- In the world of language nerdery,
there's perhaps no greater language nerd
than the conlang language nerd.
Conlang is short for constructed language,
and it refers to languages that don't evolve
from the organic forces of culture, but rather,
were deliberately designed by one or more individuals.
Conlangers spend years, decades,
even lifetimes building their languages.
And let me tell you, there is a lot more to it
than just making up a few or a few thousand words.
According to "The Language Construction Kit"
by Mark Rosenfelder, you have to decide on phonetics,
morphology, orthography, syntax,
and semantics, just for starters.
It also helps to be familiar
with lots of existing languages.
If English is your only frame of reference,
you'll be missing out on the wonderful variety
of sounds and systems that humans have generated.
Will your language be agglutinative like Turkish?
Will it have subject-object-verb structure like Japanese?
Or maybe ergative-absolutive alignment like Basque?
I told you this was gonna get nerdy.
It may not seem like there's much practical application
for conlangs in the real world,
but the history of invented languages
deepens our understanding of language in general,
its potential, its limitations, and its beauty.
I'm Dr. Erica Brozovsky, and this is Otherwords.
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♪ Otherwords ♪
Perhaps the most famous conlanger is J.R.R. Tolkien,
linguist and author of "The Lord of the Rings."
Creating his fictional elvish languages,
Quenya and Sindarin,
was Tolkien's true passion and priority.
(speaking in Sindarin)
(speaking in Quenya)
(speaking in Sindarin)
(speaking in Quenya)
He was inspired by the beauty of Finnish and Welsh,
and because real languages evolved with time,
Tolkien wanted his too as well.
This required writing a detailed history and mythology
of the people who spoke them, which ended up becoming
one of the most beloved fiction franchises of all time,
and basically, created an entire genre
of popular entertainment.
This is more or less the opposite
of how that other super nerdy fictional language came about.
In the early 1980s, a linguist named Marc Okrand was hired
by Paramount Pictures to devise a Klingon language
for the upcoming third film in the Star Trek franchise.
Up to that point, the only Klingon that had ever been heard
were a few lines actor James Doohan came up with
while filming "Star Trek, The Motion Picture."
(speaking in Klingon)
Okrand figured that since this was an alien race,
he ought to choose features
that are very rare in human languages,
like an odd object-verb-subject sentence structure
and a collection of phonemes
that are difficult to pronounce individually,
let alone in quick succession.
(speaking in Klingon) Okay.
(speaking in Klingon)
Okrand also wanted the language
to match the coarse war-like culture
of the people who speak it.
So Klingon has many different synonyms for fighting,
but no word for hello.
The closest you can get is, (speaks in Klingon)
which means, what do you want?
Linguist David J. Peterson took a similar tack
when inventing Dothraki for the "Game of Thrones" TV show.
It has 14 different ways to say horse,
but none for thank you.
When helping James Cameron
develop the Na'vi language for "Avatar,"
linguist Paul Frommer wanted it
to be relatively easy for the actors to pronounce.
Though he did include some ejective phonemes,
voiceless consonants produced with a contracted glottis,
like ch'ah and p'ah, similar to those found
in real-world languages like Mayan and Chechen.
Na'vi does not require specifying gender in its pronouns,
though it does offer two forms of we.
We as in me and you, and we as in me and someone else.
That way you always know exactly
who's invited to the sa'eoio.
Clearly, it takes a lot of work
to make a fictional language sound real.
But does anyone actually speak them? Not really.
Of all the fictional languages,
Klingon has the greatest number of truly conversant speakers
and they can probably all fit onto one bus.
Fictional languages like Klingon, Quenya,
and Na'vi were invented mainly
for artistic and aesthetic purposes.
However, some language inventors were much more ambitious.
They believed their creations were actually
improvements over natural languages,
that they could unlock human potential and better the world.
In the 17th century, many scholars became preoccupied
with the Tower of Babel problem.
According to the Bible,
God cursed humanity with many different languages
as punishment for building a really tall tower.
The inability to communicate, these scholars believed,
was still holding civilization back,
and they thought they could fix it
by trying to outdo God once again
with a man-made universal language.
The most famous attempt of the time
was by Bishop John Wilkins, who didn't like
that words were just arbitrary representations
that had to be memorized.
He believed that in a perfect universal language,
the very essence of a concept
should be encoded into the word itself,
with each letter representing
a hierarchy of classifications.
For example, a dog was called zita
because it was a domesticated, land-dwelling carnivore
with an oblong head and claws.
This barely makes sense when describing animals,
but Wilkins tried to classify everything,
and I mean everything!
The result is hundreds and hundreds
of pages of complex hierarchies,
many of which are pretty subjective.
For example, witchcraft is categorized
under Judicial Relations, subheading Capital Crimes.
As we explained in a previous video,
what Wilkins didn't understand, is that words
being arbitrary memorizations is not a bug, it's a feature.
It allows us to share a vast mental dictionary
that can be effortlessly and instantly accessed.
We don't need to describe a dog every time we say it
because we all already agree on what a dog is.
Despite the failure of Wilkin's life's work,
the dream of a universal language was resurrected
in the late 19th century when a small book
called "Lingvo Internacia" was self-published
by someone calling himself Dr. Esperanto,
which means one who hopes.
It was a guidebook for an international auxiliary language,
a kind of backup language, which could be used by people
from different nations to communicate with each other.
The true author was L.L. Zamenhof,
a Jewish ophthalmologist and amateur linguist
who grew up in a diverse area of Poland.
Like Wilkins, Zamenhof believed
that a universal auxlang could benefit the human race.
But unlike Wilkins, he wanted it to be easy to learn,
so he borrowed familiar morphemes
from existing Indo-European languages,
like hom- for man, and am- for love,
and a very simple, predictable grammar.
Anyone with a couple of years
of Spanish under their belt should be capable
of decoding simple sentences, like kio estas via nomo?
Today, Esperanto is the biggest real-world success story
of all invented languages.
There are hundreds of thousands of fluent speakers,
including several thousand raised on it.
However, it never quite became
a universal auxiliary language,
perhaps due to the rise in power of Britain
and the United States after World War II,
which cemented English's role as a de facto lingua franca.
But international diplomacy isn't the only problem
that conlangers have tried to fix.
In the early 20th century,
a linguist named Benjamin Whorf hypothesized
that the language you speak
limits your perceptions and cognition,
like maybe having more words for colors
would actually enable you to see more colors,
and maybe Klingons would be nicer
if they did have a word for hello.
Some even worried that humanity's reliance
on language prevented us
from understanding the true nature of the universe.
Words might be Plato's shadows on the cave wall.
Sociologist James Cooke Brown wanted
to test the Whorf hypothesis
by inventing a language that could empower its speakers
to shed all their preconceptions
and think with perfect logic.
Loglan, short for logical language,
is an example of an engineered language,
one designed for theoretical or experimental purposes.
Its grammar was based on first order logic,
the kind used in mathematics and computer science,
which makes literal translations sound
more like equations than sentences.
Loglan was designed to be totally unambiguous,
there can only be one possible way to interpret a sentence.
You can't just say that Romeo and Juliet fell in love,
you must specify whether they fell in love with each other
or individually with other people,
whether they just happen to be in love while falling,
or whether they landed in a pile of love.
All the contextual clues and assumptions
that lubricate our everyday conversations are forbidden.
This makes Loglan so difficult
that it's unlikely anyone speaks it fluently enough
to actually test the Whorf hypothesis.
Making things even more complicated,
a disagreement between Brown and his closest supporters
created a rift in the Loglan community
and a competing alternate version called Lojban.
Disagreement is a common theme in conlangs,
even Esperanto had its schisms with offshoots
like Reformed Esperanto, Ido, Mundolinco, and Romanico.
No matter how engineered a language is,
no matter how controlling its creator,
it will inevitably evolve
to fit the needs of the people who use it.
Like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park,
language... finds a way.
Conlangs may not have a stellar historical success rate,
but they do a great job
of revealing how we feel about language.
We can be entranced by its beauty,
fascinated by its variety,
but also frustrated with its limitations,
and even afraid of its influence over our thoughts.
Perhaps there will never be
a truly universal artificial language,
but as long as people yearn
for new ways to express themselves,
they will always push the boundaries of what language is.
We've only scratched the surface of constructed languages,
there are over 500 of them out there by one count.
If you wanna know more,
you could check out Arika Okrent's book,
"In The Land of Invented Languages."
(speaking in Klingon) (whimsical music)
(speaking in Klingon) (Erica laughs)
(speaking in Klingon)