To make fake languages you need to know real ones

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, languages, linguistics, language creation

Languages, mainly written, and linguistics, have been a hobby and sometime obsession for my brother and me since we were children. He made a career out of it, becoming a calligrapher, including spending time in Japan to learn Japanese calligraphy (with a brush) and also the carving of netsuke. He eventually became a professor of art history and a Mayan archaeologist, one of a few people who can read and paint the Maya script. Not having a good artistic hand, I became more an observer than a doer.

Having gone into coding from an early age (about 50 years ago, now), I occasionally studied formal languages, as I call them; not only computer coding languages (FORTRAN, Basic, Pascal, C) and scripts (Perl, JavaScript), but also the broader scope of symbolic languages such as the standard sets of drafting details used in piping, architecture, and electronics design, for example. More recently, I had some interest in the icons used to launch programs (apps) on small-screen devices, but there is no grammar; they are all nouns (or, perhaps, imperative predicate phrases of the form "Do X!"). Also, there is an effectively infinite variety of them: 32×32 pixels ×256 colors, as the exponent of 2, comes to about 10⁷⁸⁹¹³ possible color patterns, and even if only a trillionth of a trillionth of them would "look like something", what remains is a truly incredible number (10⁷⁸⁸⁸⁹). Then there are the Emoji, which  seem to be settling down to some kind of standard, complete with a review board.

In my mid-twenties I got a little interested in the scope for creation of new languages in fiction by reading The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. I read somewhere that he invented five languages for Middle Earth, complete with scripts in at least two cases (I am sure many folks out there know better than I). So I was primed, with a slow-burning fuse, to thoroughly enjoy The Art of Language Invention, by David J. Peterson, when I came across it recently; it has been in print about four years.

The focus of the book is the creation of new languages to be used in fictional settings. The author was hired to create two languages used in Game of Thrones, for example. One might think, "Why create languages out of whole cloth? Aren't there languages enough already, something like 6,000? Couldn't one of these, which the right sort of 'soundscape', be used?" Perhaps. One significant problem arises, though: in the current legal atmosphere, intellectual property laws would require the permission of a language's speakers, and they might not like having their mother tongue used on the "lips" (or whatever) of tentacled villains from Aldebaran. Also, while we might use a human language for fictional humans, in the distant future perhaps, other languages are intended to be "native" to various kinds of aliens. Modern filmmakers are doing their best to put the era of aliens-as-humans-in-weird-suits behind them. If we ever encounter genuine space aliens, will it even be possible for them to make the sounds used in human languages…and vice versa? Most of all, though, for those so inclined, creation of a new language is great fun! The fun comes through in the author's writing, again and again.

The book turns out to include a powerful introduction to linguistics. Thinking about it, I realized it has to! Natural languages give a language designer the parameters of what languages can do, and ideas for how to stretch the limits as needed. The four sections of the book are Sounds (a lot more involved than just a discussion of "phonemes"; he also gets into sign languages and possible alien sound systems), Words (choices like inflected or not, cases and the presence or lack of case agreement, etc.), Evolution (history of a language and its sibling and offspring languages), and Writing (scripts and how they support the spoken word…or don't).

I'll just touch on a couple of items of interest to me. One is alien sounds. We have "alien" creatures aplenty around us, that make sounds we typically can't make: birds and dolphins—and whales in general—are best known. But also: Just how much symbolism is in the waggle dance of honeybees? How articulate is the postural language of a wolf or a bobcat? Is the Brown Thrasher, with its repertoire of 2,000 songs, each including many sounds, saying anything more than, "This land is my land"? More to the point on the bird: are the murmurings and cooings between a mated pair or Thrashers, Doves, Robins or whatever, more meaningful than the "comfort sounds" they are usually thought to be?

Another is the written scripts. In an appendix we find a phrase book for eight constructed languages (conlangs), six of which have scripts. I picked out a potentially useful phrase from each:

Dothraki and High Valerian are from Game of Thrones. The producers apparently didn't set the show up to require scripts for them. The others are from other projects. Some would be rather hard for any of us to write or draw. Indojisnen, in particular, is predicated on an alien species that went for genetic modification in a big way, including the development of hand skills that exceed those of any other species by a large margin. So the written language they invented, once they could write it, is intricate and hyper-regular.

I rather like Kamakawi. In both script and sounds, it is like a cross between Japanese and Korean. Some of the others may seem too loopy or whatever, but if you look in the front of an old Gideon's Bible, with John 3:16 translated into dozens of human scripts, you'll see just how loopy many human languages can be. The ones shown here are not at all out of line (except Indojisnen!).

I thought I knew a lot about variations of grammar. The Words section showed me how little I knew about it. I was fortunate to learn Latin at a young age, and French later. A friend who speaks these, plus Romanian and Russian, says, "French grammar is endless". It's true. Even though English has less than usual in the way of conjugation (of nouns) and declension (of verbs), some friends and I once figured out 48 verb tenses that are possible in English, if one takes account of moods and everything (of course, few of us use more than five or six). Then we tackled French, and we sort of ran out of steam when we'd racked up 256 verb tenses. There might be more; we couldn't be sure. Funny thing, even though there are inflections (word endings) to distinguish most of them in written French, most of them just sound like a cross between "-ei" and "-ee" in spoken French. That goes for the "-it" in conduit ("conduct", the verb, when "I" is the subject), as well as "-aient" in effectuaient ("were conducting", when "we" is the subject).

I can't figure how the author crammed so much linguistic knowledge into a book hardly exceeding 260 pages (in paperback, at least). If you want to try your hand at inventing a language, this book is a very good starting place for learning what you'll need to succeed. So much to learn, and presented very enjoyably.