In the Land of Invented Languages

 

Tolkien told this story during a speech given in the early 1930s (before the publication of his fiction), which he introduced as being on the subject of “nothing less embarrassing than the unveiling in public of a secret vice.” After issuing a sort of apologia and explanation for what he was up to, he presented some examples of poetry in his own languages, thereby opening his secret to scrutiny in the name of the advancement of the art form whose “development to perfection must… certainly be prevented by its solitariness, the lack of interchange, open rivalry, study or imitation of others' technique.”

Things are different now. In an increasing number of online “artlang” or “conlang” (constructed language) forums, the formerly closeted (this is the word they use) practitioners of the no-longer-secret vice share the details of their languages with each other looking only for feedback and appreciation, and for the satisfaction of giving concrete linguistic shape to their personal aesthetic. The creator of ’x00E1;aokxaa incorporated influences from Mohawk, Swahili, and Japanese in creating a language with “an emphasis on emotion, touch, and action” in order to reflect his “philosophical views (existentialism, idealism, absurdism, etc.)-” Toki Pona, a language of simple syllables that uses only positive words, is intended to promote positive thinking, to be “fun and cute … one could almost imagine a race of little cartoon creatures speaking in Toki Pona.” Brithenig was designed as “the language of an alternate history, being the Romance language that might have evolved if Latin speakers had displaced Celtic speakers in Britain.” Nunihongo is an “attempt to answer what Japanese might look like if half its vocabulary were derived from English.” The Azak language was inspired by the inventor’s “discovery of agglutinative languages and ergativity” (grammatical types common in the world’s languages, but exotic with respect to English) and is meant to “take those features and push them to their limits.”

The urge to push features to their limits is also found in languages like Aeo, which uses only vowels, and (the self-describing) AllNoun. Other projects push the idea of language itself to its limits. Ilish is the language of a hypothetical sea creature that communicates by electrical shocks representing points in a Cartesian coordinate system. Meaning is completely carried by pronouns, which contain information about “attitude (beneficial, threatening, neutral), location (x, y, and z coordinates) and context (seen at that location now, expected to be at that location now, at that location in the past).” Rikchik is the language of octopus-like aliens that use seven tentacles to form combinations of shapes to make utterances.

In this atmosphere of lively exchange and discussion, some critical standards have emerged. Languages that are too Englishy are frowned upon, as are “kitchen sink” languages or “Frankenlangs,” which just throw together every cool feature the author can think of but don’t make sense as a whole. First timers often make the mistake of excitedly trumpeting a great new idea for marking pronouns, or negating sentences, or indicating tense, only to be patiently referred to the hundreds of natural languages that already do it that way. It is much harder to come up with something original than one might think. And while originality is appreciated, it must be backed up by complexity and depth. The most respected languages in the conlang community often have years of work behind them, and may even be attached to whole “conworlds” or “concultures” that help give them coherence and a model “literature.”

It is clear that the upper-echelon active conlangers have a lot of knowledge about a wide range of natural languages. Many critiques of proposed conlang features branch off into lengthy dis-cussions about exotic Australian languages or the sound-change rules of ancient Greek. In the summer of 2007, I attended the second annual Language Creation Conference in Berkeley, where about forty conlangers gathered to give presentations, participate in workshops, and socialize. The technical level of the discussions was sometimes incredibly high; people really knew their stuff. When one presenter began by playing some sound files and asking the audience to guess which languages they were, someone guessed right every time—Breton, Finnish, Navajo.

For these language inventors, language was not an enemy to be tamed or reformed but a muse. And they bowed down before her. Jeff Burke, a tall man who seemed nervous and shy at the podium, explained how he had been inspired to build his own family of “Central Mountain” languages by the incredible beauty he found in Mohawk when he took a course on it in college. He said the language “did something to me,” and he began to dig into the history of the language, becoming a self-taught expert in the development of Mohawk from Proto-Iroquoian. He was also fascinated by Cheyenne and wanted to capture “the spirit of its sounds,” so he studied the development of the language from Proto-Algonquian. His talk didn’t focus so much on his own creation as on the real languages that inspired it. He wanted us to understand where his artistic vision had come from. As he went over the complicated details of the Mohawk pronominal system, he spoke softly, but with such love and wonder in his voice that I thought he might burst into tears.

I was energized by the proceedings, reminded of the reason I had gone into linguistics in the first place —my own heart-fluttering fascination with languages. Over the years that visceral feeling had been somewhat dampened by the intellectual focus that an academic track demands. All linguists begin with that spark of love for language, but they sometimes end up so involved in supporting a theory or gathering evidence against someone else’s theory that they forget it. Languages become cold bundles of data that they pick through for what they need. There is value in this kind of activity, and sometimes excitement as well, but it rarely inspires delight.

And there was plenty of delight at the conlang conference. One of the most popular presentations was by Don Boozer, a librarian at the Cleveland Public Library. His language, Dritok, was born when he began to wonder if it was possible to make a language out of chipmunk noises. He started constructing a voiceless language, carried solely by clicking, popping, and hissing sounds. The loudest sound in the language (used for pejoratives) is a sort of forceful pig snort. The examples he gave sent waves of glee through the audience—they sounded so strange, so inhuman, but there was a detectable structure or system that gave Dritok a scent of “languageness.” He had also worked out aspects of a cultural context that would help the language make sense. Dritok is the language of the Drushek, long-tailed beings with large ears and no vocal cords who value solitude and quiet. They also use gestures for some syntactic functions. People immediately started asking questions: “How do they yell?” “Do they make art?” “Can they use whistling?” “Can they throw objects to get someone’s attention?” “Do they have thick skin?” Boozer hadn’t yet worked things out that far, but it was clear that if he wanted to, he had the blessings of the conlang community. They were clamoring for more.

Watching the presentations at the conlang conference got me thinking that I might like to make a language of my own. I came up with lots of ideas: a pan-conlang hybrid, formed from the features of various other invented languages; a language that used English words, but with different functions and meanings from those they have in English; a language whose phonemes were physical objects that had to be juggled in distinct patterns to make words; a language where every word is defined by its relationship to one specific concept; a language where the mesage has to be physically eaten and digested to be understood—immediacy of communication could not be a factor in that culture. I realized as I came up with these ideas that they were too “clever.” I had no desire to sit down and fill out the details of how any of them would work. I was moved not by the muse but by a desire to impress, to be seen as creative or original. I wanted to inspire that feeling of delight, to get the admiration and the respect that I had seen expressed for certain conlang projects, but I didn’t want to do the work. I was that guy who wants to play guitar in order to get the girls, that woman who wants to write a novel so she can go to fancy New York cocktail parties. I wasn’t driven by a need to practice the art, to satisfy a personal vision; I just thought it would be cool for other people to think my language was cool.

I guess I don’t have it in me. I’m not a language creation artist. But I can still be a language creation art appreciator, which itself takes a certain amount of work and background knowledge. The more you know about language and linguistics in general, the better you can enjoy the truly elegant or complex idea, and the better you can tell the good stuff from the lazy stuff, the mature solutions from the beginners' mistakes. One of the presenters, John Quijada (whose own language, Ithkuil, has been thirty years in the making and claims as its influences the “consonantal phonology and verbal morphology of Ubykh and Abkhaz, certain Amerindian verbal moods, Niger-Kordofanian aspectual systems, Basque and Dagestanian nominal case systems, Wakashan enclitic systems, the Tzeltal and Guugu Yimidhirr positional orientation systems, the Semitic triliteral root morphology, the evidential and possessive categories of Suzette Elgin’s Laadan, and the schematic word-formation principles of Wilkins' Analytical Language and Sudre’s Solresol”), compared the activities of the conlangers at the conference to a convention of biologists getting together to create an animal. “They would know and appreciate what they were doing, but it might be hard to explain to nonbiologists why some choices were praised as brilliant, some got a laugh, and others got a groan.”

At a very basic level, language invention is an expression of the creativity that is latent in all of us. Children like to draw pictures, playact scenes, and make up little tunes, and many of them also go through a phase