Inside this article I will use some terms which are not well known. The following list gives the term, and its meaning:
TERM Meaning
CONLANG Constructed or artificial language
AUXLANG Auxiliary language, international lingua franca
ARTLANG Artistic language, made up for a book, movie, or for fun
IAL International Auxiliary Language
A question asked by many people is: why in the world would anyone wish to make up a language? This question is generally followed by: how would you figure out vocabulary? Grammar? What would it be used for? And a few others.
A surprising amount of conlangs have been made up. The Star Trek series spawned An-Dorian, Borg, Vulcan, and the world-famous Klingon. In Tolkien’s book The Lord of the Rings and in his other book The Silmarillion there are over 15 languages. He made up yet more. Many other people make up languages just for fun. One website I visited had links to sites about 310 conlangs.
J.R.R. Tolkien called it his “secret vice,” and compared it to a private symphony: of words. Dr. Ludovic Zamenhof wanted to clear out the misunderstandings between people from countries that speak different languages, and so he invented Esperanto.
So why? Why would Dr. Marc Okrand invent Klingon, Atlantean, and others? Probably because he was paid by the people who made the Star Trek films, and Disney. So, that’s not a good example.
It is best before answering such a question to specify whether the languages are artlang, or auxlang. The answer I would give for artlang is fun. Perhaps also for a book (Nadsat, Lapine, Quenya, Sindarin) or for a film (Klingon, An’Dorian, Atlantean,) for a private, or not-so-private, world (Verdurian, Ismain), or (as I already stated) for fun.
An example of one simply for fun is Animalic. Animalic was invented by two of Tolkien’s cousins. It was made up principly of animal names. The sentence, “You are an ass” was spoken as “Dog nightingale woodpecker forty.” One wonders why this is the only phrase that survived.... . , the translation of only one word survived. This is vru which means “ever.” O Naffarínos cutá vu navru cangor luttos ca vúna tiéranar, dana maga tíer ce vru encá vún' farta once ya merúta vúna maxt' amámen. That is an example of a sentence in Naffarin. However we will probably never know what it means.
The answer for the “why” of auxlangs is generally international understanding. There are surprisingly many: Volapuk, Solresol, Plan B, Interlingua, Folksspraak, Esperanto, Lojban, Loglan, and I could list probably at least fifty more. But that would be boring, so I’ll keep it down to this list. Almost every one of those has, in its name, an indication of its point.
Volapuk comes from two roots (supposedly English, although I doubt most English speakers would recognise them in the word). VOLA is for world, and PUK for speak. Solresol comes from the fact that it is a singing language of seven syllables: Do re mi fa sol la si. I bet that Julie Andrews will want to learn that one. However, I do not think Solresol has much hope of being the world’s language. Plan B because it is obviously the second plan. (I wonder what happened to Plan A??) Interlingua you should be able to guess. Foksspraak from “folk speech,” I assume. Lojban and Loglan are supposedly “logical languages.” Esperanto comes from a word that means, “hope.”
“Logical languages” are what some people like to call languages they make up that don’t have irregularities, etc. etc. Solresol, described above, is a “philosophical language.”
Speaking of hope, Esperanto (the name, as I mentioned, comes from a word for “hope”) is probably the closest to that goal. It was invented by Dr. Ludovic Zamenhof and is based on European languages, which raises the question, “Is it a world language, or a European one?” When Dr. Zamenhof had nearly completed it, however, his father burned all his papers fearing that people would think his son a spy working in code. Dr. Zamenhof lived in the Soviet Union.
Although I said that Esperanto is closest to the goal of being the world’s language, it is still far from it. Esperanto is spoken by about 8 million people worldwide. That is about the population of New York City. Now distribute that over the world, and you end up with 750 non-speakers of Esperanto to every 1 speaker of Esperanto. Even more rarely would one see a child carrying Volapuk for Dummies to school, or An Idiot’s Guide to Solresol, or a college student taking a course in Interlingua at Harvard!! And one would certainly never see someone taking a course in Klingon anywhere. Klingon was invented by Dr. Marc Okrand for the Star Trek series, and consists of guttural sounds. It does have a grammar and a good vocabulary (two of Shakespeare’s plays have been translated, and the Bible is being translated into Klingon. The plays are Much Ado About Nothing and Hamlet. (Hamlet fits it best, death and dying.) However many ask the question: why would someone wish to learn Klingon? Here is an example of a sentence (decide for yourself): qaQongmoHlaH. This means: I can put you to sleep. The capitals are not voluntary. The capital Q has a different sound from the lowercase q. I have never found it interesting, although it has a facinating set of suffixes and prefixes. qa means “I__you” the __ to be filled by a verb. Qong means “sleep” and thus we have: “I sleep you.” moH is a causative suffix, in other words: “I cause you to sleep.” laH means “can.” And thus we have: qaQongmoHlaH, “I can cause you to sleep/I can put you to sleep.” By the way, Klingon is spoken by (ta da!) the Klingons, who lived (this is amazing) on the planet of Klingon! (What originality.) The complete opposite of Klingon is Quenya. This is a beautiful language, and is much more to my liking. It was invented by J.R.R.Tolkien, along with Sindarin, Khuzdul, Orkish, the Black Speech, Westron, Adunaic, and a handful of others. Quenya was spoken (presumably) by the High Elves, and is a sort of “elf-latin.” Here is a quote from his uncompleted book The Lost Road:
“. . . Your Latin needs improving (or so I am told), for school purposes. . . .” [says his father]
“I wish Latin prose was not so important,” said Alboin. “I am really much better at verses.”
“Don’t go putting any bits of your Eressean, or Elf-latin, into your verses at Oxford. It might scan, but it wouldn’t pass.”
Eressea is the Isle of Elves, perhaps closely linked in Tolkien’s mythology to Britain. An example of his elven languages is an untranslated poem:
Ai lintulinde lasselanta
pilingeve suyer nalla ganta. . .
The beginning is: “O swiftly sing of the fall of leaves!”
While Quenya and Sindarin are incomplete, they are closer than many artlangs. Since artlangs are made up for fun or for a book, oftentimes only words relevant to the book are invented. An example of this is Lapine. Lapine was invented by Richard Adams for his book Watership Down. It is not, as some argue, a language, but more simple a short lexicon of a few phrases. The longest single section of the book in Lapine is an “Owsla Lampoon” sung by Thlayli:
Hoi Hoi u embleer hrair, M’saion ule hraka vair.
And so, as you see, Lapine is not a complete language or even close.
Another language of this type is a supposed “dialect” of English whose inventor has remained unknown. It is called “Gerunt” which is a largely unimaginative name. Used in conjunction with English, one can write long dialogues in Gerunt, which, however, are not highly interesting. For example: vilya setr glimn ontVe-cax, or will you watch the TV.
While this is artificial, a more “natural” dialect came to be in a small town in California, called Boonville. No one knows really how it came to be, but eventually the entire town spoke it, fluently. It was a dialect of English full of strange words, for instance: “An eeld’m found aplenty buckys and thought herself high-pockety so she piked to Boonville. . .” meaning, “An old woman found many nickels and thought she was rich so she walked to Boontville.” A “horn of zeese” is a cup of coffee. Many other phrases came to be spoken, and so an entire town became fluent in two languages, English and Boontling.
So, as you see, a variety of people have invented languages. On a website I found one language invented by an eight year old boy. It was a bit strange for my liking, but a good example of how many different people invent languages. But not only are artlangs invented for books and films, a few are invented for other purposes. And so we come to Verdurian.
Verdurian is the invention of Mark Rosenfelder. It is part of the fantasy world Verduria, related to Ismain. This language was invented for a world that is not part of a fantasy book, or sci-fi/fantasy movie, and there are more of these than one would think. An example is Sael Jan, or the Sea-Language. This is an interesting language invented as part of the world Alfen. The author says that it has a strange grammar and alphabet, and its pronunciation is a little like Latin. An example is this sentence: shail ki’re, rwniv? (SHAY-il KEE-ray roo-NEEV.) Which means: who are you, little one?
If you are interested in making up your own language, go to the Language Construction Kit (see website in Bibliography.) As an ending to this, I think it appropriate to say: Elki lo y’graen le Yin Lang-el. (I hope you have enjoyed the Yin and Lang.)
Language Construction Kit at: www.zompist.com/kit.htm -- Mark Rosenfelder.
The Languages of Middle-Earth -- Ruth S. Noel
The Mother Tongue -- Bill Bryson
J.R.R Tolkien (a biography) -- Humphrey Carpenter
The Lost Road and Other Writings -- J.R.R. Tolkien -- editor Christopher Tolkien