Cafe 'Stelo', a Korean online cafe for constructed languages

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Jens Wilkinson, the creator of Neo Patwa, alerted me today to a cafe on Naver (pretty much Korea's Google) in Korean for constructed languages. Here's the link.

I'll translate the content into Japanese (always easy to translate into due to the same word order) as well as English. Here's the intro in Korean:

카페 스텔로에 오신 것을 환영합니다

안녕하세요? 이 곳 카페 스텔로 (stelo)는 인공 언어를 배우거나 새로 만들려는 사람들의 모임으로, 이름 '스텔로'은 가장 유명한 인공 언어 중 하나인 에스페란토 (Esperanto), epo)의 '별'을 뜻하는 단어입니다.

인공 언어란 자연스럽게 존재하게 된 언어가 아닌, 어떤 사람이나 사람들이 만들어 낸 자신만의 언어입니다. 인공어는 유희적으로 쓰일 수도, 국제 보조어일 수도 있지요.

하나의 언어를 만든다는 것은 정말 꿈같은 일임과 동시에 힘든 일입니다. 그러기에 회원들의 분위기에 떠밀려 새 언어를 만들어야만 하는 것은 아닙니다. 다른 회원들이 만들고 있는 언어를 도와 줄 수도 있고, 그저 언어학에 충실할 수도 있지요.

아무쪼록 많은 참여와 홍보 부탁드립니다.


Followed by my Japanese translation:

カフェ「ステロ」へようこそ。

こんにちは!このカフェ「ステロ」は人工言語を学んだり新しく作ろうとする人たちの集まりとして、名前「ステロ」は一番有名な人工言語の中の一つであるエスペラント(Esperanto,Epo)の「星」と意味する単語です。

人工言語とは自然に存在するようになった言語ではなく、誰一人か何人かが作り出した自分だけの言語です。人工言語は遊戯的に使われることも、国際補助語でもできるでしょう。

一つの言語を作るのは本当に夢のようなことであると同時に難しいことでもあります。といって会員たちの雰囲気にあわせて新しい言語を作らなきゃいけないことではありません。他の会員たちが作ってる言語を手伝うこともできるし、なんとなく言語学にまじめなのかもしれません。

とにかく多い参与と広報をお願いします。


And now English:

Welcome to Cafe Stelo.

Hello there. This cafe is a gathering called Stelo of people that are learning or making new constructed languages, the name of which (Stelo) comes from Esperanto, one of the most famous constructed languages, and means 'star'.

Constructed languages are languages that don't just exist naturally, but are made by a person or a group of people, their own language. They can be used for fun, or as international auxiliary languages.

Making a language is really like a dream, but at the same time it's also pretty hard. That doesn't mean that you have to make a language here with the members of the cafe though. You can help other people with the languages they're making, and it can help out linguistically as well too.

Anyway, we hope for a lot of participation and promotion from you.


Both of these are rough translations, but they do the job. I haven't taken a good look at the cafe yet so I have no idea how active it is but it's nice to see that they exist here in Korea too.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I am curious about the ease of translating Korean to Japanese and vice versa.

It would be nice if you created a blog entry illustrating some grammatical/syntax similarities and differences between Korean and Japanese.

Me said...

Okay, sure. I'll write something on that tomorrow or the next day. There might actually already be some good information in Japanese or Korean that I can just copy here and explain a bit in English, which would make things really easy.

Steve said...

The more interesting question for me would be, "What sort of auxlangs will they produce--Western or world?" If I could keep tabs on them myself, that's what I'd check on.

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