Superlinguo

Two beautiful documentary shorts made from my Syuba archive collections

The ELAR archive teamed up with Anna and Remy Sowa at Chouette Films to make shorts from the open access materials in the collection. These two films was created from footage from my Kagate (Syuba) deposit at ELAR.

The video above shows Dawa Lama harvesting honey and talking about the process. The video below features people talking about their experiences of the 2015 earthquakes in Nepal. It was an interesting experience working with other people on my data, but it’s made me all the more happy that it’s open access and available for people to use. I’ve also been blown away by how beautiful the archive footage looks when it’s left in the hands of professional editors!

The ELAR blog will be featuring other videos made by Chouette over the coming weeks. It’s also just a great blog about language documentation.

See also on Superlinguo: Syuba language Open Access collection now available through ELAR

Indiegogo Campaign: Conlanging Documentary Film

I never used to understand the point of constructed languages (conlangs). Why spend your time making up languages when we haven’t even got a sufficient record of the languages already spoken on Earth. There is, of course, no reason why we can’t pursue both ends - and indeed some of the most successful conlangers are also linguists.

We’ve been watching the development of the Conlanging film, and they’re now at a point where they’re crowdraising the last bit of funding they’ll need to make the film available. From the campaign page:

Did you know that the global phenomenon of inventing languages is flourishing like never before? Popular culture is embracing language construction as a key detail in world-building for fantasy, sci-fi, and other entertainment genres? Despite the universal nature of language, few people know about the world of language construction, the people who engage in it, or its long history. Yet no one has done a documentary feature about this fascinating landscape before—this will be the first.  

You have until the 14th of August 2016 to help make this film a reality!

We don’t write about conlang (constructed language) on Superlinguo that much. It’s not a deliberate slight, it’s just that we get our kicks looking at how language is used day to day. 

Superlinguo buddy and creator of the Krypton language used in Superman Christine Schreyer sent us this link for Conlanging, an upcoming documentary about constructed languages. I like conlangs because they can test the parameters of what you can do with communication in ways that naturally occurring languages may not - check out the haptic language in the trailer! Christine is one of the Executive Producers for the film. 

One of the other Executive Producers is David J. Peterson, who works on the languages featured in HBO’s Game of Thrones. He has a book out later this year called The Art of Language Invention. If the documentary aims to give you a ‘why’ for conlanging then this book looks like it will be more of the ‘how’. 

Conlanging certainly appears to be gaining in popularity, and it seems to be especially thanks to TV and Cinema blockbusters. We’re not complaining, we figure that anything that gets people thinking critically about language, and how it works, is a good thing.

We’ll do our best to review both when they’re out!