If Your Own Tongue Fails...
[Crystal Dombrowski]
The pen is mightier than the sword, especially when the ink's homegrown. In 2004, currently attending NYUs Gallatin School for Individualized Study, Crystal Dombrowski decided to create her own language, a mosh of tongues Elven and Romantic. As of yet unnamed-Crystal, a Taoist, says the name will come to her, and will mean "earth", the language boasts a grammar system similar to ours but with attached pronoun; its characters are "flowy...with a lot of circular motions." When she's not penning Tolkien 2.0, Crystal flirts with French, Spanish, and Italian, preferably in hipster coffee havens. Crystal's long-term aspirations include a book, which hopefully will "bridge the gap of misunderstanding between languages." The U wishes her luck --Esperanto didn't quite catch on, but was it sprinkled with elf dust?
Vassili Verrecchia Shows Off His Favorite Things In His Paris Home
While his brother, Timothee, runs the NYC office, Vassili takes on the Paris-based side of things. To gain some insight to what inspires such a creative and entrepreneurial spirit, we asked Vass to show off some of his favorite worldly and sentimental possessions in his Paris home. See where Vass's travels have taken him...
about 19 hours ago
about 21 hours ago
03:00:41 PM May 26, 2012
01:42:26 PM May 26, 2012
02:56:54 PM May 21, 2012
02:35:16 PM May 21, 2012
model behavior
February 28, 2008
8:06pm
To think I have an NYU degree and still haven't mastered pig latin.
Blind Item
February 28, 2008
9:06pm
And to think so many village languages are dying out now...maybe because you can't inscribe them into a clunky dull gold ring?
Hoss
February 29, 2008
4:06am
Heh. Well, seeing as how it went from one speaker to millions around the world in less than a century, Esperanto seems to have "caught on" surprisingly well for a language without a military or an economy to coerce people into using it.
mankso
February 29, 2008
4:37am
>Esperanto didn’t quite catch on, Says who? You either haven't checked into it sufficiently or have been looking in all the wrong places. Or else have a very demanding definiton of 'catch on'! I think that in 120+ years without the backing of any large state, with very few financial resources and with only grass-roots support from private individuals, Esperanto has made quite remarkable progress around the world. Perhaps you don't know what happened to many Esperanto-speakers living under Hitler and Stalin? Maybe a quick look at this: [www.uea.org] or the Prague Manifesto: [lingvo.org] or a daily Esperanto broadcast from Radio Polonia: [www.polskieradio.pl] could help change your mind?
the undergrad
February 29, 2008
4:30pm
Perhaps not. In as much as it started with a circulation of 0 and has, in little over a century, expanded its base to 1 million, you could say it hasn't entirely failed. However, Zamenhof intended it to be a universal language, one which would help level cultural and sociological differences. Today, the majority of its users employ it as a side or second language, and not as a basic means of communication. I think it was an interesting concept, but not a practical one, for language is a very rooted part of identity, and needs a culture and history to root it.