Artistic language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
An artistic language (artlang) is a constructed language designed for aesthetic pleasure. Unlike engineered languages or auxiliary languages, artistic languages usually have irregular grammar systems, much like natural languages. Many are designed within the context of fictional worlds, such as J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth and Mark Rosenfelder's Almea. Others represent fictional minority languages in a world not patently different from the real world, or have no particular fictional background attached.
There are several different schools of artistic language construction. The most important is the naturalist school, which seeks to imitate the complexity and historicity of natural languages. Others do not attempt to imitate the natural evolution of languages, but follow a more abstract style.
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[edit] Genres
Several different genres of constructed languages are classified as 'artistic'. An artistic language may fall into any one of these groups, depending on the aim of its use. Overlapping with artistic languages is the group of philosophical languages, languages derived from some first principle.
[edit] Fictional languages
By far the largest group of artistic languages are fictional languages (sometimes also referred to as "professional artlangs"). Fictional languages are intended to be the languages of a fictional world, and are often designed with the intent of giving more depth and an appearance of plausibility to the fictional worlds with which they are associated, and to have their characters communicate in a fashion which is both alien and dislocated. By analogy with the word "conlang", the term conworld is used to describe these worlds, inhabited by fictional constructed cultures. The conworld influences vocabulary (what words the language will have for flora and fauna, articles of clothing, objects of technology, religious concepts, names of places and tribes, etc.), as well as influencing other factors such as pronouns, or how their cultures view the break-off points between colors or the gender and age of family members. Primary examples of this are:
- J.R.R. Tolkien's Elvish, among others, spoken in The Lord of the Rings
- George Orwell's Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four
- Václav Havel's Ptydepe in The Memorandum
- Anthony Burgess's Nadsat in A Clockwork Orange
- Iain M. Banks' Marain in his Culture novels
- Ursula K. Le Guin's Pravic in The Dispossessed
- Christopher Paolini's Ancient Language in the Inheritance Trilogy
- Richard Adams's Lapine language in Watership Down
- The most commonly spoken fictional language; The Klingon Language in Star Trek
Some of these languages are presented as distorted versions or dialects of modern English.
Professional fictional languages are those languages created for use in books, movies, television shows, video games, comics, toys, and musical albums (prominent examples of works featuring fictional languages include the Middle-earth and Star Trek universes and the game Myst). Internet-based fictional languages are hosted along with their "conworlds" on the Internet, and based at these sites, becoming known to the world through the visitors to these sites; Verdurian, the language of Mark Rosenfelder's Verduria on the planet of Almea, is a flagship Internet-based fictional language. Many other fictional languages and their associated conworlds are created privately by their inventor, known only to the inventor and perhaps a few friends. In this context the term "professional" (used for the first category) as opposed to "amateur" (used for the second and third) refers only to the professionalism of the used medium, and not to the professionalism of the language itself or its creator. In fact, most professional languages are the work of non-linguists, while many amateur languages were in fact created by linguists, and in general the latter are better developed.
Fictional languages are separated from artistic languages by both purpose and relative completion: a fictional language generally has the least amount of grammar and vocabulary possible, and rarely extends beyond the absolutely necessary. Nevertheless, some others have developed languages in detail for their own sake, such as J. R. R. Tolkien's Quenya and Sindarin and Star Trek's Klingon language, which exist as functioning, useable languages. Here "fictional" can be a misnomer.
The term fictional diachronic language describes fictional languages that are invented in large families and have their fictional history traced over time, with a proto-language used to derive descendant languages.
[edit] Alternative languages
Alternative languages, or altlangs, speculate on an alternate history and try to reconstruct how a family of natural languages would have evolved if things had been different (e.g. What if Greek civilization went on to thrive without a Roman Empire, leaving Greek and not Latin to develop several modern descendants?) The language that would have evolved is then traced step by step in its evolution, to reach its final form. An altlang will typically base itself on the core vocabulary of one language and the phonology of another. The best-known language of this category is Brithenig, which initiated the interest among Internet conlangers in devising such alternate-historical languages, like Wenedyk. Brithenig attempts to determine what Romance languages would have evolved had Roman influence in Britain been sufficient to replace Celtic languages with Vulgar Latin, and bases its phonology on that of Welsh. An earlier instance is Philip José Farmer's Winkie language, a relative of the Germanic languages spoken by the Winkies of Oz in A Barnstormer in Oz.
[edit] Micronational languages
Micronational languages are the languages created for use in micronations. Having the citizens learn the language is as much a part of participating in the micronation as minting coins and stamps or participating in government. The members of these micronations meet up and speak the language they have learned when they are participating in these meets. They coin new words and grammatical constructions when needed. Talossan, from R. Ben Madison's Kingdom of Talossa, is by far the best-known example of a micronational language.
[edit] Personal languages
The term personal language refers to languages that are ultimately created for one's own edification. There is nobody whom the creator actually expects to speak it. The language exists as a work of art. A personal language may be invented for the purpose of having a beautiful language, for self-expression, as an exercise in understanding linguistic principles, or perhaps as an attempt to create a language with an extreme phonemic inventory or system of verbs. Personal languages tend to have short lifespans, and are often displayed on the Internet and discussed on message boards much like Internet-based fictional languages. They are often invented in large numbers by the people who design these languages. However, a few personal languages are used extensively and long-term by their creators (e.g., for writing diaries). Javant Biarujia, the creator of Taneraic, described his personal language (which he terms a hermetic language) thus: "a private pact negotiated between the world at large and the world within me; public words simply could not guarantee me the private expression I sought." Vabungula by Bill Price is another notable example of an extensively used and thoroughly documented personal language; the author says of it, "It would of course be interesting to have someone else to converse with, but I have gotten along fine these past 35 years without a 'partner' and will probably get along just fine for the next 35 years without one." The author Robert Dessaix describes the origins of his personal language K: "I wanted words that described reality. So I made them up." [1]
[edit] Jokelangs
The term jokelang is sometimes applied to conlangs created as jokes. These may be languages intended primarily to sound funny, such as DiLingo, or for some type of satire, often as satire on some aspect of constructed languages.
Some typical Jokelangs are:
- Europanto - constituting an unstructured mixture of any European Language
- Transpiranto - constructed from international words inflected to sound like Swedish jargon, in order to improve malplacedness and ambiguity.
- Oou - a deliberately ambiguous and polysemous language whose writing system is made up entirely of punctuation marks and whose phoneme inventory is made up entirely of vowels
- DiLingo- a rhyming language that contains much humor, both superficial and cleverly sneaky.
- Pig Latin, which garbles words by taking out the first letter and adding it to the end, along with the sylabyle "ay."
- Ubbi Dubbi - A made up language where syllables are inserted in parts of a phrase to alter the sound of the phrase, but still renders the sentence understandable. Made popular by comedian Bill Cosby and PBS television show, ZOOM.
[edit] Experimental languages
Some conlangists design languages based on a philosophy or experiment, such as Laadan (feminism) or Toki Pona (minimal pidgin). These are often musings on the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis to see if a person thinks differently or has to think differently to function in a different language.
[edit] Language games
Strictly speaking, language games are not really languages, but merely provide a mechanism for altering an existing language according to a fixed pattern. They are often used by groups with the purpose of keeping their conversation incomprehensible for outsiders.
A slightly difficult one is Gibberish, where each syllable is split into consanant and vowel sound and iddag is placed in between them. Example ('Hi' would be "hiddagi", and pronounced hidduhgai). Many different forms of Gibberish exist. A similar language is Verlan, popular in France, which is based on exchanging syllables. Language games are especially popular among children. Similar to Gibberish is Op Language, where the syllable 'op' is placed before every vowel sound. Thus, 'Op Language' in Op Language is "Opop Lopangopaugop" (Pronounced Ahpahp Lahpangahpwijjahp)
Other language games might involve mixing up or instituting new rules of grammar. For instance, in The Gilmore Girls, there is a reference to a language with no "e"s. Some books are written without a certain letter. This is called constrained writing.
Frequently, people will replace the first person with third person in a sort of language game. This might be taken further by switching first- and second- person, or first- and third-, or any combination.
An interesting Hungarian language game is Eszperente, where different objects and notions are expressed in a sentence whose words can only contain e as vowels. The game exploits the fact that e is the most frequent vowel in the Hungarian language. Eszperente is believed to be inspired by national poet Sándor Petőfi, whose poem A Tisza ("The Tisza") contains the line "Mely nyelv merne versenyezni véled?" ("Which language could rival you?"). It is not known if such games exist in other languages, but in Hungarian Eszperente can express nearly everything. (Even poems and prayers like the Lord's Prayer "are translated" to Eszperente.)
[edit] Examples of artistic languages
See list of constructed languages for a list.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- The CONLANG Mailing List
- Zompist.com
- A Constructed Languages Library
- Conlang Profiles at Langmaker.com
- Audience, Uglossia and CONLANG by Sarah L. Higley
- Asemic Magazine is an Australian publication that explores artistic writing systems, at least some of which are asemic, not representing specific meaning.
[edit] Wikis on or about constructed languages and artistic languages
- ConlangWiki - a wiki devoted to the topics of ConLangs and ConCultures.
- Conlang Wikicity
- FrathWiki
- Unilang.org - a database of language- and linguistic-related information
