Course Description
Invented Languages, from Elvish to Esperanto, LING 80K
Considers invented languages, including Elvish and Klingon, as well as lesser-known ones that tackle ethical, social, or cognitive concerns. Students learn tools from contemporary linguistics to analyze language structures and understand how they relate to creator intentions.
Key Information
Credit: 5 quarter units /
3.33 semester units credit
UC Santa Cruz, Linguistics
Course Credit:
Upon successful completion, all online courses offered through cross-enrollment provide UC unit credit. Some courses are approved for GE, major preparation and/or, major credit or can be used as a substitute for a course at your campus.If "unit credit" is listed by your campus, consult your department, academic adviser or Student Affairs division to inquire about the petition process for more than unit credit for the course.
UC Berkeley:
Unit Credit
UC Davis:
General Education: SS.
UC Irvine:
Unit Credit
UC Los Angeles:
Unit Credit
UC Merced:
Unit Credit (see your Academic Advisor)
UC Riverside:
General Education: LING Elective units
UC San Diego:
General Education: Revelle one course towards Social Science; TMC 1 course toward lower division disciplinary breadth if noncontiguous to major; Warren - may also be used for PofC depending on major/PofC/AS; Sixth - 1 NAHR; Muir: petition as one course in matching sequence for Social Sciences GE; Muir: 1 course in a Social Sciences theme in "Language and Communication";
UC San Francisco:
Unit Credit
UC Santa Barbara:
Pending
UC Santa Cruz:
General Education: TA (Textual Analysis & Interpretation)
More About The Course
This is a course about constructed languages, the languages that people deliberately devise, and the way those languages relate to (or differ from) natural languages, the languages that arise from the self-organizing nature of human communities. Constructed languages are well-known in science fiction and fantasy literature as ways of contributing to the fleshing out of a novel world, but the history and purposes of constructed languages is much more complex. Part of this courses goal is to chart the various creations of these languages and understand what may unite and divide these forms of creation. We will focus on making clear in what ways the form of the language reflects the aesthetic, political, ethical, or interpretive intentions of the creators.
Our analysis of the form of these languages will be that of contemporary mainstream generative linguistics, the modern science of language, which focuses on describing and explaining patterns of variation in languages of the world. Using the tools of modern linguistics, we will analyze the properties of various constructed languages, and use that analysis to make clearer the form-intention connection.
We will look at several extant examples of constructed languages, but, in addition, we as a class will collaboratively build our own language (a “classlang”) to more fully understand the kinds of decisions language creators face and how they go about making them.
No previous work in linguistics is presupposed.
Course Creator
Pranav Anand
Pranav Anand is a Professor of Linguistics who works at the intersection of theoretical linguistics, philosophy of language, and computational linguistics. At the broadest level, he is interested in how context shapes the meaning we draw from linguistic expressions. One major strand of his work concerns how subjective experience and perspective are encoded cross-linguistically, and here he has looked at how across languages of the world we report our dreams, how we talk about ourselves, and how we specify the evidence for our claims. With more computationally-oriented models, Pranav has examined cross-linguistic and cross-cultural forms of persuasive argumentation, as well as how our language can be used to characterize our emotional states. Current work in this area is focusing on connecting computationally-derived models with psychological theories, including work with psychologists and computer scientists on theories of emotion and on why partisan language can be more persuasive than more measured language.
Pranav Anand is a Professor of Linguistics who works at the intersection of theoretical linguistics, philosophy of language, and computational linguistics. At the broadest level, he is interested in how context shapes the meaning we draw from linguistic expressions. One major strand of his work concerns how subjective experience and perspective are encoded cross-linguistically, and here he ...Pranav Anand is a Professor of Linguistics who works at the intersection of theoretical linguistics, philosophy of language, and computational linguistics. At the broadest level, he is interested in how context shapes the meaning we draw from linguistic expressions. One major strand of his work concerns how subjective experience and perspective are encoded cross-linguistically, and here he has looked at how across languages of the world we report our dreams, how we talk about ourselves, and how we specify the evidence for our claims. With more computationally-oriented models, Pranav has examined cross-linguistic and cross-cultural forms of persuasive argumentation, as well as how our language can be used to characterize our emotional states. Current work in this area is focusing on connecting computationally-derived models with psychological theories, including work with psychologists and computer scientists on theories of emotion and on why partisan language can be more persuasive than more measured language.
