Linguistics in Outer Space (V Lange SoSe 2023)

Some people with a degree in Linguistics end up in glamorous jobs in the entertainment industry: they work as dialect coaches for elves and other creatures in Lord of the Rings, they create alien languages like Klingon for Star Trek or Na’vi for Avatar, or they come up with gadgets like chatbots and automatic translators. Some even write Science Fiction novels: there is one in which linguists rule the world! This lecture will take you where no linguist has gone before: we will investigate the many fascinating linguistic aspects related to selected Science Fiction and Fantasy films. We will devote some time to the study of Klingon and other extraterrestrial languages as well as alien writing systems and look at the issues involved in machine translation and automatic speech processing. We will also come back to what is distinctly human about human language when we try to answer the question why Data as an android is so bad at telling jokes.

When: WED 3.DS

Where: POT/006