In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [99]
The
Secret Vice
Klingon is the solution to an artistic problem, not a linguistic one. Okrand set out to create a believable language for a fictional culture, a language about which fans could say, “If Klingons existed, there is no question that this is what they would speak,” a language with the mysterious quality of having just the right feel.
And that urge, to create a language that captures an artistic vision, is the motivation for a new generation of language inventors. Their languages are designed for creativity's sake, not to shape thought or change the world, or even to be spoken by anyone, but to satisfy the urge that J. R. R. Tolkien called his “secret vice.” For his Lord of the Rings trilogy, Tolkien crafted an entire family of languages, along with a realistic and extremely detailed explanation of the “historical” derivation processes through which the languages were related. Actually, it is more accurate to say that he crafted The Lord of the Rings for his languages. By the time the books were published in the mid-1950s, he had been working on his languages for over forty years. The creation of these languages consumed him almost against his will. At twenty-four years old he wrote of his obsession, “I often long to work at it and don't let myself 'cause though I love it so it does seem such a mad hobby!” He later claimed that he wrote The Lord of the Rings to legitimize his madness: “Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real. But it is true.”
As a boy, Tolkien had become enchanted with the Welsh words he saw printed on the freight cars that stopped at the train station behind his home. He loved the way the words looked and later, when he began to study the language, found he loved their sound even more. He explained his feeling for Welsh in the following way: “Most English-speaking people, for instance, will admit that cellar door is ‘beautiful,’ especially if dissociated from its sense (and its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful. Well then, in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent.”
When he discovered Finnish as a student at Oxford, he said, “It was like discovering a wine-cellar filled with bottles of amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me.” He began to construct his own language around the aspects of Finnish that inspired him, and as he worked on it, he began to develop a history and mythology for the language as well. His method of language construction was less a process of premeditated invention than a discovery. He would try out sounds and words until they seemed “right,” and to know what was right, he felt the need to know something about the hypothetical people who spoke the language. His Finnish-inspired language would later evolve into Quenya, one of the languages of the Elves in The Lord of the Rings. Part of his construction of the history for the language involved the back-engineering of an ancestor language from which it could realistically have been derived. That ancestor language became “Primitive Quendian,” from which a “contemporary” of Quenya, the Welsh-inspired Sindarin, spoken by a different community of Elves, was also derived. On the way to Sindarin (or rather the various dialects of Sindarin), Tolkien worked out aspects of Old Sindarin, Middle Sindarin, and a variety of other stages in the life of the language.