Over the last couple of weeks, we've
talked about many topics related to
linguistics. We've talked about language
history, syntax, morphology, and in this
video, we're going to talk about one of
the nerdiest topics in our class:
artificial languages. You might have
heard an artificial language before if
you've watched the Lord of the Rings
movies, you might have noticed that some
of the characters in the movies have a
language of their own. For example the
elves speak their own elphic language.
There's another language that is the one
used for the inscription of the one true
ring, and as you can see here, the
inscription says ash nazg durbatuluk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatuluk
ash burzum-ishi krimpatul. One ring
to rule them all, and so forth. So this is
not a language that can be found in the
world. This is the language that the
author of the Lord of the Rings made
intentionally. And interestingly what
happened first was the language. Tolkien
made the languages out of an artistic
pursuit, and then had to design a world
for these languages and that world and
it ended up being Lord of the Rings. He
invented these languages as a hobby and
for example some of them like Elvish
sound like Finnish, and he - Tolkien said
that when he found out what Finnish
sounded like, he said "it was like
discovering a wine cellar filled with
bottles of amazing wine. It quite
intoxicated me." He developed his - his
hobby, what he called a secret vice, and
when he finally presented the languages
in the 30s, he said that it was
embarrassing. There was "nothing less
embarrassing than the unveiling in
public of a secret vice." He did it
because he thought it was an expr -
artistic expression, same as some people
paint, some people sculpt. Tolkien liked
created - create - creating languages that
sounded awesome and beautiful to him, and
there are many reasons why people invent
languages. Some of them do it to
push the possibilities of human
expression, to try to thi - to try to
create, I'm sorry, to try to explore
what's universal across languages.
There's one called Lojban, for example,
which is based on - it looks a little bit
like computer functions, and then you
merge them all together into messages of
the language. There's artificial languages that are
invented for philosophical reasons, maybe
the authors were want to pursue pacifism
or feminism, and make those ideals, put
those ideals into the language. For
example, Esperanto was invented by an
optometrist
called Ludwig Zamenhof in the 1880s
in a town of Poland that was divided
between Poland and Ukraine and the
Russian Empire. And so he saw languages
and multilingualism as a problem, and he
thought that if everyone spoke a very
simple language called Esperanto,
everyone would have peace. Whether this
is true or not, many people believed this
idea so much so that 30 years later,
there were meetings of Esperanto
speakers across Europe with thousands of
members. And it's an artificial language
that eventually gained a life of its own.
People have met in Esperanto clubs and
then they have children and those
children speak Esperanto as if they were
a natural language so they are first
language speakers of Esperanto whose
parents spoke to them in Esperanto and
they were babies. And I know someone like
that! And so passivism is this one. For
example, 
Laadan, there was a language - language
invented by linguist called Suzette
Elgin, and this was from the second wave
of feminism. She wanted to try to see if
there was the language that could
incorporate points of view of women. And
if you read the grammar of Laadan, you
will see what her ideas were about it,
but I can tell you that in the first
few units, the examples that she uses for
the verbs include the verb to menstruate.
Like this is what's in the first unit
for learning the language. Very different
from our books that have the verbs to be or
to go in the first few units. Some
languages are invented for other
characters to separate us from the them
and to make them sound, you know, like
outsiders or like barbarians, like the
Dothraki from Game of Thrones.
There's languages that are invented
simply for artistic reasons. This is the
logo of the language creation society
and people invent languages for
chipmunks, people invent languages and
make them as tiny as possible just as an
artistic challenge. And by the way if you
like any of the ideas here, you can go to
the Language Creation Society and
they're always looking for people to
invent new languages, maybe because the
writer wants language for their book, or
for a movie. So these jobs appear every now and then.
Let's focus on the other. So you may be a
movie studio.
We'll ask someone to design a language
for their movies or for a TV
series, which is how the Klingon language
was invented for the TV series Star Trek.
That's how Dothraki was invented for Game
of Thrones, and how Navi was invented for
Avatar, for example. And so what people do is
that they built a language that sounds
different from English, and by the way
quick parentheses it's - it's interesting
that usually what sounds like an other
or something different ends up being
sounds that are,, you know, from
non-Indo-European language, so it
reinforces the idea that there's people
that are others. And many - for example,
Klingon is rich on velar fricatives like
the sound xa, which are sounds - which are
sounds that you find in Spanish but also
in Arabic, for example. Let's take a quick
look at one of these languages, Klingon.
In world, Klingon is the official
language of the Klingon Empire, which is
Empire centered on a planet that we see
there. And there's different dialects for
Klingon on the different planets of the
Empire. There's - whenever a new emperor comes to power,
their dialect becomes the official
language of the Empire. And the other
ones are shunned, and so forth. There's a
lot of ... yes, we know a lot about Klingon,
and it's because the person who made
Klingon has been very careful in
crafting both the language and the world
for it. Seriously, we have books that tell
us like terms for how to cook in Klingon.
The language was designed by a linguist
called Marc Okrand. He was working on a
language from California called Cahuilla,
and Klingon uses a morphology that is similar
to Cahuilla. By the way I know people who
speak Cahuilla and I asked them once what
they thought, and thinking that maybe
they would think it would be silly or
something. They actually thought it was
really cool that Cahuilla was the template
for Klingon. Okrand also used
phonology from Uto-Aztecan languages
like Nahuatl from Mexico.
It used the syntax of a language Hixkaryana from Brazil, and that syntax by
the way, is like the mirror image of
English. So here we have an example Dave
drinks coffee in English, would be Dave
drinks coffee in Klingon it's Coffee
drinks Dave, qa'vln tlhutlh Dave. So you have the object first, then
the verb, and then the noun - and then the
subject. Object verb subject. It's, yes,
the reverse of English in many cases, or
English is the reverse of Klingon. And
we'll see some more in a Python
programming exercise. It's a full
language. People who speak it, people
learn it, and ya know, there's nerds all
over the world that have - that have
learned the language, converse in it, have
conventions, and you can learn it on duolingo. So languages like Esperanto and
Klingon have taken a life of their own
to the point where, for example,
Esperanto is now an actual natural
language because there were children who
grew up speaking it. So there's many
reasons why people invent artificial
languages to test the possibilities of human
language. To make a language express a
particular philosophy or ideal that
they have about the world, to make
fictional characters others, to other the
characters of fiction, make them separate
from us so that they speak their own
language. We speak our language and
people invent languages for just
artistic purposes as an expression of
creativity or
to capture something that they love
about the world, like Tolkien loved the
way Finnish sounded. Some of these
languages again like Esperanto and
Klingon are - have become - have gained a
life of their own to the point where
people use them now in everyday settings.
And yeah this is - so in the next video
we're going to use Python to parse the
syntax of the Klingon language.
