OSTADAN'S LORE & LETTERS:
Glossopoeia for Fun and Profit
Table of Contents - What is Glossopoeia?
- Esperanto: Language of Hope
- That Elvish Vice
- tlhIngan Hol: The Warrior's Tongue
- The Languages of Myth
- Other References
One of J.R.R. Tolkien's less famous works is A Secret Vice, a
lecture first presented in 1931, and reprinted as an essay in
The Monsters & the Critics and Other
Essays. The “vice”
to which the essay refers is the peculiar practice of creating
languages, not as a code, but as an art form, perhaps to be
shared for the use or appreciation of interested parties, as one
would share a painting or manuscript.
The word glossopoeia is
a coinage derived from Greek, meaning “the making of tongues.” As Tolkien explains,
the creation of languages offers both intellectual and
aesthetic satisfaction, but at the time he wrote, there were few
such creations known to the public. As we will see, this
situation has changed considerably since that time.
In this article, we will consider the genesis and effects of the
three best-known
glossopoeic works in chronological order: the international
language Esperanto; the
Elvish cluster of
languages; and
tlhIngan Hol, better known by its English
name, “Klingon”.
Esperanto: Language of Hope
Esperanto was conceived and developed during the 1870s and 1880s
by L.L. Zamenhof (1859–1917). Dismayed as a child by
the mistrust that followed when people did not share a common
language, he made it his life's work to create a language that
could be learned by people in many lands as a common second
language. Zamenhof's language was first published in 1887 as
La Lingvo Internacia, with
Zamenhof assuming the pseudonym of “Dr. Esperanto”;
the word esperanto in the new
language meant “one who hopes”, and
indeed Zamenhof hoped that his language would help the cause of
international peace and understanding by encouraging
communication among ordinary citizens of the world. Before
long, the name became associated with the language itself,
rather than the author. Esperanto
was designed to be easy to learn and understand, at least
relative to other European languages. As an example of what Esperanto
looks like, here is a couplet, translated by Bertil Wennergren, that may seem familiar:
Unu Ringo ilin regas, Unu ilin prenas,
Unu Ringo en mallumon ilin gvidas kaj katenas.
This example shows a few of Esperanto's interesting features.
The vocabulary is largely derived from Latin roots
( reg-, “rule”), but has some Germanic or English
roots like ring- in the mix as
well. The word mal-lumon for
“darkness” demonstrates how the
vocabulary is extended by using affixes; the word can be
literally analyzed as “un-light”.
The number of Esperanto speakers grew steadily after its
publication. A number of literary translations[1], as well as
original articles, prose, and poetry, appeared during the next twenty years, and
the first international congress conducted entirely in Esperanto
was held in France, in 1905.
Among the people who eventually learned Esperanto to the point
of being able to write in it was a young English Boy Scout named
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. In 1909, he wrote a small sixteen-page
notebook, the Book of the Foxrook[2] partly
in Esperanto, describing a “privata kodo”
for scouts. This private code consisted of a rune-like alphabet
and a set of ideographs and represents the earliest known
alphabet invented by Tolkien.
Tolkien maintained some interest in Esperanto even while his own
linguistic creativity was in full bloom. He refers to the
language favorably in A Secret Vice, and in 1932 wrote an open letter
to the British Esperanto Association. In part, he wrote,
… technical improvement of the machinery …
tends … to destroy the “humane” or
aesthetic aspect of
the invented idiom. This apparently unpractical aspect
appears to be largely overlooked by theorists; though I
imagine it is not really unpractical and will have ultimately
great influence on the prime matter of universal
acceptance. … [one rival language] … has no gleam
of the individuality, coherence, and beauty, which appear in
the great natural idioms, and which do appear to a
considerable degree (probably as high a degree as is possible
in an artificial idiom) in Esperanto …
Here Tolkien, echoing some of his thoughts in A Secret Vice, is
observing that the creation of a language is more than the
simple creation of a tool or code; it is an endeavor that must give
not only intellectual satisfaction, but aesthetic pleasure in the arrangement
of sounds and meaning. Indeed, Zamenhof evidently
spent a fair amount of time “taste-testing” his developing language
before deciding on the words and sounds that would finally be
part of the language.
Tolkien's feelings for Esperanto apparently cooled in later
years based on his belief that language and myth are
inseparable. In a letter to one Mr. Thompson in 1956
[Letters, #180], he wrote, Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c &c are
dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their
authors never invented any Esperanto legends.
Nevertheless, it is worth observing that, of the dozens of
prospective international language projects that have appeared
in the last 150 years (including the three others Tolkien
mentioned), only Esperanto has continued to grow substantially
after the death of its creator. Estimates of the number of
competent speakers range in the hundreds of thousands, and a
Google search for “Esperanto” produces more than
850,000 matching Web pages. There is even an Esperanto translation
of The Lord of the Rings in print.
Arguably, Tolkien was wrong about Esperanto
— but for exactly the right reason. Unlike the other
languages he mentions, Esperanto does indeed have its own
mythology. It does not consist of magical legends, but is a
kind of political mythology of hope, a shared belief among its
speakers that the world would be a better and friendlier place
if everyone in the world could communicate across borders as easily
as Esperantists do, in a language that belongs to no single nation or
people. This notion, called the
interna ideo by Esperantists, is
sometimes a source of embarassment. Nevertheless, this idealism
pervades much of Esperanto literature, especially from the first
fifty years of its existence. Many, if not most, biographies of
Zamenhof tend to mythologize his life, treating the behavior of
some of those who tried to gain control of Esperanto's
development with the sort of language usually reserved for the
likes of a Lucifer or Sauron. So, if Esperanto is not dead, it
is precisely because there are legends and
myths connected with the language.
In A Secret Vice, Tolkien distinguishes languages like Esperanto,
devised for the practical purpose of serving as an
interlanguage, from the real subject of his article —
languages constructed as an Art or Game.
Tolkien,
indeed, was addicted to this “game”. Over the years,
he created perhaps a dozen or
more identifiable languages, including Dwarvish, Adûnaic,
Black Speech, Valinorean, and several dialects of Elvish. He
wrote,
You must remember that these things were constructed
deliberately to be personal, and give private satisfaction
— not for scientific experiment, nor yet in
expectation of any audience.
The Elvish languages, and Qenya (later Quenya) in particular,
were thus a way for Tolkien to express his individual taste in
languages. As has been discussed many times elsewhere, Qenya
was strongly influenced by Tolkien's attraction to the Finnish
language. In early Qenya for example, the word for
“twenty-three”, his age at the time, was
leminkainen, quite similar to
Lemminkäinen, one of the major heroes of the Finnish
epic, the Kalevala. Similarly,
Goldogrin, the Gnomish language of the Noldor, was heavily
influenced by Tolkien's love of Welsh. There is no question
that the Elvish languages represent the most complicated such
creation ever seen. Not only did Tolkien devise Qenya and
Goldogrin, but also a common proto-language from which those
two were (within the mythology) derived, and hints of several
other related Elvish dialects.
Closely bound up with the Elvish languages was Tolkien's own
emerging mythology, recorded in the Book of Lost
Tales. In A Secret Vice, he wrote
… for perfect construction of an art-language it
is found necessary to construct at least in outline a
mythology concomitant. Not solely because some pieces of
verse will inevitably be part of the (more or less) completed
structure, but because the making of language and mythology
are related functions … The converse indeed is true,
your language construction will breed a
mythology.
So closely bound were the languages and myth that it is
impossible to tell where a phrase or word in the language
inspired a new part of the story, and where the languages were
expanded or changed to suit the tale.
Unlike a practical language like Esperanto, in which stability
is (as Tolkien himself observed) critically important to its goal of
widespread propagation, Tolkien's languages were dynamic and
changed as his own tastes changed and, indeed, as his mythology
of Arda itself grew and evolved. “There is no finality in
linguistic invention and taste,” Tolkien wrote in 1932,
and his own languages demonstrated that dramatically. But
Tolkien's private game took a different turn when his fiction
was published. In The Hobbit, there
are a few hints of the Gnomish language — names like
Orcrist, Glamdring, and Elrond, with English meanings given for
the two weapons. The Lord of the Rings, however, entailed the publication of
dozens of such names, and examples of complete sentences and
even poetry in both Quenya and Sindarin. In fact, the names and
relationships of Sindarin and Quenya themselves changed during the
writing of the novel, another example of how the mythology and
languages influenced one another reciprocally.
The publication of so much Elvish had two profound effects.
The first was that Sindarin and Quenya became essentially
“frozen”. With few exceptions,
the names and interpretations that had appeared in print were no
longer subject to revision, and had to be considered
definitive. To Tolkien, this was just a new feature of the
game. Previously, if a word was changed or added, the existing
languages were retroactively modified, sometimes extensively,
to accomodate the change. But after publication, whenever
he devised a new grammatical construct or
vocabulary element, he felt bound to make sure it conformed to
the published material, even when this was inconvenient.
The second effect was that the game was no longer private.
Fans of the books quickly learned to write (at least in English)
using Tolkien's Cirth and Tengwar, and began their own
linguistic game, that of reconstructing the Elvish languages
based on the “linguistic
evidence” that appeared in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien, for as long
as his time and energy permitted, encouraged and even
participated in this
activity. He would answer language-related inquiries[3], and prepared a detailed analysis of two
Elvish poems for publication with the Road Goes
Ever On song-book. As a result, Elvish linguistics
became its own sub-fandom within organized Tolkien fandom. The
journal Parma Eldalamberon first appeared
under the auspices of the Mythopoeic Society in September, 1971
and contained articles on writing English using the Tengwar and
on the formation of plurals in Sindarin. The journal is still
irregularly published; the most recent issue contained the first
publication of Tolkien's Qenya Lexicon. Many other journals relating
to Tolkienian linguistics have appeared over the years, and with
the rapidly-expanding use of the Internet, we now see electronic
mailing lists and dozens of Web pages devoted to this esoteric
field. One can even find translations into Elvish such as this
Sindarin couplet by Ryszard Derdzinski:
Er-chorf hain torthad bain, Er-chorf hain hired,
Er-chorf hain toged bain a din fuin hain nuded.
In all likelihood, there are some thousands of Tolkien fans
around the world who, like the herb-master in the Houses of
Healing, “know somewhat of the Valinorean [4].”
With the publication
of the Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and each
volume of The History of Middle-earth, more of Tolkien's linguistic invention
has been revealed. Nevertheless, even Quenya, the most
well-documented of Tolkien's languages,
will never be fully known. Nobody can hope to speak Quenya fluently
because neither its vocabulary nor grammar is complete — Tolkien
never intended for them to be! Nor is
there ever likely to be an official Academy of Elvish that can
expand and establish some kind of “canonical” Quenya or Sindarin that
everyone can agree upon. In a private correspondence, one
professor of linguistics expressed his personal dissatisfaction with
Elvish as an area of study: Elvish satisfies a very different need, I think. In some
ways, it strikes
me as studying Latin. The language is basically dead. It exists in
fragments as a fascinating puzzle, but it's not going
anywhere.
Klingon, on the other hand …
tlhIngan Hol: The Warrior's Tongue
Perhaps the most profound effect of the prominence of the Elvish
languages in Tolkien's hugely popular work was that it made
glossopoeia respectable. Indeed, it seems that fantasy and
science fiction works in the post-Tolkien milieu practically
require the appearance of some exotic language spoken by alien
or mythic races, or at least some systematic phonological
structure in the names of people and places. One can now find
several Web pages devoted to glossopoeia, or
“conlangs” as such constructed languages are
sometimes called.
It was in this post-Tolkienian world that Paramount and Gene
Roddenberry created the Star Trek motion
pictures of the 1970s. The first film had a short subtitled
dialogue among the Klingons, as well as a snippet of Vulcan
dialogue, but these were ad hoc
creations, not part of any systematic language. For the 1982
Star Trek
film, The Wrath of Khan, the studios were
looking for a linguist to construct a few lines of Vulcan
dialogue and recruited one Dr. Mark Okrand, a linguist with
whom a producer's secretary happened to be acquainted. It
represented a few days' work, but the producers called upon
Okrand again for the somewhat more extensive Klingon dialogue in
the 1984 film, The Search for Spock.
Unexpectedly, and perhaps himself inspired by Tolkien's work,
Okrand created an extensive phonology, grammar,
and lexicon for the Klingon language, and even retro-fitted the
haphazard speech from the first film into his language as
“clipped” Klingon, a battle dialect.
The first
edition of The Klingon Dictionary was
published in 1985, and has had several reprintings (including
updates based on additional material appearing in later films).
In a sense, Klingon is a linguistic joke. It disobeys certain
rules recognized as human language universals by linguists,
and its Romanized orthography uses upper and lower case
letters in a most idiosyncratic manner. As an example of the
language, here once more is the familiar couplet, rendered into Klingon by
Ivan Derzhansky:
Hoch SeHmeH wa' Qeb 'ej bIH maghmeH wa' Qeb,
Hoch qemmeH 'ej ramDaq bIH baghmeH wa' Qeb.
With the many harsh aspirants and glottal consonants, the
Klingon language would likely have struck Tolkien as an Orkish
“brutal jargon,” and indeed does have superficial
phonological resemblences to Black Speech.
The Klingons, however, are a much more richly depicted
culture than Orcs, and have captured the imagination of many
viewers. Consequently, The Klingon Dictionary has sold
hundreds of thousands of copies, a figure which usually leads to
rather inflated numbers claimed for the number of Klingon
“speakers”. There are instructional language tapes
available, and the Klingon Language Institute even produced a
Klingon version of Hamlet not long ago,
largely as a result of a joke in a Star
Trek film[5]. In the case of Klingon, the popularity can
be attributed to the mythology that produced it: the mythical
future world of Star Trek. While only a
small number of people can actually speak it fluently[6], it is nearly certain that there are a large number
of fans who
can, with the aid of the dictionary and grammar, construct a
grammatical Klingon phrase or sentence, or who have memorized some
of the “useful phrases” such as
“Surrender or die!”
(bIjeghbe'chugh vaj bIHegh) —
almost certainly more than the number of people
who can do the same with Quenya or Sindarin.
All three of these invented languages have had considerable success
in their own rights. Perhaps to understand why, we can compare the “cultures” associated with Esperanto,
Elvish, and Klingon. The stereotypical Esperantist is a slightly
naïve idealist who sees Esperanto as a way of increasing the
brotherhood of mankind through improved communication, and tries
to correspond with pen-pals in as many countries as he or she can. The
stereotyped student of Elvish is inspired by a language in which
one routinely says things like, “a star shines on the hour
of our meeting,” and may write Elvish poetry filled with natural
imagery about oceans, forests, trees, rivers, and clouds. The Klingon
speaker enjoys the dark irony of a language in which the standard
greeting translates as, “what do you want?” and
even “I love you” is expressed in a guttural
phrase like
qamuSHa'[7]. While this is obviously a too-facile
characterization, we can see that each of these languages
fulfills some need (albeit not necessarily practical) of its
community: aesthetically, politically,
literarily, or indeed, mythically. They enjoy unusual success out
of the hundreds of glossopoeic inventions that have doubtless
occurred in the past, because they touch some part of the human
linguistic facility in ways that other efforts have not.
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