made up languages and audiobooks

Post separation for topic sanity...

I've transformed into an audiobook junkie over the period of the last 5 years or so. It's partly as a result of long drives to gigs with Navan. An audiobook makes 11 hours in an 8x10 moving space much better, and it rips your throat up less than taking turns reading aloud (which we did with Bonfire of the Vanities on the way out the South Dakota years ago, leading to a number of very funny moments with Paul waking extremely shocked and confused from a dead sleep when the one of us reading would launch into one of the many loud swearing fests written into that book). In addition to making long trips better, audiobooks are also great for language upkeep or learning. I got into listening to Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen when I was trying to get my German functional. But it gets a bit sketchier when the language in question is created by the author.

Case in point: If you've noticed my audiobook sidebar, you've seen that I've been listening to Eragon, which has a good dose of created language in it. The problem is that I only know these things by sound and I realized most of the way through the book that I have no idea what these words look like. In a real language that's all well and good. There are plenty of arguments for learning by ear. But with a language that only exists in printed form it's a bit odd to never see the print. Internet to the rescue, as usual.

And just because I'm always happier with maps, there's also this.