Speech is perhaps the most complex and vital addition to the human skill set and has pretty much defined our evolutionary success. Philology is the study of language, and over the years it has become a hugely researched branch of science. It is a proponent of both studying its art but also finding effective teaching techniques.
Some master philologists have even tried to compete with the “natural” languages, which evolved over long periods of time, and set out to create artificial languages for various purposes.
Esperanto - lingvo de paco (language of peace)
In 1887, Ludwig Zamenhof, a Polish eye surgeon, created what is currently the most famous constructed language worldwide: Esperanto. Esperanto, meaning ‘hopeful’, was designed to serve as an international auxiliary (second) language to promote world peace. About 80% of its vocabulary comes from romance languages: these primarily being Italian and Spanish. However, a lot of the grammar was taken from Polish and other Slavic languages.
There are an estimated 2 million speakers of Esperanto worldwide, with it even being part of the school curriculum in many different countries such as China and Brazil. Some micronations have even adopted it as their primary language, like Rose Island and the Republic of Molossia.
Esperanto has had significant political implications in the past, especially when Hitler accused it of being ‘a tool of Jewish world domination,’ but also when Japan in WW2 who criticised it as a socialist movement that could harm the state.
However, Esperanto remains a respected and well-constructed language. With only 917 root words (compared to 88,750 in English) and has completely regular conjugation, it is relatively simple to learn. Additionally, it is more efficient than any other natural language in terms of its rate of sharing information, including English which is at the top of this list.
All in all, Esperanto is an excellent language which has had a significant impact in breaking communication barriers worldwide. A famous example is in Catalonia, where a large push from local authorities was made around 1909 for the spreading of Esperanto. This helped promote social, economic and political relations between the neighbouring regions which did not speak Catalan, but who were willing to learn Esperanto, which is much easier and much more structured.
However, there are some criticisms on how it is quite Eurocentric – it uses almost all its words, sounds and grammatical structures from European languages. Therefore, although it is meant to universal it is much easier for some people to learn than others. But, despite this, Esperanto is still the most successful made-up language so far in terms of number of speakers.
Elvish
Commonly known to fans of Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien, in wanting to make his books rich and authentic, he decided to construct an artificial language of his own: Elvish. However, what is less known is that Tolkien actually constructed a total of 15 languages!
To integrate these languages into his stories, Tolkien wrote the book ‘Lhammas’ which describes how the newer languages have evolved from proto-languages (early/preceeding) such as Avarin (the divine language) to the later languages such as the well-known Elvish languages Quenya and Sindarin.
Whilst each language is unique, Tolkien establishes clear similaries in vocabulary and grammar between related languages. For example, ‘I’ and ‘you’ are: ‘m’ and ‘n’ in Quenya, a language of the High Elves, and ‘mb’ and ‘nd’ in Valarin, the language of the ‘holy creatures’ which were said to have created the elves. However, there may be similarities in vocabulary, but grammatically they are very diffferent. Valarin has no grammatical structure describing when a word is an object rather than a subject, and so has no word for ‘me’, whereas Quenya does (‘umb’).
Tolkien took inspiration from real languages to make his own, such as Old Norse for the making of Khuzdul (Dwarvish), Welsh for hobbits, and Old English for Rohirric (Riders of Rohan). These parallels in language were meant to relate the similarities in traditions and accents to that of cultures that readers would know already, so that his languages might feel more realistic.
The impressive part about Tolkien’s work is that every similarity has a reason within the story. If there is a word that two distant languages share, there will most likely be a story behind how this came to be. This could have come from an ancient they collectively worked from, or a specific trader from a different race that came to introduce into their society.
Suffice to say, JRR Tolkien was a master writer and philologist, navigating the complexities of human speech unlike anyone else.
Ithkuil
In 2004, John Quijada made Ithkuil: an experimental language that attempts to remove the 'vagueness' found in most natural languages. What this refers to is words with many meanings. For example, the word ‘space’ has connotations (ideas) of emptiness and depression. But it also has connotations of growth and opportunity. Quijada hoped that Ithkuil could be used in important subjects like philosophy to prevent this ambiguity. Therefore, writers could be more specific and more effective at conveying their desired meaning.
Like Esperanto, Ithkuil is very efficient in terms of its information rate. For example, the two-word Ithkuil sentence "Tram-mļöi hhâsmařpţuktôx" can be translated into English as "On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point."
Whilst Ithkuil is evidently much more efficient and concise than other languages, it is so complex in both its grammar and sound-making that it is often deemed unlearnable by many, and so it is not as successful as Quijada had once hoped.
Toki Pona
Toki Pona, made by Canadian philologist Sonja Lang in 2001, is famous for having only 120 words in its vocabulary. Each word consists of a single morpheme, which could be described as a linguistical ‘unit’ (e.g. in/come/ing). It is therefore no surprise that ‘Toki Pona’ means ‘Simple Talk’ (coming from ‘Toki’ -> ‘talk’ (English) and ‘Pona’ -> ‘bona’ (Esperanto)).
Despite its simple nature, it was not intended as an international auxiliary language because complex ideas typically require long combinations of words, making Toki Pona quite inefficient for this. Instead, it was created as an artistic language, attempting to ease the mind through the simplicity of speech.
Toki Pona is therefore very soothing both to listen to and to speak, although its dictionary consists of pretty drawings as words, possible suggesting the language’s trivial nature. Whilst it may not be as useful as the likes of Esperanto, it shows us new ways as to how language can help us.
Minionese
Minionese, or ‘Banana Language,’ and although it initially seems like gibberish, the language that the minions speak in the ‘Despicable Me’ film series is heavily inspired by natural languages, primarily Spanish and Italian, but it also takes vocabulary from Hindi, Russian, English, Korean and many other languages.
The variety in Minionese is meant to portray how minions have travelled and experienced the world. An app called the ‘Minionator’ can translate Minionese into English and as it is surprisingly accurate, it can help you see the similarities in Minionese, English, and other natural languages.
Minionese is an example of an ‘a posteriori’ language – a language that uses the contents of natural languages to make a new one. Another example of this includes ‘Simlish’ from the video game series ‘The Sims’, which was made to prevent voice lines from getting too repetitive.
These are not as carefully crafted as the other languages mentioned, but still were a great success for their intended purpose and were inspirations for other media to do the same.
Teo. R
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