Curious about model languages? Here's my personal opinion on the ones you should study first. (Then check out the 2005 Top 200 for the most popular.)
1. Esperanto - more staying power, more longevity, more speakers, more imitators than any other constructed language.
2. Quenya* - the most beautiful sounding constructed language, spoken by one of the most compelling fictional races ever portrayed (Elves).
3. Nadsat - the best invented slang, with great-sounding words, artfully derived.
4. Klingon - the most commercially successful conlang. It helped transform the Klingons from cardboard villains in Classic Trek to a fascinating warrior culture.
5. Lapine - the best naming language ever created and a minimalist virtuoso performance, a haiku of a language compared to the sonnet of Sindarin.
6. Solresol - the cleverest pasigraphy (philosophical language), the earliest auxlang to be successful and the most likely to be learned by Julie Andrews.
7. Lojban - the most professional and thought-provoking of the modern logical languages, with a fascinating methodology for its original word derivation.
8. Tepa - a unique personal language, professionally designed and presented; highly regarded among the Internet community of language modelers.
9. Amman-Iar - if you have ever longed to see one of Tolkien's languages brought to completion, you will love Amman-Iar, created in the spirit of Sindarin and Quenya and set in a new continent of Middle Earth.
10. Talossan - the most detailed fictional language, a Gallo-Romance offshoot with over 30,000 words of vocabulary and a well-developed grammar.
*Since most Sindarin terms are derived from Quenya, I could say that Quenya & Sindarin are one entry in the Top Ten, especially since most of the names in The Lord of the Rings are from Sindarin.
|
