Tok Class: Language

During today's class, we did a task where we needed to create our own language based on a given setting. In my group, we were asked to create a language that would be used by people living near a volcano. We came across several difficulties, it was difficult to differentiate between sounds and letters. I believe that the basis of every language is a set of letters, however others disagreed and believed that using familiar sounds was more important. They did raise several interesting points where they believed that sounds from nature, in this case a volcanic eruption, should be used in related words. We created words that acted as a root, then derived several words, which seemed like the way we would go about in creating a language. It was important for words with connected meanings to have similar sounds. When thinking of what would be the basic words we had to create, we found the most important aspect to be that of survival. As a result of being a group that lives near a volcano, calling for danger was an important section of language. That way we would be able to communicate things when needed. Therefore most of our language was related to this, then we created more elaborate words we might need. Some people in class commented that our language was similar to Latin, how our language consisted of roots and derivatives.