Taken from: www.focus.pl
Translated by: Anna Duda
The Biblical parable of the Tower of Babel doesn’t seem to go out of date - at least when it comes to the amount of generated languages.
Constructed languages are springing up. Can they break the hegemony of English?
Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam – this mysterious-looking patchwork of letters is by no means an editorial mistake, but a battle cry which can be translated as: Today is a good day to die. This is a sentence in Klingon, spoken by the Klingons - a warrior race from Star Trek. The Klingon dictionary and textbook was created in 1985, when a linguist Marc Okrand observed a huge interest in his language created for the TV series. Seven years later, the institute promoting the culture of the Klingons was founded, and in 2010 the first opera in their language was staged.
Klingon is one of about 500 currently functioning constructed languages, i.e. those which - in contrast to those resulting from a spontaneous development - are a conscious human creation.
It’s difficult to estimate the number of people using them. The most famous one, Esperanto, according to some of the sources, is spoken by about 1.6 million people. There are about 30 fluent Klingon speakers, other languages have a few hundred or a few users.
Undoubtedly, film or literary languages top the list among linguistic utopias. "None of the hundreds of languages invented for sociological and ideological reasons earned such popularity," says Arika Okrent, the author of In the Land ofInventedLanguages.
Klingons are no exception. The inhabitants of the planet Tatooine from Star Wars also have their own language, Huttese. In Ridley Scott's BladeRunner, in turn, Cityspeak can be heard .
Na'vi is spoken by the people of the moon Pandora in the film Avatar. The record holder when it comes to the number of invented languages, which, moreover, the passion for creating them called his secret sin - is the writer John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, author of Sindarin , Adunaic, Westrone, Khuzdul and the most developed one - Quenya. The latter is used by, among others, the characters of The Lord ofthe Rings. The popularity of the cycle of novels about the history of Middle-earth causes that even the computer game Minecraft has been translated into Quenya (there’s also its Klingon version).
Linguistic ghetto
Artificially created languages often successfully live their own lives afterwards. Suzette Haden Elgin, a professor of linguistics at the University of San Diego in the U.S. experienced it. For the benefit of her feminist novel Native Tongue, she has created a secret language of women – Laádan. Professor Elgin admits that while creating it, she was thinking about language having about a thousand words and very simple grammar rules. A circle of its enthusiasts was quickly expanding, and many of them began to invent and add new words to the Laádan dictionary.
The same happens with the majority of constructed languages. Tolkien's Quenya is still developing (it was improved, inter alia, for the purposes of filming The Lord of the Rings directed by Peter Jackson) and Klingon is constantly complemented by the fans of Star Trek. An American linguist d'Armond Speers even used it every day at home and has been teaching his son for the first three years of his life, wanting it to become his child’s second language.
Do these languages, however, have a chance to become more than just conceits of their creators and fans?
Only devoted Tolkien fans are interested in Quenya, and teenage now Speers' son that - as a result of an experiment conducted by his father - learned to speak Klingon quite smoothly, today almost doesn’t remember it. It found out, that too big gaps in vocabulary were responsible for problems in communication.
Why then people want to learn constructed languages, and what can they be useful to?
“According to people who took up film or literary language, learning is more of an emotional decision than a practical one. It’s about belonging to a certain society or a group of fans,” says Arika Okrent.
Do you speak volapük?
Do not forget that constructed languages are created not just for fun or for literature or film. One of the reasons is also - as in the case of Ludwik Zamenhof - longing for a new universal language. Since childhood, this ophthalmologist from Białystok has been dreaming of a common language for the Russians, Germans, Poles and Jews living in the city. He decided to make this dream come true and in 1887 published an Esperanto textbook. It was by no means the first conlanger, i.e. the creator of constructed languages. In 1817, a French musician and composer Jean-François Sudre created Solresol, which is a language based on the musical scale. A decade before Zamenhof, German priest Johan Martin Scheyer, drawing from spoken English, invented Volapük: a language in which all adjectives end in "ik".
The birth of Esperanto by no means chilled the enthusiasm of the creators of new languages. In 1930s, a British linguist Charles Kay Ogden, wanting to improve international trade, came up with the idea of Basic English - a language based on abbreviations and patchworks of syllables - which corresponds to the level of a six year old. Simple to use is based on loose terms and words from different tongues European language Europanto. In turn, the most concise language in the world was created in 1978 by a Canadian translator Sonja Elen Kisa - Toki Pona consists of only 123 words.
Today, new languages are springing up on the Internet. Talossa, Freedonia, Alphistia or Aeldaria are only the few of the virtual lands with distinct languages. Created in an era of the Internet newspeaks are quite poor, compared to their predecessors. In combination with the development of technology, however, they can be considered as fulfilling the dreams of the sixteenth-century utopians who placed the actions of their novels in imaginary lands. "Lands are created today, the essence of which is not space, but the word," says Caterina Marrone, a philosopher of language at the Sapienza University of Rome.
Against linguistic supremacy
Swiss psychologist Claude Piron claimed that the dominance of English is fiction. He argued that most of the people for whom it’s not a native language, use so-called Pidgin English which consists of no more than 1500 words. This is drop in the ocean of 615 thousand words contained in the Oxford Dictionary. This means that the international English is not richer than the constructed languages, aspiring to the role of the universal means of communication.
According to Piron, the supremacy of the language was always associated with a political and economic hegemony of the nation, which, nota bene, drew huge profits from this privilege. Swiss predicted that the end of the political and economic dominance of the United States would open the field to new global languages. Esperanto would probably have its chance. Piron claimed that it develops in accordance with the principle of exponential growth, which would mean that after years of slow development there will be a huge boost. From time to time there are also suggestions to make it an official language of the European Union institutions, which would reduce the colossal expenditures on translations. Would it - after Latin, French and English - be the time for Esperanto then? For now, only two thousand people consider Zamenhof's language their native one. In comparison to 30 people speaking Klingon however, it's still a pretty good result.
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