sound and etymology that that tell a native speaker of English from a long line of native speakers that a word is probably real are simply invisible to my immigrant kids.

Did you notice that Nanowrimo is a an unrecognizable neologism?

Could you do a lesson on "Jabberwocky"? Take all of the unfamiliar words, make a list of words they remind you of, and take a guess at what the author meant. Might work at engaging wonder at the language, as well as showing why it's useful to learn roots and cognates. You could then even take the explanation of "Jabberwocky" given by the White King and have the students work out that the author is lying to them.

I continue to love reading your entries.

[wombats.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough, I tripped there as well but for an entirely different reason - English has one of the messier sets of word origins for a currently used language. I'm not an expert but my understanding is that between Old Norse, Norman French, Latin and Greek, English has very little of its original Old English still in it. Add to that, the twisted force of language politics that confuses the origins - like "debt" with a silent "b" since that was the Latin derivation foisted upon the spelling by some pedants in the 17th cent. (or was it 18th? - see, no expert here) and it gets hard to do etymology purely from spelling. With this polyglot of phonemic origin for the language, how does one develop a sense of "Englishness", as say compared to something that I think is more homogenous, such as Japanese?