Invented language. Fictional languages \u200b\u200bin cinema

You ask - why speak in invented languages, because no one understands them? That's just the point! Suppose you need to talk about something very important on the phone (or, more recently, already on Skype), and you definitely do not want to be overheard by competitors, and even more so - by special services. No, they will eavesdrop, but they will probably not understand a word. And all you need is that your partner on the other end of the line (on the other side of the monitor) also knows this language.
Plus, learning any new language is great brain training. And for this you do not need to go to language courses - patience and the Internet are enough

The utopian language of Thomas More
I hope you remember from the history lessons who Thomas More is? Professor, writer, lawyer, diplomat and politician who lived at the turn of the 15-16 centuries and did not like English society so much that he invented a prosperous country long before Marx-Engels-Lenin, and called it "Utopia", which means at the same time "the best place "And" missing place ". The voluminous work was published in 1516 and was written in Latin. However, Thomas More assumed that the fundamental in the new ideal society was a new language, not similar to anything the previous one.

Tolkien's Tengwar (Elvish) language
Well, just don’t tell me that you have never been thrilled with Liv Tyler fluent in Sindarin Tengwar. This is the language of Valarin, Telerin, Sindarin, and a bunch of other places, and even the Dark Language of Mordor. When you master the language perfectly, and you have in your hands “our beauty”, that is, the Ring of Omnipotence, do not rush to destroy it. Suddenly come in handy.

Kirt - Tolkien's dwarf language
And, if we started talking about Middle-earth, then we must not forget about the numerous people of dwarfs. The Kirtha alphabet (or Kertas Daeron) was successfully integrated by the population of Moria into their Khuzdul language, because ... well, you know, gnomes don't write - they carve words in stone. In principle, there is an assumption that Tolkien almost exactly "rolled" the kirt from the Celtic runes. So, at the same time learn the language that is still spoken in some places in Ireland.

Futurama's alien language
If you think that the incomprehensible icons that appear in many Futurama episodes are just a set of symbols that came to Matt Groeneng's head, then you are greatly mistaken. As, until recently, we were also mistaken. Cartoon aliens even have punctuation marks. This means that this language is the future :)

Klingon from Star Trek
How do you make a list of fictional languages \u200b\u200band not mention Klingon? This language has gained such popularity that there are a certain number of people in the world who speak it fluently. Moreover, Shakespeare is being translated into Klingon, and even the Bible. The only inconvenience with the Klingon is that, most likely, in the "cunning schools" of the entire Earth, just in case, is already taught.

Aurek-Besh - the language of the Jedi
Despite the fact that Aurek Besh first appeared only in Return of the Jedi, I can assume that the Jedi have spoken it for many centuries.

Krypton - the language of Superman
In Kryptonian (or Kryptonese), they say, not surprisingly, on Krypton, the homeworld of Clark Kent. Having decided to study this language, do not forget about the curse of Superman, and also think about the fact that ending your post on Facebook (Vkontakte, Twitter, etc.) with a double exclamation mark, you are actually writing the letter "a".

Stargate Language of the Ancients
If you believe the series SG-1, then it was in this language that the Ancients wrote and spoke - the people who created (including) the earthly civilization millions of years ago. Although, it should be noted that the appearance of this font, we actually owe an old Czech poster, on the basis of which the artist Boyd Godfrey created it for the pilot episode "Stargate Atlantis".

Dragon runes
The dragon language is considered the most ancient of all that existed on Earth. Dragons are generally taciturn creatures, but if they began to speak, then this language was expressed exclusively. People in the Middle Ages often used dragon as the universal language of magic. Now it is difficult to check exactly how it sounds. And all thanks to Saint George, who destroyed, they say, the last living dragon on the planet.

From the Klingon language of the universe Star trek to the Navi language from the movie Avatar James Cameron, fictional languages \u200b\u200bare able to give a work of art additional "realism" and "believability". Creating a fictional language is not an easy task. For example, J.R.R. Tolkien studied linguistics for a long time before creating novels from the cycle. Lord of the Ringsin which there are many languages \u200b\u200bhe invented. However, depending on the scale of the plan, even a beginner can create their own fictional language for fun or for a fictional world.

Steps

Using the alphabet

Come up with a name. All in your hands! Just let it look like the name of the language!

Start with pronunciation. You choose how your language will sound. But for this to be more than just an arbitrary set of sounds, you will have to work out the system on which they will be based.

Create an alphabet. This is where creative freedom begins. You can invent anything you want. There are several paths before you:

• Use pictographs or symbols. Many languages \u200b\u200blike Chinese use pictographs or symbols to represent spoken language. By choosing this option, you will have to come up with the pronunciation of each individual character. Each character will have its own unique sound. Numbers are a good example. This is a beautiful but time consuming way.
• Create an alphabet or syllabary. Latin, Cyrillic, Hindi, Greek, Japanese ... Create a symbol system that will represent individual letters or whole syllables, or even diphthongs.
• An existing alphabet can be used. For example, when using the Latin alphabet, you only need to come up with new words to denote concepts and objects, and not completely new phonetics.
• You can combine different alphabets. Add accents to existing letters (for example, the Spanish “ñ”) to create new letters or sounds.

1. Create a vocabulary base. These will be the words for your language. You should start with common words, and then move on to more rare ones.

   • Start with foundational and frequently used words. These will be pronouns, prepositions, etc. Then move on to verbs like to be, to have, to love, to walk, and to do. Don't forget about the vowels, they are very important for the sound of the language.
   • Move on to common words. As your vocabulary expands, come up with names for whatever comes to your mind. Don't forget about countries, body parts, activities, etc. Also remember the numbers!
   • If you have difficulties, you can always borrow words from other languages. You can also change existing words. For example, a man in French is homme. In Spanish - hombre - almost the same, only a few letters and pronunciation change.

2. Build your own vocabulary. Open the dictionary and start writing down words and translations. So you not only will not forget what and how it is translated, but you will not come up with an already existing word twice.

   • Try to come up with easily pronounceable words - there is no need to break the language on every word.

3. The words should look natural. A common misfortune of language creators is the abuse of apostrophes in words.

   Describe the rules for making proposals. Much can be borrowed from existing languages, but for originality you should add something of your own.

   Create plural nouns. The language needs to make a clear distinction between "book" and "books". Many languages \u200b\u200bsimply add the -s suffix for this. You can use not only suffixes, but also prefixes. You can even add a whole word! (examples: if book \u003d Skaru, then books can be Neskaru, Skarune, Skaneru, Skaru Ne or Ne Skaru, etc.)

   Think about the education of the times. This is necessary to indicate the time of the event. The three main tenses are past, present and future.

   • You can also emphasize the difference between words like "swim" and "swim". But this is optional. So, in French "Je nage" can mean "I am swimming" OR "I am swimming".

4. Create placeholders for suffixes. For example, in English, the -ly suffix turns adjectives into adverbs, and -ness turns different words into nouns.

   Decide on word conjugation. Conjugation is a change in words for an agent. So, we say "I love" and "he loves".

   Write sentences in a new language. Start with simple sentences like "I have a cat". Then move on to more difficult ones, such as "I love watching TV, but I prefer to go to the movies."

   Exercise. As with learning a foreign language, it takes practice to be fluent in your language.

   Check the reactions of other people. You will love their surprised expressions. In their eyes, you will look eccentric at best, but that shouldn't bother you!

   If you want, teach other people a new language. If you want to speak your language with friends, then they should be taught. You can even try to maximize the distribution of the language you invented.

   Write the rules down in a dictionary or phrasebook. So you will definitely not forget anything over time. You can even sell them!

   • If you want your language to become famous, then you need to compile a sufficient number of dictionaries, as well as an alphabet to study and provide them to everyone.

   Using grammar

   1. Come up with a name. This is the basic property of all languages. You can choose from many names, or even use an invented word from your own language with a meaning like "victory" or "great language." The choice is yours.

      • Start with frequently used words: pronouns, prepositions, numerals. It is recommended that such words be concise. For example, "ant", "es" or even "loo" for the word "and".

   2. Develop grammar rules. For example, if "bird" is "Vogelaviatiolap" then the plural could be "Vogelaviatiolaps", as most languages \u200b\u200buse the "s" suffix for this. To complicate the language, you can add a gender category, as in most European languages. For example, to distinguish between "horse" and "horse", the masculine gender can be designated as "Mat Fereder", and for the "cat" the feminine gender can be designated as "Fet Kamaow".

      Your language can be based on an existing one. For example, in my made-up language, the word "Vogelaviatiolap" means a bird. Here's how it happened:

      • "Vogel" means bird in German
      • "aviatio" is part of the English word "aviation"
      • "lap" is an onomatopoeia or onomatopoeia meaning "bang!"

   3. Other words may be based on what you have already invented. For example, if "China" in your language is "Khinssa", "drink" is "Bever", and "incident" is "Casnondelibreaten", then why shouldn't the word "tea" look like "Khincasnonbever", "Bevernondelibreatekin" or even "Khinssacasnondelibreatenibever"!

      Take inspiration from existing words and alphabets.

      • Why not add non-Latin characters like ß? Even your entire language can use a completely different alphabet!
      • You can borrow words from other languages, change them or not. So, the word "pen" can be "pen" or just "pen". Use dictionaries to avoid missing words.

   4. Write down everything you come up with so you don't forget anything important!

   5. Speak your language. Use it yourself and teach others. When you start to speak it confidently, then you can move on to the next:

      • Translate your favorite book into your language.
      • Teach your friends a new language.
      • When your friends begin to understand you, speak this language.
      • When you are fluent in it, start chatting in it with friends, family and strangers!
      • Write your own poem / novel / story using fictional language.
      • If you are ambitious, then you can set yourself the task of teaching others fluency in your language. Who knows, maybe one day it will become the official language of your country!
   • Use fictional language often so you don't forget it!
   • Don't forget about punctuation!
   • To improve the language, you can add certain shades of meaning to some letters. To do this, come up with different words that begin with a specific letter. For example: agony, greed, unity, naturalness; in this case A carries a negative value, while E - positive. Even if you cannot remember the meaning of a word without a dictionary, you will almost certainly guess from the letter composition.
   • It is important that when speaking in your language, the language itself does not become entangled in a knot!
   • Don't forget about writing. So, we write from left to right, in Arabic they write from right to left, in Chinese in a column, and so on.
   • Make sure you and your friends systematically use fictional language. In other words, you must follow the same rules.
   • Don't use random letters. Everything should be present certain meaning to make the language easier to learn and speak it.
   • Don't forget to practice pronunciation and spelling of many of the basic words of your language: be, who, when, where, why, if, what, where, can, etc.
   • When getting to work, follow the rules of the other language you like. It's easier to write grammar this way. But you do not need to blindly copy an existing one so as not to turn your future language into regular code.
   • Try not to make the words in your language sound like complete nonsense or nonsense. You do not need to suffer yourself and torment others. Put risks over letters, come up with something meaningful. It can take a long time!
   • To create writing, letters can be assigned the meanings of individual objects (pictography).
   • Try to get your friends interested. It's much more fun when other people understand your language.
   • You can correspond with friends in a fictitious language via e-mail and SMS.
   • When developing writing, you need to take breaks every five minutes, otherwise all the letters will start to seem the same to you.
   • If you go to create other languages, then you can use this language as a template by changing some letters and sounds. So the first language you invented will turn into a proto-language - a whole language family can develop from it.

Professor Tolkien knew a lot about non-existent universes. "It's easy to invent a green sun," he said, "it's harder to create a world in which it would be natural." For him, a philologist, a specialist in Old Germanic and Old English literature, the main element of such naturalness was, of course, the languages \u200b\u200bof peoples and creatures living in the fictional world. It was the construction of artificial languages \u200b\u200bthat was the real passion of the ancestor of fantasy, and during his long life Tolkien invented several dozen of them. He saw the heroes and events described in his famous books simply as a background on which languages \u200b\u200bexist and develop. “Rather,“ stories ”were composed in order to create a world for languages, rather than the other way around,” the writer explained. - In my case, first comes the name, and then the story. I would rather write in Elvish. " A great variety of fictional languages, "artlangs", have been invented in literature and cinema. Some were created by professional linguists, but few can boast of such scrupulous elaboration as Tolkien's. The professor worked out in great detail grammar and writing, and most importantly - history: unlike most other artificial languages, we know about Tolkien's how they changed over time.

Our expert is Alexander Piperski, Ph.D. in Philology, Associate Professor of the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian State University for the Humanities, author of the book "Construction of Languages: from Esperanto to Dothraki", which is being prepared for publication by the publishing house Alpina Non-Fiction.

Sindarin

John Tolkien, "The Lord of the Rings"

Slender linguistic diversity is perhaps the main secret of the amazing authenticity of the world described by Tolkien. The author invented no less than fifteen elvish languages \u200b\u200balone, and after his death, an almost finished sketch of the book "Lammas" was published, stylized as the learned work of a linguist from Middle-earth. The fictional author, speaking about the dialects of his fictional world, attributes their origin to the Valarin, the language of local deities, and divides them into three large families. Oromean includes Avarin, Quenya, Telerin, Sindarin, and other Elven languages, as well as Rohan and most human languages \u200b\u200bin general. Khuzdul and other languages \u200b\u200bof the gnomes are attributed to the Aulean family, the "black dialect" of orcs and other evil creatures to the Melkian family. The most famous of Tolkien's languages \u200b\u200bwere the Elvish Sindarin and Quenya, which reflected his fondness for the languages \u200b\u200bof northern Europe. Morphology - the structure of words - for Quenya was borrowed from Finnish. The phonology of Sindarin - the structure of the sound system - inherits Welsh. Alexander Piperski: - Tolkien borrowed a lot from natural languages. Thus, the proto-elven plural ending -ī disappeared during the development of the Sindarin, causing an alternation of vowels at the base of the word: brannon ("lord") and brennyn ("lords"), urug ("orcs") and yryg ("orcs"). This is how the irregular forms of the English plural arose: man ("man") and men ("men") - comes from the Germanic * mann- and * manni-. Foot ("leg") and feet ("feet") - from * fōt- and * fōti-. This alternation is even more common in Welsh.

Dothraki

George Martin and David Peterson, Game of Thrones

The fantasy world of the A Song of Ice and Fire novels is almost as detailed as Tolkien's. Languages \u200b\u200bare also mentioned in them, and for effect, the characters pronounce a few words either in the rough language of the Dothraki horsemen, or in “high” or “low” Valyrian, reminiscent of the classical and folk versions of Latin or Arabic. But when it came to filming Game of Thrones, HBO turned to the Society for the Creation of Languages, and a young linguist David Peterson won the competition to develop Valyrian and Dothraki.

Peterson did not have much source material: there are no more than thirty Dothraki words in Martin's books, and a noticeable part of them are proper names. This gave the linguist a lot of imagination. And he began with the very word "Dothraki" (dothraki), elevating it to the verb dothralat, "to ride." Already from him is formed the word dothrak, "rider", the plural of which is dothraki. Alexander Piperski: - The grammar of the Dothraki language turned out to be quite simple, although not without refined features. For example, nouns are divided into two large classes: animate and inanimate, and the information about animate is unpredictable. In general, large and active living things and phenomena, as well as active parts of the body, will be animate, and the rest of the concepts will be inanimate, but there are many exceptions. As in Russian, the declension of nouns depends on animation. Thus, in Dothraki, inanimate nouns do not change in numbers, but animate ones do. The inanimate word yetto can be translated as "frog" or "frogs", but shiro is only "scorpion" because it has a separate plural form - shirosi, "scorpions."

Newspeak

George Orwell, 1984

The language of the fictional totalitarian state of Oceania is heavily modified and "coarse" English, emphasizing the heavy atmosphere of dystopia. In Newspeak, an extremely meager set of adjectives remained, which generally happens with natural languages. For example, in Igbo, which is spoken by about 20 million people in Nigeria, there are only eight adjectives: big, small, old, new, dark, light, good and bad. By the way, in Newspeak such a combination is impossible. Many antonymous pairs in it are formed using the negative prefix un- ("not"). The writer gives examples of the words good ("good") and ungood ("bad", "bad"). In addition, Newspeak borrowed from the language of the Soviet era a love of abbreviations and complex words. We, who confidently use words like "foreman" (work manager) or "head teacher" (head of the educational department), this love is easy to understand. Alexander Piperski: - The main feature of Orwellian Newspeak is, of course, vocabulary. It consists of three layers, dictionaries A, B and C. Dictionary A includes the most common, everyday words, the number of which is minimized. Glossary C contains specific technical terms. The most interesting thing is dictionary B. It contains complex words specially designed for political needs: for example, goodthink and its derivatives. Dictionary B is difficult to translate into ordinary language - "Oldspeak". For example, the phrase Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc ("Old thinkers do not get inside the Ingsoc") means "Those whose ideas were formed before the Revolution, do not fully perceive the principles of English socialism."

Klingon

Gene Roddenberry and Mark Okrand, Star Trek

David Peterson's direct predecessor is Mark Okrand, creator of the Vulcan and Klingon languages \u200b\u200bfor Star Trek. It is worth saying that the humanoid, but extremely warlike inhabitants of the planet Klingon received a very suitable language: at the same time similar to the earthly and unusually frightening. It is one of the most sophisticated artificial languages, supported by Microsoft's Bing translation system, and the enthusiastic Klingon Language Institute publishes classical literature translated into this artlang. However, Mark Okrand, in the preface to the authoritative "Klingon Dictionary," writes that the Klingons themselves, although proud of their language, prefer English to communicate with outsiders. Alexander Piperski: - The Klingon language is especially famous for its phonetics. There are two dozen consonants in it, and it seems that this is not much - but among them there are very rare sounds, for example tlh (voiceless, “tl” pronounced together) and Q (pronounced “kh” very deep in the mouth). But even more unusual for terrestrial languages \u200b\u200bis the word order in Klingon sentences: complement - predicate - subject. For example, the phrase “puq legh yaS” translates as “the officer sees the child”, and “yaS legh puq” means “the child sees the officer”. Of all the possible orders of subject, predicate, and object, this one is the second most rare. In the "World Atlas of Language Structures" it is represented only in 11 languages \u200b\u200bout of 1377 included in the sample, and seven of them are common in South America.

Na'vi

James Cameron and Paul Frommer, Avatar

Linguist Paul Frommer was recruited to work on Avatar before the script was completed. So the blue-skinned three-meter humanoids of the planet Pandora, who appeared on the screens four years later, already spoke their own language with might and main, numbering about a thousand words. Unlike Russian, the Na'vi language has an agglutinative structure: our ending in the word "wide" already contains information about gender and number, and in Na'vi (as well as Tatar, Japanese and other agglutinative languages), each detail will need to be used separate element (formant), as if to say "wide - one - she".

But the order of words in sentences in Na'vi is familiar to us: subject, predicate, object. The system of numbers invented for this language is very unusual. In addition to the singular and plural - as in Russian - and also the dual - as in Old Russian, there is also a triple number, as in some languages \u200b\u200bof Oceania. Nantang ("serpentine") turns into menantang ("two serpentines"), pxenantang ("three serpentines") and only then into aynantang ("many serpentines").

Alexander Piperski: - The Na'vi language uses a three-part sentence construction: the subject (subject) of a transitive verb is denoted in one way, the object (object) in another, and the subject of an intransitive verb in a third. For example, the sentence Nantang-ìl frìp tute-t ("The snake-wolf bites a man"): here the subject of the transitive verb ("serpentine") has the exponent -ìl, and the object of the transitive verb ("person") adds the exponent -t. In the sentence Nantang-Ø hahaw - "The snakewolf is sleeping" - the subject of the intransitive verb is marked with a zero ending -Ø. In Russian, the subject of a transitive and intransitive verb is denoted in the same way, and "serpentine" in both Russian sentences has the same form. Languages \u200b\u200bwith a three-part construction are rare, but exist: this is how, for example, the North American Indian language of non-Persian works.

The language, created by Canadian Sonya Lang, claims to be the simplest of artificial languages. There are only about 120 roots in his lexicon.

Constructed languages \u200b\u200bare languages \u200b\u200bin which vocabulary, phonetics, and grammar have been developed for specific purposes. These are fake languages \u200b\u200binvented by one person. Today there are more than a thousand of them, and new ones are constantly being created. The reasons for creating an artificial language are: facilitating human communication, giving realism to fiction and fictional worlds in cinema, linguistic experiments, language games, the development of the Internet and the creation of languages \u200b\u200bthat are understandable to all peoples of the planet.

1. Grammelot. The style of language used in the theater of humor and satire. It's kind of gibberish with onomatopoeic elements along with pantomime and mimicry. Grammelot was popularized by the Italian playwright Dario Fo.
2. Esperanto. The most widespread artificial language in the world. Today over 100,000 people speak it fluently. It was invented by the Czech optometrist Lazar Zamenhof in 1887. Esperanto has a simple grammar. Its alphabet has 28 letters and is based on Latin. Most of the vocabulary is taken from Romance and Germanic languages. Esperanto also has many international words that are understandable without translation. There are 250 newspapers and magazines in Esperanto, 4 radio stations broadcast, there are articles in Wikipedia.
3. Vendergood. It was developed by teenage prodigy William James Sideis based on the Romance languages. Saidis knew about 40 languages \u200b\u200band was fluent in translating from one to another. Saidis created Vendergood in a book entitled The Book of Vendergood, which he wrote at the age of 8. The language is built on Latin and Greek vocabulary and grammar, as well as elements of German, French and other Romance languages.
4. Auy. Created by John Waelgart. It is based on the philosophical concept of the formation of all concepts from a small number of elementary concepts, and the elementary concept of language. Its very name translates as "the language of the cosmos." Each sound in aui is associated with the concept it denotes. All vocabulary is built by combining basic concepts.
5. Nadsat. The fictional language spoken by teenagers in Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange. In the nadsat, part of the vocabulary is English, part is fictional, created by the author based on the Russian language. Most often, Russian equivalents are written in Latin and have some distortion. The grammar system is based on English. In addition, there are French and German slang, Malay and Gypsy, Cockney, and words invented by Burgess himself.
6. Litspeak. It is used in online games, chats, SMS and other electronic communication channels. The language was created as a cipher that could be read by users who know the key to it. In litspik, numbers and symbols replace letters. Also, intentional mistakes are made in it, there are phonetic variations of words and neologisms.
7. Talossan. An artificial language created in 1980 by the 14-year-old founder of the virtual Talossa micro-state, Robert Ben-Madison. Talossan is built on the basis of the languages \u200b\u200bof the Romance group.
8. Klingon. Linguist Mark Okrand invented Klingon for the Paramount Pictures Company for the TV series, and then for the films of the Star Trek cinematic universe. Aliens speak it. In addition to them, the language was adopted by numerous fans of the series. Currently, there is the Klingon Language Institute in the United States, which publishes periodicals and translations of literary classics in the Klingon.
9. Toki Pona. The language, created by Canadian Sonya Lang, claims to be the simplest of artificial languages. There are only about 120 roots in his lexicon. The names of animals and plants are missing. But in the unofficial dictionary there are designations for countries, nations, languages \u200b\u200bthat are written with a capital letter. Everything is simplified in Toki Pona: vocabulary, phonology, grammar and syntax.
10. Na'vi. This fictional language was developed by linguist Paul Frommer for the movie Avatar by James Cameron Production. According to the scenario, the native speakers of the Na'vi language are the inhabitants of the planet Pandora. Today, there are over 1000 words in his dictionary. Work on the Na'vi language continues. By the way, in its grammatical and lexical structure, Na'vi resembles the Papuan and Australian languages.

Artificial languages - specialized languages \u200b\u200bin which vocabulary, phonetics and grammar have been specially designed to fulfill specific purposes. Exactly purposefulness distinguishes artificial languages \u200b\u200bfrom natural ones. Sometimes these languages \u200b\u200bare called fake, invented languages \u200b\u200b(eng. invented language, see an example of use in the article). There are more than a thousand such languages, and new ones are constantly being created.

Nikolai Lobachevsky gave a remarkably bright assessment artificial languages: “To what have science, the glory of the present times, the triumph of the human mind been lent by their brilliant successes? Without a doubt, his artificial language! "

The reasons for creating an artificial language are: facilitating human communication (international auxiliary languages, codes), giving additional realism to fiction, linguistic experiments, ensuring communication in the fictional world, language games.

Expression "Artificial language" sometimes used to refer to planned languages and other languages \u200b\u200bdesigned to communicate with people. Sometimes they prefer to call such languages \u200b\u200bprecisely "planned", since the word "artificial" has a dismissive connotation in some languages.

Outside the Esperanto community, "planned language" means a set of rules related to a natural language with the aim of unifying (standardizing) it. In this sense, even natural languages \u200b\u200bcan be artificial in some respects. The prescriptive grammars described in ancient times for classical languages \u200b\u200bsuch as Latin and Sanskrit are based on the rules for the codification of natural languages. Such sets of rules are somewhere between the natural development of a language and its construction through formal description. The term "glossopoeia" refers to the construction of languages \u200b\u200bfor some artistic purpose, and also refers to the languages \u200b\u200bthemselves.

Overview

The idea of \u200b\u200bcreating a new language of international communication was born in the 17th-18th centuries as a result of the gradual decrease in the role of Latin in the world. Initially, these were mainly projects of a rational language, independent of the logical errors of living languages, and based on the logical classification of concepts. Later, projects appeared based on the model and materials of living languages. The first such project was the universalglot, published by Jean Pirrot in 1868 in Paris. Pirro's project, which anticipated many of the details of later projects, went unnoticed by the public.

The next project of the international language was Volapuk, created in 1880 by the German linguist I. Schleier. He caused a very large resonance in society.

The most famous artificial language was Esperanto (Ludwik Zamenhof, 1887) - the only artificial language that became widespread and united around itself quite a few supporters of the international language.

The most famous artificial languages \u200b\u200bare:

• basic english
• esperanto
• Macaton
• volapuk
• interlingua
• latin blue flexione
• lingua de planet
• loglan
• lojban
• na'vi
• novial
• occidental
• solresol
• ifkuil
• klingon language
• elvish languages

The number of speakers of artificial languages \u200b\u200bcan be called only approximately, since there is no systematic registration of speakers. According to the Ethnologist reference book, there are “200-2000 people who speak Esperanto since birth”.

As soon as an artificial language has native speakers who are fluent in the language, especially if there are many such speakers, the language begins to develop and, therefore, loses its status as an artificial language. For example, modern Hebrew was based on biblical Hebrew, rather than created from scratch, and has undergone significant changes since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. However, linguist Gilad Zuckerman claims that modern Hebrew, which he calls "Israeli", is a Semitic-European hybrid and is based not only on Hebrew, but also on Yiddish and other languages \u200b\u200bspoken by followers of the religious movement. revival. Therefore, Zuckerman approves of translating the Hebrew Bible into what he calls "Israeli." Esperanto as a modern spoken language differs significantly from the original version published in 1887, so that modern editions Fundamenta Krestomatio The 1903 years require many references to syntactic and lexical differences between early and modern Esperanto.

Proponents of artificial languages \u200b\u200bhave many reasons for using them. The famous but controversial Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that the structure of language influences the way of thinking. Thus, a "better" language should allow the person who speaks it to think clearer and smarter; this hypothesis was tested by Suzet Hayden Elgin when she created the feminist language Laadan, which appeared in her novel Native Tongue... Constructed language can also be used to constrain thoughts, like Newspeak in George Orwell's novel, or to simplify, like Toki Pona. In contrast, some linguists, such as Stephen Pinker, argue that the language we speak is "instinct." Thus, every generation of children invents slang and even grammar. If this is true, then it will not be possible to control the range of human thought through the transformation of language, and concepts such as "freedom" will appear in the form of new words when the old ones disappear.

Proponents of artificial languages \u200b\u200balso believe that a particular language is easier to express and understand concepts in one area, but more difficult in other areas. For example, various computer languages \u200b\u200bmake it easier to write only certain kinds of programs.

Another reason for using artificial language is the telescope rule, which says it takes less time to learn a simple artificial language first and then a natural language than to learn only a natural language. For example, if someone wants to learn English, then they can start by learning Basic English. Constructed languages \u200b\u200bsuch as Esperanto and Interlingua are easier due to the lack of irregular verbs and some grammatical rules. Numerous studies have shown that children who first learned Yak Esperanto, and then some other language, achieved a better level of language proficiency than those who had not previously learned Esperanto.

The ISO 639-2 standard contains the "art" code for artificial languages. However, some artificial languages \u200b\u200bhave their own ISO 639 codes (for example, “eo” and “epo” for Esperanto, “jbo” for Lojban, “ia” and “ina” for Interlingua, “tlh” for Klingon, and “io” and "Ido" for Ido).

Classification

There are the following types of artificial languages:

• Programming languages \u200b\u200band computer languages \u200b\u200b- languages \u200b\u200bfor automatic processing of information using a computer.
• Information languages \u200b\u200bare languages \u200b\u200bused in various information processing systems.
• Formalized languages \u200b\u200bof science - languages \u200b\u200bintended for the symbolic recording of scientific facts and theories of mathematics, logic, chemistry and other sciences.
• International auxiliary languages \u200b\u200b(planned) - languages \u200b\u200bcreated from elements of natural languages \u200b\u200band offered as an auxiliary means of interethnic communication.
• Languages \u200b\u200bof non-existent peoples created for fictional or recreational purposes, for example: Elvish language invented by J. Tolkien, Klingon language invented by Mark Okrand for a fantasy series "Star Trek", a Na'vi language created for the movie "Avatar".
• There are also languages \u200b\u200bthat have been specifically designed to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligence. For example, linkos.

According to the purpose of creation, artificial languages \u200b\u200bcan be divided into the following groups:

• Philosophicaland logical languages - languages \u200b\u200bthat have a clear logical structure of word formation and syntax: Lojban, Tokipona, Ifkuil, Ilaksh.
• Auxiliary languages- designed for practical communication: Esperanto, Interlingua, Slovio, Slavonic.
• Artisticor aesthetic languages - created for creative and aesthetic pleasure: Quenya.
• Languages \u200b\u200bfor setting up an experiment, for example, to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that the language spoken by a person limits consciousness, drives it into a certain framework).

By their structure, artificial language projects can be divided into the following groups:

• A priori languages- on the basis of logical or empirical classifications of concepts: loglan, Lojban, ro, solresol, ifkuil, ilaksh.
• A posteriori languages- languages \u200b\u200bbuilt mainly on the basis of international vocabulary: interlingua, occidental
• Mixed languages- words and word formation are partly borrowed from non-artificial languages, partly created on the basis of artificially invented words and word-building elements: volapyuk, ido, esperanto, neo.

According to the degree of practical use, artificial languages \u200b\u200bare divided into the following projects:

• Languages \u200b\u200bthat have become widespread: Ido, Interlingua, Esperanto. Such languages, like national languages, are called "socialized"; among artificial languages \u200b\u200bthey are united under the term planned languages.
• Artificial language projects that have a number of supporters, for example, Loglan (and its descendant Lojban), Slovio and others.
• Languages \u200b\u200bthat have a single native speaker - the author of the language (for this reason, it is more correct to call them "linguistic projects" rather than languages).

Ancient linguistic experiments

The first mentions of an artificial language in the period of antiquity appeared, for example, in Plato's "Cratilus" in the assertion of Hermogenes that words are not inherently connected with what they refer to; what people use " part of my own voice ... to the subject". Athenaeus of Navcratis in the third book of Deipnosophistae tells the story of two people: Dionysius of Sicily and Alexarch. Dionysius of Sicily created such neologisms as menandros "Virgin" (from menei "Waiting" and andra "husband"), menekratēs "Pillar" (from menei, "Stays in one place" and kratei, "Strong"), and ballantion "Spear" (from balletai enantion"Thrown against someone"). By the way, the usual Greek words for these three are parthenos, stulos and akon... Alexarchus of Macedon (brother of King Kassandra) was the founder of the city of Ouranoupoli. Afinit recalls a story where Aleksarchus “offered a strange vocabulary, calling the rooster“ the cry of the dawn ”, the barber“ the mortal razor ”... and the herald aputēs [from ēputa, "Loud"] ". While the grammar mechanisms proposed by classical philosophers were designed to explain existing languages \u200b\u200b(Latin, Greek, Sanskrit), they were not used to create a new grammar. Panini, presumably living at the same time as Plato, in his descriptive Sanskrit grammar created a set of rules for explaining language, so his text can be considered a mixture of natural and artificial language.

Early artificial languages

The earliest artificial languages \u200b\u200bwere considered "supernatural", mystical, or divinely inspired. The Lingua Ignota language, recorded in the 12th century by St. Hildegard of Bingen, became the first completely artificial language. This language is one of the forms of a private mystical language. An example from Middle Eastern culture is the Baleibelen language, invented in the 16th century.

Improving the language

Johannes Trithemius in Steganography tried to show how all languages \u200b\u200bcan be reduced to one. In the 17th century, interest in magical languages \u200b\u200bwas continued by the Rosicrucian Order and alchemists (like John Dee and his Enochian language). Jacob Boehme in 1623 spoke of the "natural language" (Natursprache) of the senses.

The musical languages \u200b\u200bof the Renaissance were associated with mysticism, magic and alchemy and were sometimes also called the language of birds. The Solresol project of 1817 used the concept of "musical languages" in a more pragmatic context: the words of this language are based on the names of seven musical notes used in various combinations.

XVII and XVIII centuries: the emergence of universal languages

In the 17th century, there appeared such "universal" or "a priori" languages \u200b\u200bas:

• A Common Writing(1647) Francis Lodwick;
• Ekskybalauron(1651) and Logopandecteision (1652) Thomas Urquhart;
• Ars signorumGeorge Dalgarno, 1661;
• Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical LanguageJohn Wilkins, 1668;

These early taxonomic artificial languages \u200b\u200bwere devoted to creating a hierarchical language classification system. Leibniz used a similar idea for his Generalis language in 1678. The authors of these languages \u200b\u200bwere not only busy with the reduction or modeling of grammar, but also with the compilation of a hierarchical system of human knowledge, which subsequently led to the French Encyclopedia. Many of the artificial languages \u200b\u200bof the 17th and 18th centuries were pazigraphic or purely written languages \u200b\u200bthat did not have an oral form.

Leibniz and the compilers of the Encyclopedia realized that it was impossible to definitely put all human knowledge in the "Procrustean bed" of the tree diagram, and, therefore, to build an a priori language based on such a classification of concepts. D'Alembert criticized the projects of universal languages \u200b\u200bof the previous century. Individual authors, usually ignorant of the history of the idea, continued to propose taxonomic universal languages \u200b\u200buntil the early twentieth century (for example, the Po language), but most recent languages \u200b\u200bhave been limited to a specific field, such as mathematical formalism or computation (for example, Lincos and languages programming), others were designed to eliminate syntactic ambiguity (e.g. Loglan and Lojban).

XIX and XX centuries: auxiliary languages

Interest in a posteriori auxiliary languages \u200b\u200barose with the creation of the French Encyclopedia. During the 19th century, a large number of international auxiliary languages \u200b\u200bemerged; Louis Couture and Leopold Law considered 38 projects in his work Histoire de la langue universelle (1903).

The first international language was Volapuk, created by Johann Martin Schleier in 1879. However, disagreements between Schleier and some famous users of the language led to a decline in Volapuk's popularity in the mid-1890s, and this gave rise to the development of Esperanto, created in 1887 by Ludwik Zamenhof. The interlingua language appeared in 1951 when the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA) published its Interlingua English Dictionary and Companion Grammar. The success of Esperanto did not prevent the emergence of new auxiliary languages, such as Leslie Jones' Eurolengo, which contains elements of English and Spanish.

Robot Interaction Language (ROILA) 2010 is the first language for communication between humans and robots. The main ideas of the ROILA language are that it should be easy to learn by humans and efficiently recognized by computer speech recognition algorithms.

Artistic languages

Artistic languages, created for aesthetic pleasure, begin to appear in early modern literature (in Gargantua and Pantagruel, in utopian motives), but only become known as serious projects at the beginning of the 20th century. The Princess of Mars by Edgar Burroughs was perhaps the first science fiction novel to use artificial language. John Tolkien was the first scholar to debate artistic languages \u200b\u200bin public, giving a lecture entitled "A Secret Vice" at a 1931 convention.

By the beginning of the first decade of the 21st century, artistic languages \u200b\u200bhad become quite common in science fiction and fantasy works, in which an extremely limited but definite vocabulary is often used, indicating the existence of a full-fledged artificial language. Artistic languages \u200b\u200bappear, for example, in Star Wars, Star Trek, The Lord of the Rings (Elvish), Stargate, Atlantis: The Lost World, Game of Thrones (Dothraki and Valyrian), Avatar, and the computer adventure games Dune and Myst.

Modern communities of artificial languages

From the 1970s to the 1990s, various magazines on artificial languages \u200b\u200bwere published, for example: Glossopoeic Quarterly, Taboo jadoo and The Journal of Planned Languages... The Conlang mailing list was founded in 1991, later the AUXLANG mailing list dedicated to international auxiliary languages \u200b\u200bspun off. In the first half of the 1990s, several artificial language magazines were published in the form of emails, several magazines were published on websites, we are talking about such magazines as: Vortpunoj and Model Languages (Model Languages). Sarah Higley's poll results show that men on the artificial languages \u200b\u200bmailing list are primarily men from North America and Western Europe, fewer are from Oceania, Asia, the Middle East and South America, and participants range in age from thirteen to sixty; the number of women participating has increased over time. Most recently established communities include the zompist bulletin board (ZBB; from 2001) and the Conlanger Bulletin Board... On the forums, communication takes place between participants, discussion of natural languages, participants decide whether certain artificial languages \u200b\u200bhave the functions of a natural language, and what interesting functions of natural languages \u200b\u200bcan be used in relation to artificial languages, short texts that are interesting from the point of view of translation are posted on these forums, as well as discussions about the philosophy of artificial languages \u200b\u200band the goals of the members of these communities. ZBB data showed that a large number of participants spend relatively little time on one artificial language and move from one project to another, spending about four months learning one language.

Joint artificial languages

The Talos language, the cultural basis for the virtual state known as Talossa, was created in 1979. However, as interest in the Talos language grew, the development of guidelines and regulations for the language since 1983 has been undertaken by the Committee on the Use of the Talos Language, as well as other independent enthusiastic organizations. The Villnian language is based on Latin, Greek and Scandinavian languages. Its syntax and grammar are reminiscent of Chinese. The basic elements of this artificial language were created by one author, and its vocabulary was expanded by members of the Internet community.

Most artificial languages \u200b\u200bare created by one person, like the Talos language. But there are languages \u200b\u200bthat are created by a group of people, such as Interlingua, developed by the International Auxiliary Language Association, and Lojban, created by the Logical Language Group.

Collaborative artificial language development has become prevalent in recent years as artificial language designers began using Internet-based tools to coordinate design developments. NGL / Tokcir was one of the first internet collaborative designed languages \u200b\u200bwhose developers used a mailing list to discuss and vote on grammatical and lexical design issues. Later, The Demos IAL Project developed an International Auxiliary Language with similar collaborative methods. The languages \u200b\u200bVoksigid and Novial 98 were developed using mailing lists, but none of them has been published in final form.

Several artistic languages \u200b\u200bhave been developed on various language wikis, usually with discussion and voting on phonology and grammar rules. An interesting language design option is the corpus approach, such as Kalusa (mid 2006), where participants simply read the corpus of existing sentences and add their own, perhaps supporting existing trends or adding new words and constructs. The Kalusa engine provides an opportunity for visitors to rate proposals as acceptable or unacceptable. In the corpus approach, there are no explicit grammatical rules or explicit word definitions; the meaning of words is inferred from their use in different sentences in the corpus by different readers and participants, and grammatical rules can be inferred from the sentence structures that were most highly rated by participants and other visitors.