Has anyone salvaged Christopher Paolini's conlang?

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MoonRightRomantic
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Has anyone salvaged Christopher Paolini's conlang?

Post by MoonRightRomantic »

I am sure everyone here is probably familiar with Christopher Paolini's horrible published conlang. I am probably masochistic for asking this, but has anyone salvaged his conlang (or attempted to)? I entertained the idea of doing so as a lab for making my own conlangs (again, masochism), but I was curious if anyone else had done so.
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Re: Has anyone salvaged Christopher Paolini's conlang?

Post by Keenir »

MoonRightRomantic wrote:I am sure everyone here is probably familiar with Christopher Paolini's horrible published conlang. I am probably masochistic for asking this, but has anyone salvaged his conlang (or attempted to)? I entertained the idea of doing so as a lab for making my own conlangs (again, masochism), but I was curious if anyone else had done so.
there was a thread here or on the ZBB, in which Paolini's conlang was discussed - I think it turned out to be Old Norse.
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elemtilas
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Re: Has anyone salvaged Christopher Paolini's conlang?

Post by elemtilas »

Keenir wrote:
MoonRightRomantic wrote:I am sure everyone here is probably familiar with Christopher Paolini's horrible published conlang. I am probably masochistic for asking this, but has anyone salvaged his conlang (or attempted to)? I entertained the idea of doing so as a lab for making my own conlangs (again, masochism), but I was curious if anyone else had done so.
there was a thread here or on the ZBB, in which Paolini's conlang was discussed - I think it turned out to be Old Norse.
Couldn't find one there -- only threads that mention the name tangentially. There was one rantfest in the search results that turned out to be a rather amusing read. Read all five pages of it!

Question: why would anyone want to salvage his conlang? What was the issue with it? (I never read his books, so have no idea what the conlang in question is or what might be seen as defective about it.)
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Lambuzhao
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Re: Has anyone salvaged Christopher Paolini's conlang?

Post by Lambuzhao »

http://www.gaiaonline.com/guilds/viewto ... 975&page=1

Yipes!

A Norse is a Norse,
of course, of course,
Unless of course
the Norse is the lametastic
Ancient Language of Cristoforo Paolini.

[:S]
Last edited by Lambuzhao on 14 Feb 2016 04:23, edited 1 time in total.
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Thrice Xandvii
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Re: Has anyone salvaged Christopher Paolini's conlang?

Post by Thrice Xandvii »

What/who are we talking about?
Edit: Reading through the above link now!
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elemtilas
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Re: Has anyone salvaged Christopher Paolini's conlang?

Post by elemtilas »

Thrice Xandvii wrote:What/who are we talking about?
Edit: Reading through the above link now!
"I am sure everyone here is probably familiar with Christopher Paolini's horrible published conlang. I am probably masochistic for asking this, but has anyone salvaged his conlang (or attempted to)? I entertained the idea of doing so as a lab for making my own conlangs (again, masochism), but I was curious if anyone else had done so."

I picked up the book in question a couple years ago in a 50% off bin at a dollar store, but never read it. From what I háve heard about it in the above link and other similar critical posts it sounds rather like a bit of a train wreck. Certainly the conlang does. Which means Celynrood will pick it up and turn it into a blockbuster...
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Re: Has anyone salvaged Christopher Paolini's conlang?

Post by Znex »

elemtilas wrote:I picked up the book in question a couple years ago in a 50% off bin at a dollar store, but never read it. From what I háve heard about it in the above link and other similar critical posts it sounds rather like a bit of a train wreck. Certainly the conlang does. Which means Celynrood will pick it up and turn it into a blockbuster...
They made a film of Eragon a few years back, but it was pretty rubbish.
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elemtilas
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Re: Has anyone salvaged Christopher Paolini's conlang?

Post by elemtilas »

Znex wrote:
elemtilas wrote:I picked up the book in question a couple years ago in a 50% off bin at a dollar store, but never read it. From what I háve heard about it in the above link and other similar critical posts it sounds rather like a bit of a train wreck. Certainly the conlang does. Which means Celynrood will pick it up and turn it into a blockbuster...
They made a film of Eragon a few years back, but it was pretty rubbish.
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Thrice Xandvii
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Re: Has anyone salvaged Christopher Paolini's conlang?

Post by Thrice Xandvii »

elemtilas wrote:
Thrice Xandvii wrote:What/who are we talking about?
Edit: Reading through the above link now!
"I am sure everyone here is probably familiar with Christopher Paolini [...]"
Yes, the irony of that wasn't lost on me. I was amused that the assumption was we had all heard of this guy when I had no clue who it was. Now, had he said, "the conlang from Eragon" I would have at least had a touchpoint, but still known nothing of this conlang in question.
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Re: Has anyone salvaged Christopher Paolini's conlang?

Post by qwed117 »

Znex wrote:
elemtilas wrote:I picked up the book in question a couple years ago in a 50% off bin at a dollar store, but never read it. From what I háve heard about it in the above link and other similar critical posts it sounds rather like a bit of a train wreck. Certainly the conlang does. Which means Celynrood will pick it up and turn it into a blockbuster...
They made a film of Eragon a few years back, but it was pretty rubbish.
God, someone at my school nominated that movies as the "best movie adaptation of a bestselling novel" for our Library's I'm-not-sure-what-it-is competition.
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Re: Has anyone salvaged Christopher Paolini's conlang?

Post by Ahzoh »

Can't say I like the conlang, but despite the consensus, I still enjoyed the books.
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Re: Has anyone salvaged Christopher Paolini's conlang?

Post by qwed117 »

Ahzoh wrote:Can't say I like the conlang, but despite the consensus, I still enjoyed the books.
Well, he fulfilled the purpose of his conlang. He needed to produce something that was familiar yet foreign. He fused Welsh, Latin and Germanic into something that a person could understand, yet not. So in that way, he sucessfully conlanged, no matter how much one wishes to avoid that concept.
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Re: Has anyone salvaged Christopher Paolini's conlang?

Post by Isoraqathedh »

I too never really bought into the dislike train regarding Eragon. It's a none-too-bad story, derivative as it may be, but then again I had been known to fail to recognise someone because I saw him from the side when I had only ever seen him from the front.

As for the Ancient Language, it's definitely enough language for whatever it's purposes; unfortunate as it is, stories are not commonly regarded to be vehicles for languages one has constructed, but as a end unto itself, so the author cannot be faulted for only putting the minimum amount of effort to be not-English (the bare minimum, I think, would be just write English but in a funny font, such as italics or surrounded-by-angle-brackets).

(Full disclosure: Eragon was the series of books that introduced me to the idea of a map in a book, and I love maps, but I am not good at combining things that I know and I need something to do it for me once in order for me to do it for myself…)
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Dormouse559
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Re: Has anyone salvaged Christopher Paolini's conlang?

Post by Dormouse559 »

Isoraqathedh wrote:As for the Ancient Language, it's definitely enough language for whatever it's purposes; unfortunate as it is, stories are not commonly regarded to be vehicles for languages one has constructed, but as a end unto itself, so the author cannot be faulted for only putting the minimum amount of effort to be not-English (the bare minimum, I think, would be just write English but in a funny font, such as italics or surrounded-by-angle-brackets).
The problem I have with the Ancient Language is not so much that Paolini only developed the language as much as the narrative required; I've read and loved fantasy stories with any number of naming languages. The issue's that he treats it like a fully developed or linguistically interesting language, when it's really just Old Norse vocabulary stretched across English grammar. And he doesn't really understand either of those things either.
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Re: Has anyone salvaged Christopher Paolini's conlang?

Post by Ælfwine »

I hadn't really read any of his books (only the movie), but boy, is this bad, and this is coming from someone making an a posteriori language from ON. [:S]
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Lambuzhao
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Re: Has anyone salvaged Christopher Paolini's conlang?

Post by Lambuzhao »

elemtilas wrote: I picked up the book in question a couple years ago in a 50% off bin at a dollar store,
Ditto [:|] (I think I bought mine from a garage sale)
Ælfwine wrote:I hadn't really read any of his books (only the movie),
Ditto [¬.¬]

but boy, is this bad,
Ditto [D;]
and this is coming from someone making an a posteriori language from ON. [:S]
Ditto [:'(]

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Re: Has anyone salvaged Christopher Paolini's conlang?

Post by Curlyjimsam »

Let's be fair, there are plenty of fantasy authors who are much better regarded than Paolini and yet do pretty horribly when it comes to languages ...
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Dormouse559
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Re: Has anyone salvaged Christopher Paolini's conlang?

Post by Dormouse559 »

We aren't talking about them, though. The fact that other people have made bad conlangs doesn't change the quality of the Ancient Language.
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Re: Has anyone salvaged Christopher Paolini's conlang?

Post by KaiTheHomoSapien »

Sometimes it seems like not much thought went into conlangs like this: as in, they're just translations from English. That's sort of the feeling I got when reading Eragon. I also didn't really like the pronunciations he gave; they seemed too English-influenced and the needless diacritics seemed silly. I thought it had a good potential as a conlang, though.
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Re: Has anyone salvaged Christopher Paolini's conlang?

Post by alynnidalar »

Augh, the movie was plain awful. I was a legitimate Paolini fan back when it came out (forgive me; I was very young), and the fans of the books hated the movie more than anyone else. They changed the book enough such that it'd be impossible to make a sequel even remotely accurate to the books, yet not enough to transform it into something interesting and original. They took a book that was already pretty cliched and made it more cliche, if that's even possible.

As a joke, back in the day I created a "good bits" version of the movie... aka only the parts with Garrett Hedlund in it. He (and Jeremy Irons) were the only salvageable things in the movie.

Anyway, I will say this about the Ancient Language--the fact that it existed at all helped further my interest in conlangs. I dunno what there is to say about "salvaging" it; I mean if you took the vocabulary that exists and threw out 95% of the things said about syntax and morphology and so on, I suppose you could create something from that, but then it wouldn't really be the same language, would it?

It can't work as a real language because of the whole "can't lie" thing, anyway. It's really more of a magically-enforced auxlang.

EDIT: I just remembered that I never actually finished the last book. I don't have much desire to, honestly; the books were fun at the time but just aren't anything to write home about. Mostly inoffensive in retrospect.
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