Artistic language
Encyclopedia
An artistic language is a constructed language
designed for aesthetic pleasure. Unlike engineered language
s or auxiliary languages, artistic languages usually have irregular grammar systems, much like natural language
s. Many are designed within the context of fictional worlds, such as J. R. R. Tolkien
's Middle-earth
. 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 prominent 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.
Overlapping with artistic languages is the group of philosophical language
s, languages derived from some first principle.
s.
There are two major categories of fictional languages.
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 Ico
.
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. An example is Verdurian, the language of Mark Rosenfelder's Verduria on the planet of Almea.
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.
s. 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.
). 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." The author Robert Dessaix
describes the origins of his personal language K: "I wanted words that described reality. So I made them up."
. Another language composed along the same lines is Papisa-samama which utilises just six consonants and two vowels, has just 12 sounds, making just a 120 word lexicon. It can be read in its own Chinese-like written form or in a pinyin
-like, romanised form. Unlike Toki Pona, it has a complex number system based on Roman Numerals. Both Toki Pona and Papisa-samama have a small root-word vocabulary and relies heavily on compound nouns, for instance, in Papisa-samama, enlightenment might be translated as patima-tasama-simi, that is, deep-thought-light.
, often as satire on some aspect of constructed languages.
Some typical jokelangs are:
designed for the purpose of exploring some theory of linguistics
. Most such languages are concerned with the relation between language and thought
; however, languages have been constructed to explore other aspects of language as well. In science fiction
, much work has been done on the assumption popularly known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
. Artlangs of this type overlap with engineered language
s.
Constructed language
A planned or constructed language—known colloquially as a conlang—is a language whose phonology, grammar, and/or vocabulary has been consciously devised by an individual or group, instead of having evolved naturally...
designed for aesthetic pleasure. Unlike engineered language
Engineered language
Engineered languages are constructed languages devised to test or prove some hypotheses about how languages work or might work. There are at least three subcategories, philosophical languages , logical languages , and experimental languages...
s or auxiliary languages, artistic languages usually have irregular grammar systems, much like natural language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
s. Many are designed within the context of fictional worlds, such as J. R. R. Tolkien
J. R. R. Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College,...
's Middle-earth
Middle-earth
Middle-earth is the fictional setting of the majority of author J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy writings. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings take place entirely in Middle-earth, as does much of The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales....
. 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 prominent 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.
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 language
Philosophical language
A philosophical language is any constructed language that is constructed from first principles, like a logical language, but may entail a strong claim of absolute perfection or transcendent or even mystical truth rather than satisfaction of pragmatic goals...
s, languages derived from some first principle.
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 cultureConstructed culture
A constructed culture or conculture is a fictional culture, created as part of a constructed world and usually associated with constructed languages. Countless constructed cultures exist, spanning many genres of fiction, as most world-constructors, unlike Tolkien, find it much easier to create a...
s.
There are two major categories of fictional languages.
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
Middle-earth
Middle-earth is the fictional setting of the majority of author J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy writings. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings take place entirely in Middle-earth, as does much of The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales....
and Star Trek
Star Trek
Star Trek is an American science fiction entertainment franchise created by Gene Roddenberry. The core of Star Trek is its six television series: The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise...
universes and the game Ico
Ico
is an action-adventure game published by Sony Computer Entertainment and released for the PlayStation 2 video game console. It was designed and directed by Fumito Ueda, who wanted to create a minimalist game around a "boy meets girl" concept. Originally planned for the PlayStation, Ico took...
.
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. An example is Verdurian, the language of Mark Rosenfelder's Verduria on the planet of Almea.
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 GreekGreek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
and not Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
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
Brithenig
Brithenig is an invented language, or constructed language . It was created as a hobby in 1996 by Andrew Smith from New Zealand, who also invented the alternate history of Ill Bethisad to "explain" it....
, which initiated the interest among Internet conlangers in devising such alternate-historical languages, like Wenedyk
Wenedyk
Wenedyk is a naturalistic constructed language, created by the Dutch translator Jan van Steenbergen . It is used in the fictional Republic of the Two Crowns , in the alternate timeline of Ill Bethisad...
. Brithenig attempts to determine what Romance languages would have evolved had Roman influence in Britain been sufficient to replace Celtic languages with Vulgar Latin
Vulgar Latin
Vulgar Latin is any of the nonstandard forms of Latin from which the Romance languages developed. Because of its nonstandard nature, it had no official orthography. All written works used Classical Latin, with very few exceptions...
, and bases its phonology on that of Welsh
Welsh language
Welsh is a member of the Brythonic branch of the Celtic languages spoken natively in Wales, by some along the Welsh border in England, and in Y Wladfa...
. An earlier instance is Philip José Farmer
Philip José Farmer
Philip José Farmer was an American author, principally known for his award-winning science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories....
's Winkie language, a relative of the Germanic languages
Germanic languages
The Germanic languages constitute a sub-branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic , which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...
spoken by the Winkies of Oz in A Barnstormer in Oz.
Micronational languages
Micronational languages are the languages created for use in micronationMicronation
Micronations, sometimes also referred to as model countries and new country projects, are entities that claim to be independent nations or states but which are not recognized by world governments or major international organizations...
s. 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
Talossan language
The Talossan language is a constructed language created by R. Ben Madison in 1980 for the micronation he founded, the Kingdom of Talossa....
, from R. Ben Madison's Kingdom of Talossa
Talossa
Talossa is the name of at least two micronations, the Kingdom of Talossa and the Republic of Talossa.The Kingdom was founded in 1979 by 14-year-old Robert Ben Madison of Milwaukee, and as such is one of the oldest micronations still in existence. It was one of the first to get a website , and...
, is by far the best-known example of a micronational language.
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 diariesDiary
A diary is a record with discrete entries arranged by date reporting on what has happened over the course of a day or other period. A personal diary may include a person's experiences, and/or thoughts or feelings, including comment on current events outside the writer's direct experience. Someone...
). 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." The author Robert Dessaix
Robert Dessaix
- Biography :Dessaix was born in Sydney and adopted at an early age. He was educated at North Sydney Boys High School. He studied in Moscow during the early 1970s, and taught Russian Studies at the Australian National University and the University of New South Wales from 1972 to 1984...
describes the origins of his personal language K: "I wanted words that described reality. So I made them up."
'Micro languages'
The aim of some languages is to express deep meaning with very few parts. For instance, Toki Pona is based on just 123 words and 14 'sounds.' The creator, Sonja Elen Kisa, says that the principles are built on TaoismTaoism
Taoism refers to a philosophical or religious tradition in which the basic concept is to establish harmony with the Tao , which is the mechanism of everything that exists...
. Another language composed along the same lines is Papisa-samama which utilises just six consonants and two vowels, has just 12 sounds, making just a 120 word lexicon. It can be read in its own Chinese-like written form or in a pinyin
Pinyin
Pinyin is the official system to transcribe Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet in China, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan. It is also often used to teach Mandarin Chinese and spell Chinese names in foreign publications and used as an input method to enter Chinese characters into...
-like, romanised form. Unlike Toki Pona, it has a complex number system based on Roman Numerals. Both Toki Pona and Papisa-samama have a small root-word vocabulary and relies heavily on compound nouns, for instance, in Papisa-samama, enlightenment might be translated as patima-tasama-simi, that is, deep-thought-light.
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 satireSatire
Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...
, often as satire on some aspect of constructed languages.
Some typical jokelangs are:
- EuropantoEuropantoEuropanto is a macaronic language concept with a fluid vocabulary from multiple European languages of the user's choice or need. It was conceived in 1996 by Diego Marani based on the common practice of word-borrowing usage of many EU Languages...
– constituting an unstructured mixture of any European language - TranspirantoTranspirantoIn recent years, several poems originally written in Esperanto have been rendered into Transpiranto by Martin Weichert, and have been published in the Swedish Esperanto journal La Espero, and via the internet....
– 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
- Gulevache – a fictional joke romance language created by the Argentinian comedy-musical group Les luthiersLes LuthiersLes Luthiers is an Argentine comedy-musical group, very popular also in several other Spanish-speaking countries such as Paraguay, Peru, Chile, Ecuador, Spain, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay, Bolivia, Cuba and Venezuela. They were formed in 1967 by Gerardo Masana, during the height of a period of very...
for its opera Cardoso en GulevandiaCardoso en GulevandiaCardoso en Gulevandia is the eighth album of Les Luthiers, released in October, 1991. The recording, like antriores disks in the group, took place in the ion studies of the city of Buenos Aires , in the month of October of 1991... - Unwinese – the nonsensical but structured alternative English, also known as gobbledeygook but named by its creator Basic Engly Twentyfimode, used by comedian Stanley UnwinStanley Unwin (comedian)Stanley Unwin , sometimes billed as Professor Stanley Unwin, was a British comedian and comic writer, and the inventor of his own language, "Unwinese", referred to in the film Carry On Regardless as "gobbledegook".Unwinese was a mangled form of English in which many of the...
- Inflationary Language – invented by Victor BorgeVictor BorgeVictor Borge ,born Børge Rosenbaum, was a Danish comedian, conductor and pianist, affectionately known as The Clown Prince of Denmark,The Unmelancholy Dane,and The Great Dane.-Early life and career:...
, incrementing numbers embedded in words, e.g., crenine ("create") and elevennis ("tennis")
Experimental languages
An experimental language is a constructed languageConstructed language
A planned or constructed language—known colloquially as a conlang—is a language whose phonology, grammar, and/or vocabulary has been consciously devised by an individual or group, instead of having evolved naturally...
designed for the purpose of exploring some theory of linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
. Most such languages are concerned with the relation between language and thought
Language and thought
A variety of different authors, theories and fields purport influences between language and thought.Many point out the seemingly common-sense realization that upon introspection we seem to think in the language we speak...
; however, languages have been constructed to explore other aspects of language as well. In science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
, much work has been done on the assumption popularly known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
The principle of linguistic relativity holds that the structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers are able to conceptualize their world, i.e. their world view...
. Artlangs of this type overlap with engineered language
Engineered language
Engineered languages are constructed languages devised to test or prove some hypotheses about how languages work or might work. There are at least three subcategories, philosophical languages , logical languages , and experimental languages...
s.
Examples of artistic languages
See list of constructed languages for a list.See also
- Asemic writingAsemic writingAsemic writing is a wordless open semantic form of writing. The word asemic means "having no specific semantic content". With the nonspecificity of asemic writing there comes a vacuum of meaning which is left for the reader to fill in and interpret. All of this is similar to the way one would...
- Constructed languageConstructed languageA planned or constructed language—known colloquially as a conlang—is a language whose phonology, grammar, and/or vocabulary has been consciously devised by an individual or group, instead of having evolved naturally...
- Engineered languageEngineered languageEngineered languages are constructed languages devised to test or prove some hypotheses about how languages work or might work. There are at least three subcategories, philosophical languages , logical languages , and experimental languages...
- IdioglossiaIdioglossiaAn idioglossia is an idiosyncratic language invented and spoken by only one person or very few people. Most often, idioglossia refers to the "private languages" of young children, especially twins, the latter being more specifically known as cryptophasia, and commonly referred to as twin talk or...
- International auxiliary languageInternational auxiliary languageAn international auxiliary language or interlanguage is a language meant for communication between people from different nations who do not share a common native language...
- Language gameLanguage gameA language game is a system of manipulating spoken words to render them incomprehensible to the untrained ear. Language games are used primarily by groups attempting to conceal their conversations from others...
External links
- The CONLANG Mailing List
- Zompist.com
- A Constructed Languages Library
- 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.
Wikis on or about constructed languages and artistic languages
- ConlangWiki – a wiki devoted to the topics of ConLangs and ConCultures.
- Conlang wiki at Wikia
- Unilang.org – a database of language- and linguistic-related information