The Universal Translator E-Book

Yens Wahlgren

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 411

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

If you think about it, all languages are made up - some are just more open about it than others. In The Universal Translator, Yens Wahlgren heads up an expedition through time, space and multiple universes to explore the words that have built worlds. From the classic constructed languages of Star Trek and Tolkien to (literally) Orwellian Newspeakand pop-culture sensations such as Game of Thrones, The Witcher and The Mandalorian, this is your portal to over a hundred realms and lexicons – and perhaps the starting point to creating your own.

Leseprobe

This English language edition first published 2021

First published in Swedish by Volante Förlag in 2015

This edition published by agreement with the Kontext Agency

The cost of this translation was defrayed by a subsidy from the Swedish Arts Council, gratefully acknowledged

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, gl50 3qb

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Yens Wahlgren, 2021

English translation © A.A. Prime, 2021

The right of Yens Wahlgren to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9592 4

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Contents

Introduction: Your Alibi for Speaking Alienese

1 Artificial Languages Throughout History: Starting With the Ancient Greeks – Obviously

2 Grammelot: Present and Future Dialects

3 A Posteriori: Languages With Their Roots on Earth

4 A Priori: Languages That Are a Little More Out of This World

5 Dystopian Languages: Full-Scale Literary Experiments

6 Beyond the Seven Kingdoms: How TV Sparks Language Development

7 Tolkien’s Secret Vice: A World Built on Languages

8 Klingon: From Prop to Public Property

9 The Language of Fanfiction: When the Language Outgrows its Context

Bibliography

Introduction

YOUR ALIBI FOR SPEAKING ALIENESE

It begins on the changing table. ‘Da-da, goo-goo’ – a little baby looks with curiosity and delight at the new world revealed to them after nine months of darkness and tries to name everything using their own invented language. This is not unlike Adam in the Bible, who names all living things with his own made-up language, the Adamic language, which many people throughout history have regarded as a divine protolanguage conveying the true name and essence of all things. But really, the first invented language probably wasn’t much more advanced than a curious ‘da-da’ and ‘goo-goo’.

Just as a baby soon applies systems and structure to their language – incomprehensible though it may be for anyone other than the child and their closest family – it didn’t take long for the first humans to become more systematic in their communication. It is very possible that language originated among a small group of individuals early on in human history and then spread throughout the world with human migration.

After the baby babble stage, many of us continue to concoct our own languages. I remember talking and singing in made-up English when I was little. Before I could read for real, I remember reading aloud in my own secret language and pretending to write before I could write. In primary school, my friends and I were fascinated by the Smurfs and spoke to each other in Smurf language. I remember to this day how thrilled we were when we actually managed to understand each other. I also remember the frustration of being unable to crack the code of the Robber Language (think a Swedish equivalent to Pig Latin, invented by the author Astrid Lindgren) that the girls in our class seemed able to converse in fluently.

After primary school came middle and high schools, and I made new linguistic acquaintances: the language of the great apes in Tarzan, Elvish in J.R.R. Tolkien’s books, and the alien languages in Star Wars and Dune; the secret runic alphabet I developed during a two-week holiday in Sicily but never used; and of course the Latin used by the pirates in the Asterix comics, which is still all the Latin I know.

Other than Latin, the languages that fascinated me most in childhood were invented. Languages that had no purpose beyond adding flavour and depth to literature and films. Languages that could hardly be used for communication. Languages you couldn’t study at a language school in Brighton in the summer holidays.

My interest in artificial languages continued into adulthood and I began to study them more systematically. This book is the result. My interest has also given rise to a number of articles and academic essays on the extraterrestrial language Klingon; I like to say I have a BA in Klingon.

I have also discovered that I am far from alone in my fascination with artificial languages. People have always invented languages, for their own amusement, for political, religious, social or aesthetic reasons. Many have sought the ‘perfect language’ and tried to construct a means of communication that is more precise, logical or beautiful – in other words, better – than natural languages. English, Swedish, French – indeed, most of the nearly 7,000 living languages we know of – have evolved over millennia and are not consistent, logical or regular. What’s more, change tends to evoke strong feelings in most people.

Just take the word ‘they’, to mean a singular person of undefined gender. Is this new use of the word a grammatical abomination or a natural solution to fill a gap in the English language? I would imagine that my readers’ opinions differ on this subject. But it is precisely this type of change that has been the driving force behind many people’s attempts to create ‘better’ languages. That is, the creator’s subjective idea of what makes a language ‘better’. Most of the hundreds of supposedly perfect, world-enhancing languages invented have been ideal according to their creators alone, and have never actually reached a larger audience. But that’s good enough, isn’t it? A handful have reached a wider audience – the most noteworthy example being Esperanto.

The name Esperanto means ‘hope’ and the language was created with the intention of spreading peace and international understanding. Inventor Ludwig Zamenhof fantasised that one day everyone in the world would have Esperanto as a second language, and therefore be able to communicate via a neutral language that was not native to anyone in particular. Nowadays, there actually are native speakers. It is estimated that around 1,000 people were raised speaking Esperanto, and so in practice it has become a natural language. It is also estimated that 200,000–300,000 people speak Esperanto fluently and up to 2 million speak it to a reasonable degree.

There has been similar development in two other constructed languages: Hebrew and Norwegian. Yes, you read that correctly. Both modern Hebrew and Norwegian are constructed languages.

Modern Hebrew originated in Palestine in the 1890s when Jewish immigrants decided to revive Hebrew as an oral language. For many centuries, Hebrew had not been spoken day to day and was used only in ritual. The initiator of this endeavour was Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who raised his children speaking Hebrew. In order for the ancient Hebrew of the Torah to be used as a spoken language, a lot had to be added and changed in terms of vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation – essentially constructing a language.

In the 1840s, the father of Nynorsk, or New Norwegian, Ivar Aasen, constructed the modern tongue from medieval Norwegian, with a review and systematisation of the western Norwegian dialects and the introduction of a new standard of written language. Naturally, if Norway was going to be a nation, it needed a proper language of its own.

This sort of development is taking place continually in most languages, although to a lesser degree. Existing languages go through overhauls with spelling reforms, the addition of loan words or the creation of new words, such as ‘selfie’ or ‘mansplain’. Incorporating loan words, new words or slang into the standard lexicon can cause some people, often older generations, to protest loudly. But what some consider to be the downfall and degeneration of language is simply natural development.

International auxiliary languages, logically perfect languages, pidgin and other semi-planned, semi-natural languages are all fascinating, but these are not the constructed languages that this book is about. This book is about the fantastical languages we encounter in popular culture: languages created for artistic reasons, or sometimes simply as background props. They are often called artlangs, short for ‘artistic languages’, a term that originated in the conlang movement. Similarly, conlang is simply shorthand for ‘constructed languages’. People who count language creation as a hobby, whatever the purpose of the language might be, are thus called conlangers.

Over 100 languages are mentioned in this book and, unsurprisingly, most originate from the genres commonly known as science fiction or fantasy – that is, stories that take place in alien worlds and different epochs. Just as a newborn infant and the biblical Adam feel an unstoppable urge to name all the new things they see in the world, an author must name everything in the strange world that emerges through their story. What do you call the blue sea creature with wings, a beak and moose antlers? How do people speak in the future? How has language changed in 40,000 years? How do two-headed Martians think and speak? Is centaur language neigh-based? Won’t cinema-goers find it strange if the protagonist lands on an extraterrestrial planet and its inhabitants start speaking English?

Most authors solve these issues simply by describing the phenomena in their native language, but sometimes the more linguistically inclined prefer not to take these shortcuts. In Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, readers pick up the slang as they go along. George Orwell’s Newspeak in 1984 has coined new words – not least the word ‘Newspeak’ itself. In the novel, the language represents an attempt to deprive people of any words to express critical thought. In her books, Suzette Haden Elgin has explored how a feminist-constructed language, Láadan, would differ from the languages of our reality. The difference between extraterrestrial and human languages is an issue many writers and filmmakers have had to contend with.

Sci-fi literature is the ideal testing ground for the linguistic relativity principle, or Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which states that the grammar and vocabulary of each language contains an in-built world view that defines the way its speakers think. This hypothesis, named after linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, is somewhat outdated today and controversial in linguistic circles, to put it mildly. However, most people can recognise the often embarrassing mistakes that occur when people speak a second language but continue to think in their mother tongue. But within science fiction and fantasy this hypothesis continues to be useful because they are genres with the capacity for more complex examples than reality allows: intelligent space insects – how do they think and speak? Can they make themselves understood to humans at all?

So, it doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to understand why writers and filmmakers strive to make their stories and worlds more credible through the construction of languages. But why do so many people spend their time exploring and studying the languages of these extraterrestrial and fantastical creatures? Indeed, many people learn to read, write and speak them.

If you are going to study a language, why not learn one you can actually use like Chinese, Arabic or French? Many would posit that even Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Ancient Egyptian or any other classical dead language would be better, which is to say more useful. Because although these classical languages are extinct and not easily used for communication, many claim that they have intrinsic value. A certain lofty beauty and refinement is attributed to these major ancient languages, endowing anyone who masters them with an air of culture and intelligence. The same cannot be said for artificial alien languages.

It also makes sense to study Latin, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit, for example, because a great deal of vocabulary in our modern languages originates from these classical tongues. The study of artlangs cannot compare in this respect either, although many of them are rooted in both modern and classical languages and thus display similarities.

But perhaps the most important argument for studying the languages of sophisticated ancient societies is that they give access to the history and folklore of bygone cultures. By learning their language and studying their texts, we can gain insight into the way of thinking of a particular writer who lived 3,000 years ago. Mastering a language can give access to the world view of a remote culture.

To a lesser degree, we can say the same of fictitious languages in popular culture. They allow us to tune into an author’s mindset as well as into a strange alien culture. The extraterrestrial languages of Star Trek, Avatar, Dune and Stargate are by no means just random sounds thrown together; they are carefully developed to reveal aspects of the beings that speak them.

The Star Trek language Klingon was specifically created to correspond to the portrayal of the fictional extraterrestrial Klingon race in the TV series. Its grammar and range of sounds give a deeper insight into the culture and outlook of these fictional beings. The language contains elements and combinations not found in any existing terrestrial language, therefore giving its speakers a glimpse into an ‘alien’ way of thinking.

Are Tolkien’s books meaningful if the reader has no understanding of the various Elvish tongues? Can they be understood without this knowledge? Syldavian and Arumbaya in The Adventures of Tintin say a lot about their author, Hergé, and add another dimension to the exploits of the eternally youthful Belgian journalist. What can be read between the lines by knowing the origin of the languages spoken in Dune or the Disney movie Atlantis?

To some extent, the answer to the question of why people study artificial languages is simply because it provides a deeper insight into the literary or cinematic works that birthed them. It is the quest to know everything about one’s passion. Perhaps a similarity can be drawn between conlang enthusiasts and people who are not content to simply admire the beauty of their favourite artist’s work, but instead choose to study the progression of brush strokes or colour palettes throughout their career, or experts interested in whether or not the nails and padding in a Gustavian chair are original. It gives added value to simple statements about the chair being attractive to look at and comfortable to sit on.

If you think about it, asking someone why they study an artificial language is about as arbitrary as asking someone why they enjoy poetry or music. Or, for that matter, to ask someone why they read fiction when there is such a thing as non-fiction. And why do people watch football anyway?

I cannot deny that artificial languages are something of a nerdy niche. Not everyone feels the urge to write poetry in Quenya or Huttese, or make an animation with Lego figures performing Fiddler on the Roof in Klingon (search for lurDech on YouTube – you won’t regret it!). But when it comes down to it, language is an interest we all share and that affects us all, adults and children alike, from the moment you first define the world around you with your own invented language as an infant.

Foreign languages – dead, alive or constructed – open a window to something new. This book is not a grammar guide or a dictionary, but a journey of discovery through worlds and universes created by the imagination. In order to understand these worlds and universes, we need to understand their languages. The motto of the Klingon Language Institute (KLI) is ‘qo’mey poSmoH Hol’ – ‘Language opens worlds’. This is exactly what I hope The Universal Translator will do: deepen our understanding of supposedly familiar literary worlds, and open up new worlds, unknown and waiting to be discovered.

STARTING WITH THE ANCIENT GREEKS – OBVIOUSLY

Goídelc, Lingua Ignota, Balaibalan, Enochian, Utopian, Ringuam Albaras, Moonspeak, Lilliputian, Houyhnhnm, Nazarian, Quamite, Volapük, Esperanto, Solresol

‘I artamane Xarxas apiaona satra’ is the first known phrase of an artificial language in literature. It was the opening line from the King of Persia’s minister, Pseudartabas, in what was supposed to be made-up Persian in Aristophanes’ comedy The Acharnians, from 425 bce. The response to the aforementioned line was, ‘Does anyone understand what he is saying?’ Fortunately, someone present does understand Pseudartabas and lets us know that this introductory sentence means – ‘The great King is going to send you gold.’

Aristophanes understood the subtle art of using an artificial language to give the audience a sense of foreignness. Some years later in his comedies The Birds and The Frogs, he uses both a bird language and a frog language. Of the forty comedies he wrote, only eleven have been preserved, so who knows how many artificial languages may have been lost? Several well-known phrases are also attributed to Aristophanes, such as, ‘These impossible women! How they do get around us! The poet was right: We cannot live with them, and we cannot live without them.’

No more examples of constructed languages have survived from antiquity, but naturally the great thinkers of Ancient Greece mused upon linguistic–philosophical questions. In the dialogue Cratylus, Plato ponders the connection between things and their names – is it arbitrary, or is there a natural, essential relationship? Is there a natural connection between a word and what it signifies?

Another Greek author, Athenaeus, who was active in the third century CE, approached the phenomenon of artificial languages in his mammoth work, Deipnosophistae. He tells the story of a man from Sicily, Dionysius, who invents his own words for invariably Greek concepts.

English

Greek

Neologism

Virgin

parthenos

menandros (menei – wait; andra – husband)

Spear

akontion

ballantion (balletai enantion – ‘to throw at someone’)

These examples of neologisms – new words – are probably not a rigorous attempt to build a new language, but rather a playful demonstration that alternatives to familiar words are possible.

The first mention of the concept of an artificial language appears in the Old Irish manuscript, Auraicept na n-Éces, written mainly in the 1300s but with some sections estimated to date as far back as the seventh century. It tells of the learned Scythian King Fénius Farsaid, great-grandson of Noak, who came to the Tower of Babel to study the great language confusion shortly after it arose. He brought with him seventy-two scholars whom he sent out on a mission to study how the only language previously spoken had been divided into different languages. The scholars scattered in all directions, while Fénius established a headquarters at Nimrod’s tower to co-ordinate the work. For ten years, Fénius and the seventy-two scholars studied and compiled an artificial language, Bérla tóbaide – ‘the selected language’ – based on the best parts of each of the confused tongues. Fénius named his conlang Goídelc (Gaelic). A particular kind of Irish hubris, perhaps, that the legendary Fénius took on the godlike task of creating a language, as well as supposedly joining together what God had divided!

According to legend, Fénius also created, or possibly discovered, the perfect script for his new perfect language. He named the twenty-five letters after the twenty-five prime scholars of the seventy-two he had brought with him. However, Ogham is an alphabet from the early Middle Ages, mainly used in the Irish-language area. Its origins are not entirely clear, but it is unlikely to have been created by Fénius. Ogham is also called the Celtic tree alphabet because the letters are named after types of trees, and not after twenty-five scholars, as the legend would have it.

Fénius’ grandson, Goídel Glas (who composed Goídelc, according to some versions of the legend) then married Scota, a pharaoh’s daughter. After the pharaoh and his army were drowned by Moses in the Red Sea, the lovers fled and ended up in Spain. From a tower in Spain, Goídel Glas saw a beautiful green island, which turned out to be Ireland, where they eventually settled.

Lingua Ignota

In the twelfth century, we see clearer evidence of, and more than just individual sentences from, an artificial language. Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) could be the patron saint of conlangs. Canonised in 2012, she is also known as Saint Hildegard. Her constructed language, Lingua Ignota, was not the reason behind her canonisation; that was her life’s work as a nun, abbess, philosopher, mystic and physician.

Why Hildegard invented her own language and what she planned to do with it is a mystery. Since she was an abbess at a monastery in Rupertsberg, it seems fair to speculate that it was a mystical language for religious use. Or a secret language for her diary?

She described parts of the language in Lingua Ignota per simplicem hominem Hildegardem prolata, which has been preserved in two manuscripts. This document lists 1,011 words of her artificial language with explanations in Latin and sometimes German. It seems that these words are used with grammar borrowed from Latin. The only snippet that has been preserved is a Latin sentence interspersed with words in Lingua Ignota:

Oorzchis Ecclesia, armis divinis praecincta, et hyacinto ornata, tu escaldemiastigmatumloifolumet urbs sciencia-rum. O, o tu es etiamcrizantain alto sono, et eschorzta gemma.

Oh orzchis church, girded with divine arms, and adorned with hyacinth, you are caldemias of loifolum wounds, and the city of the sciences. Oh, oh, you are crizanta in loud noise, and you are chorzta the jewel.

Unfortunately, only one of the words, loifol – ‘people’, appears in the glossary, which originally was probably more extensive than the 1,011 words that have been preserved. The glossary is arranged hierarchically, starting with the divine, then moving on to humans and animals and, lastly, things:

aigonz – God

aieganz – angel

diueliz – devil

inimois – human

jur – man

vanix – woman

peueriz – father

maiz – mother

limzkil – child

luschia – duck

sizia – beetroot

libizamanz – book

The Voynich Manuscript

The history of artificial languages doesn’t get much more intriguing than the case of a fifteenth-century manuscript discovered by a bookseller in 1912. It was written in an unknown language with an unknown script by an unknown author. The 240 pages of the manuscript depict unidentified constellations, mysterious plants, bathing women, astrological tables and long pieces of beautiful but incomprehensible text. Absolutely incomprehensible. Linguists and code crackers have been trying in vain to solve the mystery for over a century.

The first to try to solve the riddle was bookseller Wilfrid Voynich, who had dedicated his life to the search for unusual literature. In Villa Mondragone, Italy – one of the many mansions of the Jesuit order – in a chest packed with ancient, dusty volumes, he made the greatest discovery of his life with the eponymous manuscript. Voynich bought it from the Jesuit monks and devoted the rest of his life to trying to interpret the text. When he died in 1930, he had still not been able to decipher a single word.

Since then, linguists, cryptologists, occultists and various wannabe geniuses have tried to solve the mystery. Theories differ: a fifteenth-century prank; fake magic intended to impress people; or indeed some kind of written language. Voynich was also suspected of forging the manuscript himself as a cry for attention (or being deceived by a forger), but all sorts of expertise has gone into analysis of the book, including carbon dating, which placed its origin somewhere between 1404 and 1438. The book is genuine.

The document is written on vellum (calfskin) and consists of 240 pages containing 170,000 characters. A letter dated 1666 came with the manuscript, from Jan Marek Marci of Kronland, Rector of the Charles University in Prague at the time, to Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher of Rome. When asked to decipher the manuscript, Kircher discovered that it was once purchased by Emperor Rudolf II of Bohemia (1552–1612) for 600 gold ducats in the belief that it was an undiscovered work by the English Franciscan friar Roger Bacon, the genius polymath who predicted the invention of guns, aircraft, the telescope and the microscope. Could this be Bacon’s great encyclopedia of the sum of all knowledge?

There has also been speculation as to whether it is simply a conlang – an artificial language – perhaps for no other reason than to satisfy the author’s aesthetic taste for linguistics. William F. Friedman, one of the world’s foremost cryptologists who cracked the Japanese code during the Second World War, concluded that it was an artificial language after he and a group of cryptoanalysts failed to interpret the document. It must have been the only code that Friedman didn’t manage to crack.

But the most common theory is that it is a cipher. The language/script has been analysed in every conceivable way, and it does appear to be structured like a real language, not just random scrawls of decorative characters. The words are, on average, four to five characters long, which is consistent with many European languages. However, there are almost no character sequences with fewer than three or more than ten characters, which does not correspond to Western languages.

When experts examined the frequency of different characters, they saw that they follow a pattern comparable to those of natural languages, but some are arranged in an unnatural way within the words. Different pages in the manuscript are devoted to different subject areas and, quite logically, specific words appear more frequently on these pages than others. On the other hand, there are oddities, such as a specific sequence being repeated three, four or five times in a row on other pages.

Many literary works have been inspired by the enigma of the Voynich manuscript: thriller novels such as Codex by Lev Grossman; an orchestral piece by Hanspeter Kyburz; and the computer game Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, where players have to gather pages from it. In the game, the manuscript originated from an alien race that created humankind before becoming extinct.

A modern-day successor, Luigi Serafini, published Codex Seraphinianus in the 1970s – a mammoth work in two volumes containing strange drawings of flora and fauna, written in an unknown language with an unknown script …

Balaibalan

Another language whose origin and function is as mysterious as the Lingua Ignota is Balaibalan from the sixteenth century. It was likely created by a Turkish gentleman by the name of Muhyî-i Gülşenî (1528–1605). He was a member of a Sufi order founded by the Kurdish Sheikh Pir Ibrâhim Gülşenî, which has given rise to speculation that the language has mystical, spiritual undertones. It has also been hypothesised that several people were involved in its creation and the vocabulary may have been developed as a collective effort.

Another theory posits that it was an early attempt at an international auxiliary language for the Muslim world. Balaibalan features aspects of the three major Islamic languages of the time: Turkish, Persian and Arabic, belonging to the Altaic, Indo-European and Semitic language families, respectively. However, the case against the theory of Balaibalan being intended as an auxiliary language is that it was largely incomprehensible to speakers of all three languages.

It is an a priori language, meaning most of the vocabulary is not based on any existing lexicon. Some of the 4,000 words show similarities with Arabic or other languages, while some words seem to originate from metaphors used in Persian and Turkish poetry.

The numerals ad, baz, jal, dom and han were chosen so that the first letter corresponds to the original Arabic alphabet (a, b, j, d, h). Perhaps the language was used specifically for poetry.

Two copies of the Balaibalan dictionary (Ḏātayvakšāv aḥātaybakšā) have been preserved, one in Paris and one at Princeton University in the United States. There was a third copy in Baghdad, but it has been lost. No significant corpora have been preserved, so the spread of the language has been limited. Balaibalan was written in a variation on the Arabic script used in the Ottoman Empire, which also included letters from Turkish and Persian. Grammatically, Balaibalan resembles Arabic, but word formation is agglutinative – prefixes and suffixes are added to a short root word, as in Turkish.

The name of the language is itself a good example – bāl-a-ibal-an: bāl – ‘language’; a – ‘of’; I – (definite article); bal – ‘bring to life’; an – (participle). So: ‘the language of that which gives life’ – ‘God’s language’.

Let’s take another example using the verb ‘to know’:

bar – knows

baram – to know

baras – he knew

barar – he knows

Add the prefix ki-, which marks a place name, to bar (‘knows’), and it becomes kibar – ‘school’, or ‘place for knowledge’. Adding -nak to the end of a word indicates that something is ‘in abundance’, so barnak is a ‘wise old man or woman’ – someone with an abundance of knowledge.

Balaibalan is also interesting because, unlike most well-known artlangs, it originated outside Western culture. Assuming that Muhyî-i Gülşenî was the creator of the language, this dates its origin to the 1580s or thereabouts. There is a note in one of the manuscripts that suggests this is the case, plus the language came about at the same time as another language with mysterious, magical purposes. The language of the angels themselves …

Enochian

In the 1580s, British mathematician, astronomer, astrologer and court magician (to name but a few professional titles) John Dee began a project with spirit medium Edward Kelley in which they attempted to establish continuous contact with angels. Through this work, Dee learned Angelical, or Enochian. This is the language that God used when he created the world and that Adam and Eve spoke before the Fall. When they were banished from paradise, they forgot most of it and began to speak a watered-down version of Enochian, which became a kind of proto-Hebrew. Proto-Hebrew was then the spoken language until the great language confusion caused by the Tower of Babel.

Ever since Adam was banished from the Garden of Eden, the Patriarch Enoch was the only person to learn Angelical until 26 March 1583, when John Dee and Edward Kelley began receiving lessons in the language – via mirrors and crystal balls. First, Kelley had a vision of the special twenty-one-letter alphabet, written from right to left, which allowed the angel Nalvage to bash out the first text a few days later, backwards, in Enochian (the English translation was found on pieces of paper that came out of the angel’s mouth):

Ol sonf vors g, goho Iad Balt, lonsh calz vonpho; sobra zol ror I ta nazps od graa ta malprg; ds holq qaa nothoa zimz, od commah ta nobloh zien; soba thil gnonp …

This is from the introduction of an invocation believed to have been used for magical purposes. In the nineteenth century, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers and Aleister Crowley, in the occult society the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, took up the baton and developed a system of magic that they named after Enoch and in which Enochian was used as the magical language.

Some are unimpressed by the Angelical language and believe that Enochian is either simply speaking in tongues with no significance, or some sort of code for English. John Dee and his spiritualist colleague Edward Kelley, who was a well-known forger, were also suspected of being behind the Voynich manuscript. Dee was the foremost Bacon expert of his time, and Dee and Kelley sold the manuscript to Emperor Rudolf II, King of Bohemia, on a visit to Prague in the 1580s, convincing him that it was the work of Roger Bacon. However, their possible involvement with the Voynich manuscript is mostly based on circumstantial evidence and speculation.

Utopian

Thomas More’s 1516 dialogue Utopia belongs to the great classics of Renaissance literature. Perhaps More wasn’t the first to write about ideal states and utopian societies, but his work gave rise to the concept of utopian – and, indirectly, dystopian – literature. In fact, the word ‘utopia’ is derived from Greek and means ‘nowhere’.

Utopia parodies contemporary travelogues and harks back to Plato’s Republic, but also depicts a radical social utopia, foretelling the idealistic egalitarianism of socialism and communism in the distant future. The land of Utopia is an island republic where all property is common. The inhabitants, called Utopians, have a six-hour working day. Utopia enforces a labour rotation, whereby every urban resident must work in agriculture for two years of their lifetime. But a lot of the heavy labour requires slaves and prisoners of war …

Thomas More also gives examples of the language spoken in Utopia and, with the help of his friend Peter Giles, he created a new alphabet consisting of geometric figures. The only longer text that exists in the language is a four-line poem, from which it is clear that Utopian was grammatically similar to Latin.

Raphael Hythlodaeus, the protagonist who narrates his stay in Utopia, believes that the language is related to Greek because the inhabitants seem to pick up Greek easily, but also thinks that many root words originate from Persian. The poem begins:

Vtopos ha Boccas peu la chama polta chamaan. Bargol he maglomi baccan foma gymnofophaon.

Vtopos – Utopos (the legendary founder of the country)

boccas – leader

chama – island

bargol – the only

baccan – of all

gymnofophaon – philosophy

François Rabelais picked up the artlang baton with The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel, the most famous work of the French Renaissance. Rabelais wrote the first of the five books in 1534. They are a collection of gathered references and quotes, sardonic satire, and coarse, crude jokes. Rabelais’ aptitude for storytelling is boundless. It is no wonder that he gives examples of no fewer than three artificial languages in his books, one of which is a nod to Thomas More’s Utopia, including one sentence actually in the Utopian language:

Agonou dont oussys vous desdagnez algorou: nou den farou zamist vous mariston ulbrou.

This foreign language is uttered when one of the main characters, the giant Pantagruel, meets the polyglot Panugre, who alternates between German, Italian, Scottish, Dutch, Spanish, Danish, Hebrew, Greek and Latin, not to mention French and three invented languages. Pantagruel can also identify the language of the exotic Antipodean people:

Albarildim gotfano dechmin brin alabo dordio falbroth ringuam albaras.

This is a language so difficult that ‘the devil himself couldn’t get his teeth into it’. Ringuam albaras may be an anagram of linguam arabas – ‘the Arabic language’. Perhaps the Antipodean language is Rabelais’ version of a pseudo-Arabic? I wouldn’t like to speculate as to whether Harry Potter’s creator, J.K. Rowling, has read Rabelais, but a certain Antipodean word brings to mind a character in her universe: voldemoth.

The Seventeenth-Century Languages of Logic

The seventeenth century saw the first major wave of artificial languages. But whereas previous creations had been of a religious, mystical or artistic nature, this new wave was more philosophical. These were languages based on the classification of ideas, some even attempting to encompass the sum of all human knowledge.

In the 1600s, after serving as the international language (lingua franca) for educated men in Europe for 1,000 years, Latin went into decline. Mathematics, philosophy and natural sciences, however, were on the rise. Thanks to the development of the printing press, books started being published in national languages, calling into question the prevalence of Latin, which was so irregular and difficult to learn. With the decline of Latin, international communication became more difficult.

What was needed was, quite simply, a better language. A more precise language. Maybe an artificial language could herald a return to the time before the Tower of Babel and the great confusion of tongues? Prior to the Fall, Adam had named all the animals, and a natural relationship was assumed to exist between the animals themselves and their given names. Surely, if academics put their minds to it, they should be able to recreate such a language.

During this time there was also great interest in the West for Chinese characters. The philosopher Francis Bacon considered these characters to be ‘authentic’ because they represent pure ideas as opposed to words or sounds. He noted that, for example, speakers of Mandarin and Cantonese who do not understand each other’s spoken language do understand each other’s written language. This gave rise to the hope that it might be possible to construct a language that, like the Adamic language, reveals the true name and essence of things. Seventeenth-century thinkers were generally of the opinion that languages simply stood in the way of the things themselves.

A very early science-fiction novel, Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone from 1638, tells the story of how protagonist Gonsales flies to the moon with the help of swans. On the moon, giants live in a utopian society where a universal moon language is used and understood by everyone. Inspired by a travelogue about China and its description of the Chinese languages, Godwin created a musical lunar language consisting of both words and tones. The vocabulary seems limited to Gonsales, but a variety of tones help to make different words.

Cyrano de Bergerac exhumes the melodic moon language in A Voyage to the Moon (1657). The hero of de Bergerac’s sci-fi novel, Dyrcona, even meets Godwin’s main character Gonsales. As well as their spoken language, the lunar people of Godwin’s novel have another form of expression consisting entirely of gestures and body language. Dyrcona later encounters the perfect language spoken on the sun and comes to a forest where the trees speak Greek, which they learned on Earth.

These and similar stories provided intellectual fodder for the objectives of the universal language project: the need for international communication and a precise, logical language.

Francis Lodwick was the first of at least sixteen thinkers with his common writing in the 1600s. There then followed, among others, Thomas Urquhart’s Logopandecteision, Cave Beck’s Universal Character, Joakim Becher’s Linguarum Universali, George Dalgarno’s Ars Signorum, Isaac Newton’s Universal Language, Gottfried Leibniz’s Clavis Universalis, and then it all culminated, so to speak, with John Wilkins’ mammoth Philosophical Language.

Many took mathematical principles as their starting point so sentences could be built up like formulae. New writing systems were devised that could better, more logically, express true principles. Above all, they tried to organise the world and classify everything into strict hierarchies.

Just such a philosophical language was very extensively presented by John Wilkins in 1668 in a 600-page work. Wilkins divided all knowledge into forty major categories and many more subcategories denoted by various arbitrary syllables: for example, da – ‘world’, de – ‘element’, and di – ‘stone’. A syllable can then be expanded to form subgroups for these basic concepts, such as deb – ‘fire’, and debi – ‘lightning’. The word ‘light’ is not associated with fire or lightning but belongs to another category and is denoted by bag.

Any word beginning with ‘z’ signifies an animal. Zi identifies the genus (e.g. mammal), zit clarifies that it is a ‘dog-like predator’ and zitα denotes the species ‘dog’. And so on and so forth.

Wilkins classified the whole world according to his own logic. Everything is part of a hierarchy and you have to know the category to which a word belongs in order to translate it. Wilkins’ a priori words don’t represent a concept, they define the concept. The letters and syllables indicate the category and subcategory to which the word belongs. The word for ‘salmon’ – zana – tells us that it is a ‘scaly river fish, with pinkish flesh’. The written language is based on the same principle: the characters are constructed with a similarly logical system, where dashes on letters denote the subcategories relating to the concept.

Most linguistic philosophers of the time made similar classifications, building up a lexicon of concepts and trying to find universal semantic categories in the world’s languages. Wilkins’ life work is undoubtedly impressive, but as was the case with other philosophical languages, it was very hard to learn and next to impossible to speak fluently.

The idea behind artlangs in the 1600s was to invent an international auxiliary language, but in practice it became mainly language for its own sake – early conlangs, published in a book somewhere and expressing little more than the author’s views on logic and the world. Each one represented a linguistic utopia of its own, and none came close to surviving contact with reality.

Gulliver’s Travels

Linguistic philosophers were probably mocked in their day, and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) certainly made fun of the attempts of scholarly gentlemen to create the perfect language. Lemuel Gulliver visits Lagado, capital of the flying island of Laputa, where he meets three professors at the university’s Faculty of Languages who are eagerly discussing how to improve the native language. Their proposal is to condense speech by turning polysyllabic words monosyllabic, and omitting all verbs and particles because everything one can think of is, in fact, a noun. Another suggestion is to abolish words altogether in an effort to shorten conversations, which would be kinder on the lungs, among other things. Since words are really just the names of objects, it would be more appropriate for everyone to simply carry the items in question around with them instead of using words. If a person wants to say something, they need only show the object in question. The downside is that everyone would have to carry around a large pack of objects in order to have a conversation.

This sterling idea would surely have become a reality, ‘If the women, in conjunction with the vulgar and illiterate, had not threatened to raise a rebellion, unless they might be allowed the liberty to speak with their tongues, after the manner of their forefathers; such constant irreconcilable enemies to science are the common people’.

On his travels to fantastical places, Gulliver encounters more strange languages which Swift exemplifies with a few phrases here and there. The Lilliputians in Lilliput (the word ‘Lilliputian’ comes from Swift’s invented land) call Gulliver quinbus flestrin – ‘the big human mountain’, and ‘britches’ are called ranfu-lo. Just as Gulliver wakes up and finds himself captured by the Lilliputians, Swift highlights Gulliver’s strange experience on hearing several (untranslated) exotic phrases – tolgo phonac, hekina degul, langro dehul san, borach mevolah, peplom salan. Gulliver also describes some measurements of length, such as drurr and glumguff, and titles such as nardac, clumglum and hurgon. The written language is unusual; instead of from right to left or left to right, from top to bottom or bottom to top, the Lilliputians write diagonally from one corner to the other.

There is no evidence to suggest that Jonathan Swift invented a language to any great extent. The phrases and words that appear in the book were probably created separately and intended only to give the reader a sense of exotic otherness.

Lilliput has two political factions, the Tramecksan and the Slamecksan, meaning ‘high heels’ and ‘low heels’, respectively, which is an important point of political contention, as are religious disputes over the interpretation of sacred texts or indeed the best way to peel eggs.

The giants in the land of Brobdingnag have their own language as well, of course. There they call Gulliver grildrig, which means ‘small/Lilliputian’, and he is likened to the animal splacknock and described as relplum scalcatch – ‘freak of nature’.

On his travels, Gulliver also encounters a race of talking horse people, the Houyhnhnms, whose tongue consists of nasal and throat sounds which Gulliver thinks resembles German but more beautiful and expressive. The most interesting thing about the Houyhnhnms’ language is that Swift thinks in terms similar to the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. Gulliver notices that it is extremely difficult to discuss certain concepts with the Houyhnhnms. Since they have few ‘needs and desires’, their language is poor. They have no words for doubt, mistrust, lies and false promises, and therefore find these concepts very difficult to understand when Gulliver talks about them. There are also no words for power, government, war, law, punishment, money, theft, bribery, flattery, astrology, sainthood, free thinking or ‘thousands of other concepts’, making it almost impossible for Gulliver to give his Houyhnhnm master a notion of the society he comes from.

In the world of the Houyhnhnms, horses are masters, and a vile, unintelligent, humanlike race, the Yahoos, is by and large the only thing that disturbs the peace. Yahoo is also the Houyhnhmns’ word for all that is bad: ‘the folly of a servant, an omission of a child, a stone that cuts their feet, a continuance of foul or unseasonable weather’ is defined by adding the epithet yahoo.

Some examples of the Houyhnhnms’ language:

shnuwnh – to retire to one’s first mother

hnhloayn – request

hlunnh – oats

nnuhnoh – a rabbit-like animal

gnnayh – a kind of bird of prey

The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground

Scandinavia’s first bestseller was Ludvig Holberg’s The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground (1741), or as it was originally called, Nicolaï Klimii Iter Subterraneum, because the Danish–Norwegian author originally wrote the book in Latin and published it in Germany, suggesting that he was predicting an international success. It has appeared in four English translations in 1742, 1828, 1845 and 1960.

Protagonist Niels Klim from Bergen returns home after graduating in philosophy and theology at the University of Copenhagen. In the city of his birth, Klim is eager to get involved in a project and decides to descend into a legendary cave in order to investigate it scientifically. The descent becomes a headlong fall and Klim suddenly finds himself in the underworld, where he lands on the planet Nazar, in the principality of Potu, populated by intelligent, speaking trees. Klim is taken for a monkey (pikel emi), put on a vegetarian diet, appointed as a courier on account of his quick legs and is also taught in the underground (Nazar) language.

Niels Klim mainly refers to different titles in the underground language:

Kadok – lord chancellor

Smirian – high treasurer

Madik – philosophy teacher

Masbatti – fighter, disputer

Kabalki – the one who incites the disputer

Karrati – supervisor

Klim also reproduces a piece of legislation: ‘Spik, antri, Flak, skak mak, Tabu mihalat Silak’, as it says in the fourth book of law (Skibal), third chapter (Kibal), on slanderers. No translation of the legal text is given; however, Klim also mentions some book titles that are translated. Sebolac tacsi – The True Characteristics of a God-Fearing Tree – and Mahalda Libab Helil – The State Oarsman.

These titles and legal texts are apt because Ludvig Holberg used Niels Klim’s journey to another planet and underground kingdoms as a means for writing social criticism disguised as satire. Of course, it is no coincidence that the principality of Potu is Utop(ia) spelled backwards, and in many respects perhaps Holberg’s work has more similarities with Thomas More’s Utopia than Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, published only twenty years before.

Like Gulliver, Niels travels from kingdom to kingdom, each of which highlights different tendencies that Holberg sees in society. Niels Klim spends ten years underground and meets a wide range of creatures in strange countries. The kingdom of Mardak is populated exclusively by cypress trees divided into eight tribes according to the number and shape of their eyes. The most numerous tribe are the Nagirians, who also constitute the kingdom’s elite. They have oblong eyes and therefore perceive all objects as oblong. In order to become something in the cypress kingdom, one has to swear an oath in honour of the sun, which is the longest continuous text found in the underground language:

Kaki manaska qvihompu miriac jakku mesimbrii caphani crukkia manaskar qvebriaz krusundora.

I swear, that the holy table of the sun seems oblong to me, and I promise to remain in this opinion until my last breath.

As the inhabitants of the various countries Klim visits adopt more humanlike forms, the utopia gradually becomes a dystopia, from the towering trees of Potu with developed moral and sophisticated spiritual lives, through the less-developed tree kingdoms, to the realms populated by fantastical animals and creatures. Finally he gets to the realm of Quama – completely humanlike beings.

The Quama society is steeped in and governed by selfishness, vanity and absolute power. Most of the kingdoms in the Nazar world speak the same language, but the Quamites have their own language. Jeru pikal salim is Quamite and means ‘show me the way’. Niels Klim comes to power in this kingdom and receives the titles Pikil-su (‘messenger of the sun’), Jakal (‘generalissimo’) and finally Casba (‘great emperor’).

So Scandinavia’s first bestseller contains a hefty dose of invented language and I can warmly recommend this entertaining satirical utopia to anyone interested in the linguistic history of imagined languages. If not the Latin original, then the modern English translation from 1960.

The Second Wave of Improved Languages

Interest in the perfect language gradually waned. French emerged as the lingua franca of culture and science, but nineteenth-century Europe changed dramatically through industrialisation as steamboats and trains allowed more people to travel greater distances. Telegraphs suddenly enabled communication with people much farther away. Maybe a common language was needed for the masses and not just the scientists?

The scientist, or rather engineer, archetype of Captain Nemo in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869) emerged amid the technological optimism of the nineteenth century. And it might be seen as a reflection of the zeitgeist that the crew of Captain Nemo’s submarine Nautilus speaks an unknown, possibly invented, language. Professor Aronnax, the narrator of the novel, believes that Nautilus