We’ve all heard the actors speaking seeming gibberish at each other in Lord of the Rings and Star Trek. And in many movies and TV shows, alien languages really are just gibberish, created to make the place sound more exotic. But a few creators of imaginary cultures take the time to put together constructed languages (conlangs for short) for their worlds, complete with grammatical rules and vocabulary that people can learn and speak. Seventh weekend, the brave explorers of Benton House showed us some of the possibilities of where fantasy languages can take us.
Not all constructed languages have something to do with science fiction and fantasy. Esperanto is one of the most famous of all the constructed languages, invented by the Polish L. L. Zamenhofl in 1887 to foster international cooperation. His dream was that it would become a universally learned second language so that any two people in the world would have a means of communicating regardless of nationality. That dream didn’t quite pan out, as less than two million people speak Esperanto today, but the language still has a dedicated community of Esperanto hobbyists.
Other people just make up languages for fun. As Jarend Christensen ’10 explains to us, Tolkien was an incredibly avid linguist even more than he was a writer. He started inventing the Elvish language Quenya for his own entertainment. To explain how Quenya, as well as Sindarin, which is derivationally related to it, got to be the way that they are, he made up the history of Middle-Earth as we know it. We owe the existence of the most famous fantasy trilogy of all time, complete with all its awesome battles with Orcs, to the Elvish languages.
Heather Stevick ’10 described another fantasy-world language to us, Laadan. Suzette Haden Elgin, a science-fiction writer, invented the language for her Native Tongue trilogy. These books describe a dystopian near future in which women’s basic human rights have been revoked. A crack team of linguists create a language especially for them so they could speak without the men around them knowing what they’re talking about.
One of the interesting features of this language is that it has words for many concepts that speak to the female experience, that one would have to use complicated, roundabout ways to express in English. For example, the Laadan word widazhad means “to be nine months pregnant and waiting for the end.” Laadan has thirteen separate words for love, including “love for one not related by blood, but heart-kin,” “love for one respected but not liked,” “love for that which is holy.” It would have saved us English speakers a great deal of misunderstanding and awkwardness if we had such terms in our own language.
Laadan is a controversial language, as many view Elgin’s work as male-hating. Elgin had the notion that existing earth languages are patriarchal and thus insufficient for women to express themselves. “I’m not going to use Laadan in my books, I’m going to set it loose and see what happens,” Heather explained was Elgin’s mindset. “It just sort of fizzled.” As it so happened, women found that the languages they already happened to be speaking were sufficient for their needs.
Jeff Rzeszotarski ’10 gave a presentation on one of the oddest of the constructed languages out there. Hymmnos is a little-known language created for the background music in the videogame Ar Tonelico. This language shares many features with computer languages – its rules are so unintuitive to human speakers, in fact, that it can’t be spoken in real time. Anybody hoping to say something in Hymmnos must plan it out with pencil and paper ahead of time. Hymmnos uses binary encoding, a process where two lines of text are interwoven into a single line, and the pattern to unpack them is declared at the end. “If you have to spend time preparing an utterance, does it count as a language?” remarks Jeff. “[Akira Tsuchiya, the language’s creator] isn’t a linguist and it’s clear.”
The discussion of Hymmnos eventually turned to the possibility of machine understanding of natural language. At present, computers fail miserably at understanding us if we communicate with them in anything other than programming code. “We’re so used to having incredibly complicated and incredibly expressive languages that computers just can’t understand it.”
