Linguists often make a distinction between two ways of thinking: “linguistic descriptivism”
where you just try to describe how people talk, and “linguistic prescriptivism,”
where you try to prescribe how they should talk. Linguists can be kind of insecure
about their status as scientists, so they tend to shun linguistic prescriptivism, and
my last big video was part of a long tradition of pointing out how a lot of linguistic prescriptivism
is just the result of ignorance and prejudice between linguistic groups, but it’s worth
mentioning that there are completely valid reasons to say that people should speak one
way and not another. Like, if you’re in a German class then it makes perfect sense
to say that this should be pronounced “Deutsch,” or if you’re writing an academic paper then
it’s perfectly reasonable to say that you shouldn’t say “ain’t.” These are both
examples of people trying to sound like other people for one reason or another, but sometimes
people have argued that we should start speaking in a way that no one currently does, and in
it’s most extreme form this eventually leads to the topic of this video: people making
up completely new languages. There are two main reasons people have done
this. The first is that people get sick of having to learn lots of languages in order
to communicate with lots of groups of people, and start wondering “what if we all just
learned one language and communicated in that”? Such a language is called an “auxiliary
language,” and in practice this usually happens with the language of the dominant
political power of the time, like French around 1800 or English today. But the problem with
using languages that a lot of people already speak natively is that it’s unfair to the
people who didn’t grow up with it. Like, “why should almost the entire world have
to learn English while the Americans and Brits get to just keep using the language they already
know?” So another solution to the problem is to create an artificial auxiliary language,
one that would be equally hard for everyone to learn.
The first really popular artificial auxiliary language was Volapük, created around 1880
by Johann Schleyer, and it gained some serious ground in the 1880s. This might have been
a time of rising nationalism across Europe, but it was also a time of reaction against
that nationalism, and to a lot of people Volapük seemed like a symbol of universal human brotherhood.
At it’s height there were hundreds of Volapük clubs across the world. In 1889 at the Third
International Volapük conference the proceedings were held entirely in Volapük, but after
that things started going downhill. A lot of people wanted to change Volapük, but when
Schleyer wouldn’t let them they started going off and designing their own languages
based off of it. But that wound up just fracturing the movement. Like, if you wanted to learn
Volapük, should you learn the original that the creator has stubbornly refused to change
or pick one of the dozen “improved” versions floating around out there?
Increasingly, people chose neither, and instead opted to learn a competitor to Volapük. It
had been created around the time Volapük was just getting popular by a guy named Ludwik
Zamenhof for basically the same reason as Volapük. Zamenhof had seen how different
languages had divided the people of his home town into Russians, Poles, Germans and Jews,
and he wanted to create a common language for everyone to speak. Interestingly, he never
actually names the language in the book he published it in, he only ever calls it “The
International Language,” and he never names himself either, simply referred to himself
as “the one who hopes,” or, in his language, “Esperanto.” Without something to call
it, people decided to just name the language after him, or at least what he called himself.
Hence, the language of “Esperanto” was born.
If you’ve heard of an artificial auxiliary language, it’s probably Esperanto, and there’s
a reason for that. At its height in the early 20th century Esperanto was huge. Both the
League of Nations, and the UN seriously considered adopting Esperanto. Part of the
reason was that Esperanto managed to mostly avoid the fracturing that led to the end of
Volapük. Zamenhof was actually really open to the idea of reforming the language, but
people had seen what minor disagreements had done to Volapük. Besides, an auxiliary language
doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to be not-obnoxious enough for people to be
willing to learn it to communicate with each other. Some people did brake off and make
Esperanto-inspired rivals like Ido and Interlingua, but there’s been an impressive continuous
community of Esperanto speakers that’s lasted up to today. Now days it is by far the most
well-known artificial language, and it’s one of only a few to brag that it has native
speakers. That’s right, more than once speakers of Esperanto had children and regularly spoke
Esperanto in their home enough so that their child grew up speaking it. Not only that,
but one of those children, Kim Henriksen, is currently raising a second-generation native
Esperanto speaker. The second reason people create artificial
languages is because people just want to improve language. From this point of view, the problem
with languages isn’t that there’s too many of them, it’s that all of them suck.
People complain all the time about how the way we say things isn’t really how things
are in the real world, and if you follow this line of reasoning far enough you inevitably
start asking, well, how is the world then, and how should we speak? Pretty soon you’re
coming up with your own words that perfectly reflect the way things really are in the world,
and you’ve got yourself a “philosophical language.”
Different philosophical languages from different times often reflect the values of the people
and cultures that made them. During the enlightenment era in Europe there was a little bit of a
philosophical-language fad. In the era when everyone was talking about the supremacy of
human reason, it makes sense to think that we should be able to design our own, better
languages. One of the most popular was created by John Wilkins, who did his best to take
everything in the universe that can be talked about and categorize all of it into one giant
hierarchy, and then the sounds for the word for that thing would be determined based on
its place in that hierarchy. So, an alphabetically organized dictionary for this language would
feel like it’s sorted according to something like the dewy decimal system, with the first
sound in a word telling you generally what kind of word it is, then the next sound getting
more specific and so on. Now, Wilkins put an enormous amount of effort
into making the words in his language have reasons for sounding the way they do, but
he barely put any effort at all into the grammar of his language. In that respect, morpho-syntactically,
it was basically just English with a bit of Latin thrown in. But the most popular philosophical
language today takes the exact opposite approach. There is an idea in linguistics that I really
haven’t talked enough about called the Whorfian Hypothesis. It proposes basically that language
affects the way we think. There are different versions of the hypothesis that try to narrow
down and get really specific about exactly how language influences our thought, but that’s
the gist of it: different languages encourage people to think in different ways.
In 1960 a man named James Cook Brown proposed a possible test for this hypothesis. If we
design a language to be extremely different from all natural languages and try to make
it as logical as possible, and then we get a bunch of people to learn it, what would
happen to them? Would there behavior in non-language related tasks change? Well, to find out he
created such a language: Loglan. A lot of people really liked this idea of a logic-based
language. It never became nearly as popular as Esperanto, but to this day it has a decent
community around it. Well, sort of, see, the Loglan community wound up getting into a bit
of a similar conflict as the one that happened to Volapük almost a hundred years earlier.
A lot of the speakers of it wanted to change it but the guy who made it wanted it to stay
the same. Eventually most of the people interested in Loglan wound up leaving and creating their
own language on the same principles as Loglan called “Lojban,” which has been managed
collectively ever since. Now, let me talk for a second about Loglan
and Lojban, because they are basically just the weirdest thing ever. Lojban doesn’t
care about the sounds of the words, it just based all it’s vocabulary off of a handful
of existing languages, but it does care about making sure that the interactions between
words happen in a consistent, logical way, and in the process it winds up working in
a completely different way from any natural language. Frankly, if someone tried to rase
a native Lojban speaker the way people have raised native Esperanto speakers, I’m not
sure what would happen. Like, if our brains are hardwired to use language a certain way,
which we’re not sure if they are, but if they are, in my opinion Lojban almost definitely
falls outside the realm of things our brains evolved to handle. I’ve learned a little
bit, and it doesn’t feel like an actual language, it feels like spoken computer code.
So yeah. That about sums it up. None of these artificial languages have really taken off
or achieved the success they wanted to. Neither Esperanto nor any other artificial auxiliary
language has managed to overcome the inertia of people just learning the language of whatever
superpower happens to be dominating, and philosophical languages have never really caught on because,
well, everyone has a different philosophy, and it’s a bit hard for people to all speak
in a way that truly reflects the world when no one can agree on how the world really is.
So, given that both of these reasons for inventing languages are basically doomed from the start,
the whole thing seems pretty much like a waste of time to me . . . oh, hi Artifexian!
Wait, hold on, what???
Everyone, I’d like you to meet Artifexian. Last I checked he was making some cool videos
about space and stuff, but, I’ll admit it’s been a while since I caught up on his videos.
Anyway, what are you doing here?
What do you mean “the whole thing is a waste of time”?! You’re leaving out the biggest
reason people make artificial languages!
And what would that be?
Fun!
…what? Making up a language is a monstrous amount of work, you have to create a phonology,
and a syntax, and create thousands of words of vocabulary, why would anyone do that for
fun???
OK, lets, lets back it up a bit. So, early in JRR Tolkien’s life he became obsessed
with Welsh, and later Finnish. He loved the way Welsh looked and sounded and he loved
the way Finnish syntax works, and he started to make up his own language inspired by them.
Not a language either, but a whole family of languages, and then a culture to go along
with them, and then a whole world to put the culture in! The languages he made up became
the languages of the elves and other creatures of Middle Earth, and later he would say that
he wrote Lord of the Rings mostly to justify his weird hobby of making up languages.
…ok, but that was just one guy-
Yeah, but he started something! Ever since, loads of fantasy and sci-fi writers have made
up their own languages for the universes they create. Lets see, you’ve got the Nav’i
language from Avatar, Dothraki from Game of Thrones, and of course my personal favorite,
Klingon: a gruff, vaguely alien-sounding language spoken by a violent, warlike race from the
Star Trek universe. Q'apla!
. . . Just when I thought this couldn’t get any nerdier . . .
In fact, I was just about to begin constructing my very own language over on my channel! You
should totally come help!
Sorry, but I have better things to do than make up words for you silly pretend-language.
You could give people advice on how to construct phonological inventories!
I’m just gonna…
Ah, come on, it’ll be fun!
Huh, what? Heeeeeeelp!!!