In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [100]
Plenty of other authors throughout history have provided fictional languages for their imagined lands. The citizens in Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516) have a Utopian language that looks very much like Latin. The inhabitants of the moon in Francis Godwin's Man in the Moone (1638) speak a musical language. The people in Terre australe connue (1676) by Gabriel de Foigny speak a philosophical language like that designed by Wilkins and his contemporaries. From the strange cries of Swift's Lilliputians in Gulliver's Travels to Orwell's Newspeak to the street slang of Burgess's ruffians in A Clockwork Orange to the x- and z-filled jabber of countless works of science fiction, language creation has always been practiced for artistic purposes. However, these creations usually aren't languages so much as they are ideas, a bit of vocabulary, a few phrases. They don't invite further examination. They serve the story, never the other way around.
For Tolkien, language creation was an art all its own, enhanced and enriched by the stories, but still valuable even without them. He knew that others practiced the art as well. Once, while his attention wandered during a dreary presentation when he was in army training, he heard a fellow soldier suddenly say to himself, “Yes, I think I shall express the accusative case by a prefix!” He later recalled how, as these words were spoken,
the little man's smile was full of a great delight, as of a poet or painter seeing suddenly the solution of a hitherto clumsy passage. Yet he proved as close as an oyster. I never gathered any further details of his secret grammar; and military arrangements soon separated us never to meet again (up to now at any rate). But I gathered that this queer creature—ever afterwards a little bashful after inadvertently revealing his secret—cheered and comforted himself in the tedium and squalors of “training under canvas” by composing a language, a personal system and symphony that no else was to study or to hear.
Tolkien told this story during a speech given in the early 1930s (before the publication of his fiction), which he introduced as being on the subject of “nothing less embarrassing than the unveiling in public of a secret vice.” After issuing a sort of apologia and explanation for what he was up to, he presented some examples of poetry in his own languages, thereby opening his secret to scrutiny in the name of the advancement of the art form whose “development to perfection must… certainly be prevented by its solitariness, the lack of interchange, open rivalry, study or imitation of others' technique.”
Things are different now. In an increasing number of online “artlang” or “conlang” (constructed language) forums, the formerly closeted (this is the word they use) practitioners of the no-longer-secret vice share the details of their languages with each other looking only for feedback and appreciation, and for the satisfaction of giving concrete linguistic shape to their personal aesthetic. The creator of P@x'x00E1;ãokxáã incorporated influences from Mohawk, Swahili, and Japanese in creating a language with “an emphasis on emotion, touch, and action” in order to reflect his “philosophical views (existentialism, idealism, absurdism, etc.)-” Toki Pona, a language of simple syllables that uses only positive words, is intended to promote positive thinking, to be “fun and cute … one could almost imagine a race of little cartoon creatures speaking in Toki Pona.” Brithenig was designed as “the language of an alternate history, being the Romance language that might have evolved if Latin speakers had displaced Celtic speakers in Britain.” Nunihongo is an “attempt to answer what Japanese might look like if half its vocabulary were derived from English.” The Azak language was inspired by the inventor's “discovery of agglutinative languages and ergativity” (grammatical types common in the world's languages, but exotic with respect to English) and is meant to “take those features and push them to their limits.”
The urge to push features to their limits is also found in