The OnlyOneNativeSpeaker survey of Constructed Languages
Language is parasitic, not on the human body as William Burroughs suggested, but on the world around us: it feeds on the output of the sensory apparatus and leaves behind hideous carcasses. Language whiplashes the mind when we speak it, poisons our blood when we write it down and heats up the earth when we print it. Language is to reality what your lungs are to oxygen, but whereas growing a lung of ones own remains problematic, inventing a private language seems to be an option as viable as building your own backyard bunker to survive nuclear holocaust. Invented languages, implying a deep dissatisfaction with the world as-is, are grotesque creatures providing a unique instrument to create, understand, describe and manipulate private realities and dark sensibilities. The following classification of constructed languages, like half-opened Venetian blinds, give partial perspective to the mind-states that haunt the language inventor/innovator.
1) Utopian communications: transnational auxiliary languages are a typical late 19th century outcome of the dreams of universal brotherhood held by pacifists and free-masons. Esperanto, developed in 1887 by LL Zamenhof, still attracts followers, other once prominent examples like IDO, Volapuk and Interlingua have disappeared in the mist of time.
2) Language as linguistic laboratory: a constructed language as the anvil for philosophic reasoning blacksmith-style. The logical languages Loglan and Lojban were designed to test the theory that the structure of language sets limits on the thinking of those who speak it.
3) The languages of extrahuman intelligences revealed in trances: the Martian language of H??e Smith, Enochian the angelic language revealed to Edward Kelley while communicating with the crystalline netherworld, the ‘space-language’ aUI was taught John Weilgart when he was a boy by a little green elf-like humanoid from outer space.
4) Pastime languages: a mad collection of amateur syllable-pilots constructing languages for fun and self-education, playing games with them and translating the classics in them.
5) Machine languages: languages to communicate with machines, for now this category consists solely of programming languages though this does not need to be so in the future. Programmers tend to be partisan about the language they program in and debates between them can reach the same irrational fierceness that accompanied Esperanto vs. Volapuk debates from a century ago.
6) Languages found or suspected: the search for extraterrestrial intelligence as it exists today could only emerge after it was established that the radio-spectrum could in principle transmit (intergalactic) messages. Once undertaking SETI the discussion soon led to problems concerning the boundaries of what kind of messages captured would still be considered as language. Valuable information about unacknowledged conditions for languages that could only come into view through practical experimentation. John C. Lilly, a brilliant brain scientist wasting his reputation on his attempts to decipher the language of dolphins, represents the dark side of this category.
7) Symbolic languages: dream interpretations are an essential part of folk cultures all over the world. Symbols are a concentrated pulse of meaning, the complexity of which need oracle power to be properly translated for the mere mortal. 19th Century symbolist literature created symbolic languages interwoven in ordinary language. Sign systems are a special class of symbolic languages.
8) Fictional languages: invented languages as adding colour locale to fictional alien words in books and films. Science fiction and fantasy (Tolkien developed several languages in and outside the world portrayed in the dreaded pages of his horrid trilogy) are traditional suppliers of languages that sometimes manage to gain a relatively large numbers of speakers. But in the ‘serious literature’ of Thomas Morus and Nabokov fictional languages are used for the same reasons.
9) Ad-Hoc languages: words made up during drunken games of scrabble, or on intent in word games like Epram’s Game of Asparagus in which participants construct a language from words read in a jar filled with alphabet-vermicelli and then have to make polite party chit-chat in their new language.
10) Mathematics: a special-purpose rational language designed by humans to be complete and self-consisted has since long escaped human understanding.
11) Classifier languages: taxonomical systems and other scientific domain-transcendent naming schemes are not a language in the strict sense, but they are relevant in this context because the fill the gap left wide open by language inaptness to identify the individual in multitudes of similarity. Colours, insects, asteroids, compounds and particles would fall from the edge of the world of knowledge if they would remain unnamed. The benefit of these systems is that each name contains meta-information immediately understandable to those in the know of the underlying key. Classifier systems solve a problem inventors of languages out-of-thin-air run into: it provides a framework that enables systemised forward-compatible naming of objects yet to be named.
12) The recreation of a lost language and the search for the perfect language: the language of god disappeared from earth with the fall of Babylon some people believe. Each unspeakable sacred wisdom must go accompanied with a perfect language to match the divinity of its meaning is a parallel argument. Some people sought to reconstruct this perfect language lost from fragments found and the results are placed in this category. This is a muddled but well researched category including madcap geniuses like Bishop Wilkins and Giordano Bruno.
All these efforts, dreams and visions are the materials from which Borges weaved his universe of tiptoeing thinkers inventing compasses and flashlights to guide them through the sunless black box of reality where uncontrollable finiteness is the sea, ordered infinity the beach and your sanity breaks down a little bit more with each wave hammering down on the coastline. Language, Paraphrasing T.E. Hulme, is a gossamer web that has entrapped us:
Novalis, poet and mining engineer, firmly believed that “men travel in manifold paths: who traces and compares these, will find strange Figures come to light; Figures which seem as if they belonged to that great Cipher-writing”. Athanasius Kirchners thought he had deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs, but later it was discovered that his attempt though well executed and based on a reasonable hypothesis was entirely of the mark: unwittingly he had constructed a language by misinterpreting the source. Ever since Turing’s tigers mathematicians have found biological shapes that can be produced by formula’s to a level of stunning similarity, the question (despite claims made by some) what this means about both nature and mathematics is yet undecided. The perfect languages of Wilkinson and Bruno have fossilised the soft tissue of ideas. Jeremy Fodor postulated the existence of Mentalese, the native language of the brain (which is after all a symbolic processor) into which each incoming language is translated before being interpreted. Lincos by Hans Freudenthal is a thought experiment showing how an auxiliary language can be constructed from scratch in the process of communication with extraterrestrials. aUI, the established auxiliary language between space travelling communities from outer space, is (according to its only earth speaker Weilgart) due to its rational structure able to cure a person from irrational thinking patterns. Hildegard von Bingen, 12 century nun developed a secret language called “lingua Ignota”, she is best remembered for her advice to never drink water when there is beer available. The catholic priest John Martin Schleyer constructed his Volapuk because God instructed him in a dream to do so. Had he instead approached a psychoanalyst most likely he would have been told that the dream really contained symbols speaking of his unstoppable lust for catholic nuns. The popular programming language Python, named after Monty Pythons Flying Circus, has a mythical version 3000 which is promised to sport a telepathic interface. Esoteric programming languages like Brain fuck or Ook! (meant for orang-utans) are wilfully obscure, impractical and frustrating to use; by aiming for the outer rim of possibility they reveal otherwise invisible norms of what constitutes a ‘decent’ language. Klingon, developed by a proper linguist is versatile enough to serve as auxiliary language during Star Trek conventions or to translate Shakespeare in. It is reported that one man tried to raise his child in English/Klingon bilingualism. Loglan was tailored for such an experiment, but Klingon is just as well suited for this job because it reflects the habits of a race quite different from humans. The Klingons equivalent to ‘hello’ is ‘what do you want!’ and you suspect this to create a unique Klingonian sense of reality in the speaker. Klingons have little awareness for interior design though and the bilingual experiment met with large practical problems: swearing is a fine art in Klingon, but ordinary things like ‘table’ go unnamed. To knock-out any last doubt about the seriousness of Klingonese: the name given to Klingon Worf certainly must be referring to Benjamin Lee Whorf, around whose hypothesis we are circumnavigating here:
“Thinking itself is in a language – in English, in Sanskrit, In Chinese. And every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not only communicates, but also analyses nature, notices or neglects types of relationships and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of consciousness.”
Self-engineering a language cannot escape the patina of weirdness: the stereotypical image of programmers, sci-fi enthusiasts and pacifists as social outcasts does not help to debunk this myth in the eyes of those with too much confidence in their own reality. Maybe priding yourself on speaking fluent Klingon will stigmatise you as a nerd, but natural languages are not value free either: speech tainted by accent or dialect can be a definite disadvantage in life, while oppressive imperialist regimes do not hesitate to make minority languages illegal. If a language is outlawed only outlaws will speak it.
And why do you think that I write this in English instead of my native Dutch?
When I hear Moroccan men talk Berber, an oral language, every sentence seems to contain at least one Dutch word. By looking at the nature of these borrowed words one can get an idea about the everyday live of the people with whom the language originated. Samuel Delaney in his cult sci-fi novel Babel-17 puts it likes this: “Learning a language makes you see the universe through other people’s eyes”, when the other is an intelligent fishlike entity from a different solar-system the way this works is more obviously observed than it would when learning a slavish language spoken 400 kilometres to the east where conditions are similar. One last question: to what extent does learning a language makes you become the people speaking it?
In the light of all this, in search for experiences only experienced when twisting your mind and your tongue in gargoyle shapes, getting better in it with each new language you come up with, the collaborative Babylon bonanza of OnlyOneNativeSpeaker project radiates it’s home brewed gothic tunnels of consciousness.
Send us your language at: info [at] socialfiction [dot] org.