In this module, we learned the basic phonological patterns in natural languages and
how those did or did not feed Klingon phonology. We also learned that the functions of
an invented language are sometimes associated with the phonological characteristics of
the language (e.g. Klingon has characteristics that are not common in human
languages, as Klingon is a language spoken by non-humans).
Now pick one motivation for inventing a language and suppose you are creating a
language driven by the motivation. Share your ideas with your classmates on the
following points.
1. What is the motivation that you chose?
2. What phonological characteristics do you want your language to have? (Give
at least one characteristic)
3. Why do you want your language to have those characteristics? Explain,
referring to the motivation
Sounds
Non-linguists will often start with the alphabet and add a few apostro
phes and diacritical marks. The results are likely to be something that
looks too much like English, has many more sounds than necessary, and
which even the author doesn’t know how to pronounce.
You’ll get better results the more you know about PHONETICS (the study
of the possible sounds of language) and PHONOLOGY (how sounds are
actually used in language).
If you read just one book on linguistics besides this one, make it J.C.
Catford’s A Practical Introduction to Phonetics. Catford goes through the
possible sounds systematically, with practical descriptions of how to
produce each one even without having heard them.
Linguists use PHONES to refer to a particular sound used in a language.
P h o n e tic n o t a tio n
Language textbooks usually describe sounds by comparison with Eng
lish, adding recipes for producing unusual sounds. Linguists instead use
the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), a set of symbols with precise
meanings.
I’ll ease into using the IPA, since it isn’t that helpful till you know some
thing about phonetics. For now, IPA symbols will be in brackets, and I’ll
use customary English representations in boldface. E.g. sh [f] refers to
the English sh sound as in shirt and tells you that its IPA symbol is f.
If an IPA symbol isn’t given, it’s the same as the English representa
tion—e.g. the symbol for f is [f].
There’s an IPA chart at the back of the book (p. 270)
Consonants
You know about vowels and consonants— though the distinction be
tween them isn’t as airtight as you heard in school. Consonants can be
further organized, however. The most important division is a twodimensional distinction between PLACE OF ARTICULATION and degree
of CLOSURE.
27
28
LANGUAGE CONSTRUCTION KIT
P la c e o f a r tic u la tio n
Consonants are formed by obstructing the flow of air from the lungs.
The first thing to check is where the obstruction occurs; by convention
we start at the lips and move inward.
•
LABIAL: lips alone (w)
•
LABIODENTAL: lips and teeth together (f, v)
•
DENTAL: tongue against teeth (th: unvoiced [9], voiced [6];
French or Spanish t, d)
•
ALVEOLAR: tongue behind the teeth (s, z, English t, d, Spanish
r)
•
PALATO-ALVEOLAR: tongue further back from the teeth (sh [f],
American r [r])
•
PALATAL: tongue touching the top of the palate (Spanish n [p]',
Italian gn, Sanskrit c)
•
VELAR: back of the tongue against the back of the mouth (k, g,
ng [q])
•
UVULAR: tongue compressing way back in the mouth (Arabic q,
French r). To pronounce an uvular q, pronounce a series of k ’s
while sliding your tongue back as far as it will go. You’ll notice
SOUNDS
29
a difference in pitch: q is about an octave lower than k. The k in
milk is part of the way there (compare Mick).
.
GLOTTAL: constricting the throat (h, glottal stop [?] as in John
Lennon saying bottle).
The Roman alphabet doesn’t have enough symbols, so languages are
forced to use letters ambiguously, or use digraphs or diacritics. English
and Frenck t aren’t the same sound, for instance: French t is formed by
touching the tongue to the teeth, English t by touching the alveolar
ridge behind the teeth.
D e g r e e o f c lo s u r e
Consonants also vary depending on how much they obstruct the airflow.
•
STOPS (also called PLOSIVES) stop it entirely: p t k b d g. In the
middle of a word, as in happy, this is so fast that we’re hardly
conscious of the closure. The stop can be lengthened, however,
and then we can see there’s actually a brief silence while the air
flow is stopped. Compare back kit, Beckett.
•
FRICATIVES just impede the airflow, creating a noticeable hiss
ing sound: f s sh [f] kh [x]. A fricative can be prolonged indefi
nitely.
.
AFFRICATES consist of a stop releasing into a fricative at the
same place of articulation, such as t + s in tsetse. English ch is
actually an affricate, consisting of t + sh [tj]; likewise j is d + zh
[d3].
APPROXIMANTS impede the airflow only slightly; there’s no
hissing sound, only a slight change in sound quality: r 1 w y.
.
Confusingly, the IPA for y is Q]. Don’t mistake this for English
•
jIf the airflow isn’t obstructed at all, what you have is a VOWEL.
M o r e d is tin c t io n s
Voicing
Consonants can be VOICED or UNVOICED; voicing just means letting the
vocal cords vibrate.
Unvoiced and voiced consonants usually come in pairs: p/b, t/d, k/g,
f/v, sh/zh, and so on. Sometimes there are gaps:
30
LANGUAGE CONSTRUCTION KIT
•
German has unvoiced kh [x] (which it spells ch) but not voiced
gh [y] (which however exists in Dutch).
•
Spahish has unvoiced s but not voiced z.
•
Standard Arabic has voiced b but not imvoiced p.
•
Often approximants only appear in voiced form. Nonetheless it’s
possible to have an unvoiced r 1 w y. For some English speakers,
wh is pronounced as an unvoiced w[v^].
Vowels are normally voiced; we’ll see some exceptions later.
Voicing isn’t entirely binary; languages can differ in VOICING ONSET
TIME (VOT), which is when the voicing starts. English has relatively late
VOT—we start voicing initial b, d, g, j pretty late; French, by contrast,
has early VOT. English also tends to stop voicing pretty early if the con
sonant ends a word. We really distinguish “voiced” consonants at the
beginning and end of the word by other cues.
N asalization
Instead of simply stopping the airflow, we can re-route it through the
nose, producing NASAL consonants: m n ng [q].
The mouth does the exact thing for b as for m; the difference is that the
nasal passage is open for m. Thus we call m a NASAL STOP, or just a
NASAL, with a labial place of articulation.
Similarly, n is a nasal dental or dental-alveolar, and ng [q] is a nasal
velar. If a language has other places of articulation, it can have other
nasals, e.g. labiodental [rq], palatal [p].
A spiration
Stops may be released lightly, or with a noticeable puff of air—
ASPIRATION. In English, we aspirate unvoiced stops at the beginning of
a word {pot, tall, cow), but not after an s (spot, stall, scow). French and
Spanish doesn’t have this initial aspiration (and if you retain it while
speaking these languages you’ll have a gringo accent).
In Chinese, Hindi, or (Cusco) Quechua, there are separate series of aspi
rated and unaspirated stops. In Chinese and Quechua, in fact, there isn’t
a series of voiced stops at all. Beijing, for instance, doesn’t start with a b
at all, but an unaspirated p.
The IPA symbol is t”]; so the Chinese labial stops are [p p**] .
SOUNDS
31
Palatalization
A PALATALIZED consonant is pronounced by raising the tongue toward
the top of the mouth. This happens to be about the position for y, and a
palatalized consonant may sound to an English speaker as if there’s a y
(IPA [j]) after or before it.
Russian and Gaelic have palatalized and unpalatalized versions of most
of their consonants. For instance, ^a, fla [da da] ‘yes, yes’ sounds very
different from flafla [d%d^a] ‘uncle’.
Palatalization is an example of CO-ARTICULATION: the consonant is
pronounced at (or nearly at) its normal place of articulation, but with
the tongue raised. So palatalized [n^] isn’t quitp the same as palatal Qi].
Labialization
A LABIALIZED consonant is pronounced with the lips rounded. For in
stance, Latin aqua ‘water’ was pronounced [ak"'a] with labialized k. This
isn’t the same as the cluster [kw]; with true labialized [k”'], the lip
rounding'is simu/taneoMs with the [kj.
Any of the stops can be labialized, and fricatives too.
G lottal gam es
Most-sounds are produced by air moving from the lungs. It’s also possi
ble to create a small amount of airflow by moving the larynx up or
down, without any pulmonic airflow at all.
Try it! Touch your Adam’s apple and sing an [a], "varying from high to
low pitch; you’ll feel the larynx moving. Now do it silently. Finally, keep
the vocal cords closed as for [?], put the tongue in [k] position, and raise
the larynx suddenly— that should produce an EJECTIVE [k’], a sort of
throaty puff.
Now keep your lips closed as for [b], and move the larynx down while
voicing; this should prgduce a strangled-sounding [6], an IMPLOSIVE.
There’s also implosives [d] and [^ .
T h e c o n s o n a n t g r id
Where non-linguists tend to list sounds in alphabetical order, linguists
prefer to use a PHONOLOGICAL GRID, with place of articulation across
the top, and degree of closure down the sides.
The grid fdr American English looks like this.
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LANGUAGE CONSTRUCTION KIT
labiai
s to p s
iabiodentai
P
b
f
fricatives
V
affricates
approxim ants
n a sa is
w
m
alveoiar aiveoiarpaiatal
t
d
sh
s
z
zh
ch
j
r,l
y
n
veiar
glottai
k
g
h
ng
Voicing is a third dimension in English; voiced sounds can simply te
placed next to the unvoiced equivalent.
This is where the p t k order comes from: the stops are listed in order of
place of articulation.
Rhotics
In programming, there’s an aphorism that 10% of the functionality takes
90% of the effort. In phonetics we might say the same about r and 1,
which are quite messy.
There are a number of RHOTIC (r) sounds:
•
American r [i] is an approximant, but there are two ways of
forming it (which sound about the same):
°
A RETROFLEX r [^J is pronounced by curling the tongue up
behind the alveolar ridge. Some languages, such as Hindi,
have a series of retroflex consonants, such as the stops [f]
and [cy.
°
A BUNCHED r is pronounced by bunching up the tongue
thickly under the palate; the tip is drawn back into the body
of the tongue.
•
In much of England r is a post-alveolar'approximant— like the
retroflex r but the tongue pointed at the alveolar ridge, not
curled back. (However, younger speakers seem to be adopting a
sound more like a w!)
•
Another type of r is a TAP [r], where the tongue tip is brushed
briefly against the alveolar ridge. This can sound like a d; thus
“veddy” for “very” in attempts to capture certain accents. Span
ish single, non-initial r (as in caro) is a tap; it’s also-common,in
Scottish English.
SOUNDS
33
•
R can be TRILLED [r], which is like a repeated tap caused by vi
brating the tongue against the alveolar ridge. Initial and double
r in Spanish are trilled (as in rueda, carro).
•
French r is a uvular approximant or trill
[r ] .
Don’t confuse any of these realizations with a dropped r—that is, one
that’s not there! Many English dialects are NON-RHOTIC, meaning that
syllable-final r is dropped.
L aterals
LATERALS (1 sounds) are so called because they’re made with a closure,
hke a stop, but leaving an opening at the sides of the tongue for airflow.
•
English has two distinct 1 sounds:
°
CLEAR 1 is formed with the closure on the alveolar ridge; it
occurs at the beginning of a syllable, as in Luke.
°
DARK 1 [1] is formed by retracting the tongue
(VELARIZATION); it occurs at the end of a syllable, as in cool.
Velarization can be applied to other consonants as well.
Many languages have a clear 1 in all positions; using a dark 1 in
(say) Spanish will mark you as an anglofono.
•
Russian (among other languages) has a dental 1, with the tongue
touching the teeth. If you want a Slavic accent, make your I’s
dental.
•
Then there’s palatal 1 [X], as in Italian voglio. Spanish 11 used to
be pronounced this way, and still is in some dialects.
•
If the edges of the tongue are closer to the sides of the mouth, so
that there’s a noticeable hissing sound, you have a LATERAL
FRICATIVE [^]. Welsh 11 is an unvoiced lateral fricative [I]. (You
may pause to congratulate yourself that you can now work out
a triple-barreled term like that. If you can’t, re-read the conso
nants section!)
P h o n e s , p h o n e m e s , a n d a llo p h o n e s
I’ve talked about (say) different reahzations of English 1 or p. However,
we need to be more precise about what this means.
Each language has a set of PHONEMES- classes of sounds (phones) that
speakers treat as “the same sound”. By convention.
34
LANGUAGE CONSTRUCTION KIT
•
phonemes appear between slashes: /I/, /p/...
•
phones appear between brackets: [1], [p]...
This allows us to be brief and precise. For instance, we say that English
/p/ is realized as [p**] initially and as [p] elsewhere. (The absence of the ’’
indicates a lack of aspiration.) The two phones [p*"] and [p] are called
ALLOPHONES of /p/.
I
TT
i|:
I
'
j
Ij,
You can think of phonemes as how sounds are represented in the
speaker’s mental grammar. Speakers are often quite unaware of allophonic variation. We don’t think of the p in pot and spot as different,
though phonetically they are.
'
Phonemes vs. letters
Often phonemes correspond to letters, but don’t confuse them; letters
are an aspect of writing systems, which are a separate topic. The same
language may have multiple writing systems—e.g. Yiddish can be written in Hebrew or Roman letters; Turkish was once written in Arabic
script and now uses Roman; Mandarin can be written using Chinese
characters or in a dizzying variety of romanizations.
j
Letters don’t correspond one-for-one with phonemes— notoriously so,
in Enghsh. Digraphs like ch represent a single phoneme /c/. A letter can
represent different phonemes; e.g. s C2m represent /s/, /z/, or /s/. And a
single phoneme may be spelled in many ways: e.g. English /f/ can be
spelled f or ph.
;
Phonemes may be written using IPA, but often this isn’t very conven
ient. Eor a conlang, you can think of the phonemes as your romanization scheme— for most purposes, your writing system. If you like s better than f , by all means use it for the phoneme.
i
j
I,
\
But I’m
j
i
j
t 2 f \ C 0 N la e N ( 3 iN 4 C 0 9 ^ !
Maybe you’ve been making conlangs since you were eight
and you use a lot of personal symbols. Well, knock it off.
Once your conlang leaves your desk, you need to make it ac
cessible to other people. Even if you carefully explain that %
means [f], they’ll forget or won’t care.
Plus, all those cool symbols you found buried in the Unicode
manual have some actual meaning, and the people who know
that meaning will just be confused when you misapply them.
j
j
\
SOUNDS
35
Phonemes vs. allophones
Here are some more examples of phones vs. allophones:
.
English /t/ is [f] initially, [t] after an [s], often an unreleased
[t’] finally, and often a glottal stop [?] medially (as in button).
.
English /I/ is clear [1] initially, dark [i] finally.
.
English /m/ is usually labial, but if s labiodental [iq] before [f].
•
In some English dialects, dropped final /r/ reappears before a
vowel: I fear a disaster = [aj fir a dizasta]. In this case we may
say that there’s still an underlying phoneme /r/, but it’s nor
mally realized as [a], and only as [r] before a vowel. But for
some speakers, an [r] is added between vowels whether or not
written English has an r: e.g. I saw a cat = [aj sor a kaet]. For
them, this intrusive r isn’t a phoneme at all.
.
Spanish /s/ is usually [s], but it’s voiced [z] before a voiced con
sonant: los dedos = [loz dedos].
Allophones vs. dialectal realizations
Don’t confuse allophones with dialectal variation. Allophones exist
within a single speaker’s dialect.
For instance, the different ways different English varieties pronounce /r/
are not allophonic. Each individual has a particular REALIZATION they
always use—e.g. a Scottish speaker always has /r/ as flapped [r].
Different dialects can have differerit phonemes. For instance, European
Spanish has a /0/ phoneme; in Latin American Spanish it’s merged with
/s/. Some English dialects have a separate unvoiced /w/ for wh; others
just MERGE this with /w/.
Phonemic analysis
Phones are very precise and not controversial: if you see [p’’] you know
we’re talking about an unvoiced aspirated labial stop. (Though a few
symbols aren’t as precise as they could be; e.g. [t] can be used for either
a dental or an alveolar stop.)
Phonemes, however, represent an analysis of the language, and there
are often multiple ways to do this, and it’s not always possible to say
that one way is the best.
For instance, is /c/ a phoneme of English? Native speakers do think of it
as a “sound”; they’re often surprised to learn that phonetically it’s made
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LANGUAGE CONSTRUCTION KIT
of two sounds [t] + [[]• Calling /c/ a phoneme also makes some observa
tions about English phonology neater. But we could also analyze it as a
cluster /tj/.
How do you know if a given sound is a phoneme or an allophone? The
classical test is to find MINIMAL PAIRS— e.g. bat and pat show that /b/
and /p/ are separate phonemes in English. We can’t find minimal pairs
for [p*"] in pat and [p] in spat— they never distinguish words; we say
they are in COMPLEMENTARY DISTRIBUTION.
Sometimes a phonological puzzle has no accepted solution. In Mandarin,
the palatals j q occur only before high front vowels; they contrast with
three separate series: the dental sibilants z c, the retroflexes zh ch, and
the velars g k, none of which appear before those vowels. We’d like to
say that the palatals are allophones of one of the other series, but it’s not
clear which one!
Cross-language comparisons
Strictly speaking, only phones should be compared across languages.
For instance, you can say that both English and Mandarin have [p] and
[p**] phones.
But it’s misleading and confusing to say that they both have /p/ pho
nemes. You can find references to /p/ in grammars of both languages,
but they don’t mean the same thing. English /p/ has [p] and [p**] allo
phones and contrasts with /b/; Mandarin /p/ is always [p*"] and contrasts
with /b/, which is normally [p], but may be realized as [b] in unaccented
syllables.
Informally, linguists do talk about (say) how many languages have an
/a/. Just don’t take this too seriously. Without reading the individual
grammars, you don’t know what it means that the language has an /a/—
what actual realizations it has or doesn’t have.
Some consonants are more common than others. For instance, virtually
all languages have the simple stops [p t k]. Lass’s Phonology gives exam
ples; see also David Crystal's The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language,
p. 165. Online, search for UPSID (the UCLA Phonological Segment Inven
tory Database) or WALS (the World Atlas of Language Structures).
Inventing consonants
The amateur way of creating consonants it to mix letters— I encoun
tered one conlang with a sound “between an n and an m ”.
SOUNDS
37
You can pick from the many sounds English doesn’t have— e.g. add
palatalized ii and a glottal stop 7. But it’s more naturalistic and more
interesting to add entire series— or remove them. Cusco Quechua, for
instance, has three series of stops—aspirated, non-aspirated, and glottalized—but doesn’t distinguish voiced and unvoiced stops.
Or you can add places of articulation. For instance, while English has
three series of stops, Hindi has five (labial, dental, retroflex, alveolopalatal, and velar), and Arabic has six (bilabial, dental, ‘emphatic’ (don’t
ask), velar, uvular, glottal).
Vowels
Vowels vary in several dimensions. The most important are height,
frontness, and roundedness.
H e ig h t
HEIGHT refers to the height of the tongue within the mouth; there’s also
a tendency to open the mouth wider as the tongue lowers, so lower
vowels are also called OPEN.
The usual scale is HIGH [i, u], MID [e, o], LOW [a].
Many languages, including English, have four steps instead. Instead of
mid there are two heights:
•
MID-HIGH or CLOSED: English /e, o/ as in say, so, French e and
the [o] in eau\ the Italian e, o in cera, voce.
•
MID-LOW or OPEN: English /e/ as in set; French e and the o in
dormer, Italian e, o in sella, cosa.
For English speakers who distinguish Don / Dawn and cot /
caught, the open o or /o/ is the second of these pairs. But if you
pronounce these words the same, that’s not an open o but an
[a]! You can produce /of by starting with /e/ and retracting the
tongue; see Frontness below.
The word closed is a mnemonic for closed /o/. The word open has open e
(so don’t think about the o, which is also closed!).
F r o n tn e s s
FRONT vowels are pronounced with the tongue pushed forward, to the
front of the mouth, [i e e ] as in me, may, meh are all front vowels.
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LANGUAGE CONSTRUCTION KIT
BACK vowels are pronounced with the tongue retracted— e.g. [u o o] in
do, doe, dawn.
In between are CENTRAL vowels, such as the muddy schwa [a] found in
the unstressed syllables of China, about, photograph.
English /a/ as in p o t may be central, but for some speakers it’s a back
vowel /a/. The a in cat is /se/, a low front vowel.
T h e v o w e l g r id
You can arrange the vowels in a grid according to these two dimensions.
The bottom of the grid is usually drawn shorter because there isn’t as
much room for the tongue to maneuver as the mouth opens more.
front
central
back
To get a feel for these distinctions, pronounce the phones in the dia
gram, moving from top to bottom or side to side, and noting where your
tongue is and how close it is to the roof of the mouth.
Tenseness
Once you understand the vowel grid, you can appreciate the distinction
of TENSE vs. LAX. Graphically, tense vowels lie toward the edges of the
diagram; lax vowels are closer to the center. The names refer to the fact
that the tongue is held more tensely forward or backward in order to
produce these sounds.
The standard vowels used for phonetics, the CARDINAL VOWELS, are as
tense as possible. English speakers, however, tend to pronounce /u/ and
/e/ more centrally than the cardinal vowels.
Many languages, including English, have tense/lax versions of almost all
their vowels. Here’s the full diagram for my dialect of American English,
using sample words:
SOUNDS
central
front
high
closed \
pate
low
\
put
p it
uh
pet
open
back
boot
peat
\
39
pat
„
p u tt
bought
pot
And using IPA;
front
central
back
R ou n d ed n ess
A ROUNDED vowel is pronounced with the lips rounded, like English /u
o/, as opposed to UNROUNDED vowels like /i e/.
There’s a strong tendency for front vowels to be unrounded, and back
vowels to be rounded, as in English, Spanish, or Italian.
•
French u, oe and German ii, 6 are FRONT ROUNDED vowels. To
pronounce ii, your lips should be in the position for u, and your
tongue for i. Or to put it another way, say [i] and purse your
lips. The IPA for ii is [y]; don’t confuse this with English y.
•
Russian bi and Japanese u [ui] are BACK UNROUNDED vowels.
To pronounce [m], say [u] and unpurse your lips.
Here’s an expanded version of the basic vowel grid showing the IPA
symbols for unrounded then rounded vowels in each position:
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LANGUAGE CONSTRUCTION KIT
front
central
back
O t h e r d is tin c t io n s
Vowels can vary along other dimensions as well:
•
LENGTH: vowels may contrast by length, as in Latin, Greek,
Sanskrit, Japanese, and Old English. Estonian has three degrees
of length.
Length just means that the vowel is pronounced for a longer
time. E.g. Latin pdtus ‘drunken’ [po:tus] contrasts with potis
‘able’ [potis]. As a complication, short vowels may be laxed
compared to their long counterparts.
Don’t confuse this with the English “long vowels”—these do de
rive from Old English long vowels, but they’re mostly diph
thongs now.
•
NASALIZATION: like consonants, vowels can be nasalized.
French, for instance, has four nasalized vowels [oe d e a] as in un
bon vin hlanc.
•
VOICING: Vowels are normally voiced, but may be unvoiced in
particular circumstances; e.g. Japanese often devoices vowels
between two unvoiced consonants; e.g. the u [y] in kusa ‘grass’.
An unvoiced vowel may have a fricative (hissing) quality. Pho
netically, English h can be taken as the unvoiced form of the fol
lowing vowel.
SEMIVOWELS like y, w [j w] can be thought of as ultra-short vowels.
Fronted [y] has a corresponding approximant [q], found in French—e.g.
huile [qil].
Rhotics, laterals, and nasals can be prolonged, and thus can take the
place of vowels—they’re SYLLABIC. English murk, vessel, lesson are [mrk
VEsl lesn]. Dictionaries like to show a vowel [mArk lesan], but there
aren’t really two separate phones there.
SOUNDS
41
D ip h th o n g s
A DIPHTHONG is a sequence of two different vowels in the same sylla
ble, as in English coy, cow, guy /koj kaw gaj/. Phonetically, the vowels
are not really distinct; the position of the vocal organs glides from one
position to the other.
English has a tendency to diphthongize its closed vowels: e.g. day is
pronounced [dej], go is [gow]. Don’t carry this habit over to languages
with purer vowels—e.g. French the, tot are [te, to] not [tej, tow].
The diphthongs mentioned above end with a semivowel; they can also
begin with one, as in cute [kjut] or Chinese tian [tjen] ‘heaven’; or you
can have a TRIPHTHONG beginning and ending with a semivowel: xido
‘little’ [pjaw].
A single vowel is sometimes called a MONOPHTHONG, usually in the
context of sound change. In Southern American English, for instance,
/aj/ has monophthongized to /a/.
V o w e l s y s te m s
As with the consonants, if you’re inventing a vowel system, don’t just
add an exotic vowel or two. Invent a vowel system by adding or remov
ing entire classes of vowels.
Vowel systems vary greatly in complexity. Some of the simplest are
those of Quechua (three vowels, i u a) and Spanish (five: i e a o u). Sim
ple vowel systems tend to spread out; a Quechua i, for instance, can
sound like English pit, peat, or pet. Spanish e and o have open and
closed allophones.
English is fairly rich in vowels, with a dozen or so. French has 16.
W h a t m a k e s a n g o o d p h o n e t ic in v e n to r y ?
People sometimes post phonetic inventories on my board and anxiously
await comments. This mystifies me... it’s a bit like a painter showing
you which colors he intends to use. It’s only a first, small step.
Still, if you’re anxious, here are a few guidelines.
•
Don’t throw in every sound discussed above. New conlangers
often throw everything they’ve learned into one language— a
KITCHEN SINK conlang.
•
It’s a bit tacky to simply use all and only the sounds of English.
Or, as in the Standard Fantasy Language, English plus kh.
42
LANGUAGE CONSTRUCTION KIT
•
Think in terms of features, not sounds. E.g. add a series of retro
flex stops, or nasalized vowels, not just one or two new sounds.
•
On the other hand, if your language is aimed at nonconlangers— e.g. it’s the background for a novel— your readers
are going to ignore exotic sounds anyway. In that case it can be
more effective to remove English sounds than to add new ones.
Stress
Don’t forget to give a stress rule. English has unpredictable stress, and if
you don’t think about it your invented language will tend to work that
way too.
French (lightly) stresses the last syllable. Polish and Quechua always
stress the second-to-last syllable. Latin has a more complex rule: stress
the second-to-last syllable, unless both final syllables are short and
aren’t separated by two consonants.
If the rule is absolutely regular, you don’t need to indicate stress orthographically. If it's irregular, however, consider explicitly indicating it, as
in Spanish: corazon, porque.
In English, vowels are REDUCED to more indistinct or centralized forms
when unstressed. This is one big reason (though not the only one) that
English spelling is so difficult.
Tone
T one proper
Mandarin syllables have four TONES, or intonation contours: high level;
rising; falling-rising, and high falling. These tones are parts of the word,
and can be used to distinguish words of different meanings: md
‘mother’, md ‘hemp’, md ‘horse’, md ‘curse’. Cantonese and Vietnamese
have six tones.
Tones are often described on a five-point scale, 5 being the highest. The
Mandarin tones are 55, 35, 214, and 51. They may be understood better
with diagrams of relative pitch:
/
ma
ma
ma
ma
SOUNDS
43
The diacritics are mnemonics for the diagrams.
Tones are complicated by TONE SANDHI, where neighboring tones in
fluence each other. For example, Mandarin’s third tone changes to sec
ond before another third tone: wd hen hao Tm fine’ is pronounced wd
hen hao.
Some answers to questions people often have about tone:
•
Tones are not absolute, but relative to one’s normal pitch— in
deed, relative to the intonation of the sentence as a whole.
•
Songwriters may or may not try to match the tones of the lyrics
to the melody. In Mandarin songs tone tends to be ignored; in
Cantonese not.
P itc h -a c c e n t s y s te m s
If that seems a bit elaborate, you might consider a PITCH-ACCENT sys
tem, where intonation contours belong to words, not syllables. Japanese
and ancient Greek are pitch-accent languages.
In (standard) Japanese, syllables can be either high or low pitch; each
word has a particular ‘melody’ or sequence of high and low syllables—
e.g. ikebana ‘flower arrangement’ has the melody LULL; sashimi sliced
raw fish’ has LHH; kokoro ‘heart’ has LHL. It sounds as if a tone has to
be remembered for each syllable; but this turns out not to be the case.
All you must learn for each word is the location of the ‘accent’, the main
drop in pitch. Then you apply these three rules:
.
Assign high pitch to all MORAS (= syllables, except that a long
vowel is two moras, and a final -n or a double consonant takes
up a mora too).
.
Change the pitch to low for all moras following the accent.
•
Assign low pitch to the first mora if the second is high.
Thus for ike'bana we have HHHH, then HHLL, then LHLL.
C h a n n e ls
The Amazonian language Piraha has an extremely simple phonological
inventory, with tones. This allows it to be communicated by multiple
CHANNELS: normal speech, humming, whistling.
Whispering can be considered a channel too; it can readily be under
stood though all voicing information is lost.
44
LANGUAGE CONSTRUCTION KIT
Phonological constraints
Every language has a series of constraints on what possible words can
occur in the language. For distance, as an English speaker you know
somehow that blick and drass are possible words, though they don’t
happen to exist, but vlim and mtar couldn’t possibly be native English
words.
Designing the PHONOLOGICAL CONSTRAINTS (also called PHONOTACTICS) in your language will go a long way to giving it its own dis
tinctive flavor.
Start with a distinctive syllable pattern. For instance,
•
Japanese basically allows only (C)(y)V(V)(n): Ran-ma, A-ka-ne,
Ta-te-wa-ki Ku-noo, Ru-mi-ko Ta-ka-ha-shi, Go-ji-ra, Too-kyoo,
kon-kuu-ru, sushi, etc.
•
Mandarin Chinese allows (C)(i, u)V(w, y, n, ng): wo, shi, Meigu6, ren, wen-yan, chl-fdn, mdn-hud, Wang, pu-tong-hud, etc.
•
Quechua allows (C)V(C): Wall-pa-ku-na sa-ra-ta mi-kuch-kanku, ach-ka a-llin ha-tun mo-soq pu-ka wa-si-kuna, etc.
•
English goes as far as (s) + (C) + (r, 1, w, y) + (V) + V + (C) +
(C) + (C): sprite, thanks-giv-ing.
C and V?
C stands for any consonant, V for any vowel. Parentheses
mean that an element is optional. So (C)V(C) means that a
syllable must contain a vowel, but can optionally have an initial and/or final consonant.____________________________
Try to generalize your constraints. For instance, m + t is illegal at the
beginning of a word in English. We could generalize this to [nasal] +
[stop]. The rule against v + 1 generalizes at least to [voiced fricative] +
[approximant].
Some of you will immediately think of Vladimir. But notice that that’s a
borrowing— new English words are still very unlikely to have vl. But
it’s true that some constraints are harder than others— even in borrow
ings like psychology we don’t try to pronounce [ps]—though the French
do for psychologic.
W o r k in g b a c k w a r d s
If you already have a lexicon, you can deduce the phonotactics by exam
ining it and seeing what sort of syllables you’ve allowed.
SOUNDS
45
For instance, if you have a word bapada, all the syllables are CV. If you
have strumpsk, you're allowing CCCVCCCC. But try to be more specific;
probably you don’t actually allow clusters of any three arbitrary conso
nants. If you have words like stroi, skrum, prek, blat, that’s more like
(s)C(r,l)VC.
Divide clusters however they sound best to you— e.g. bastroi could be
bas-troi (CVC CCW) or bastroi (CV CCCW) or even bast-roi (CVCC
CW). Be consistent, though.
Then look at all the syllable types you’re allowing and decide if you
really want to allow them all. Maybe you decide final CCCC is too much
and have to change strumpsk.
Assimilation
Another process to be aware of is ASSIMILATION. Adjoining consonants
tend to migrate to the same place of articulation. That’s why Latin in- +
-port = import, ad + simil- = assimil- Consonants can assimilate in voice
to; that’s why our plural -s sounds like z after a voiced stop, as in dogs or
moms.
It’s also why Larry Niven’s klomter, from The Integral Trees, rings false,
m + t (though not impossible) is difficult, since each sound occurs at a
different place of articulation; both sounds are likely either to shift to
the dental position (klonder) or the labial (klomper). Another possible
outcome is the insertion of a phonetically intermediate sound: klompter.
Alien mouths
If you’re inventing a language for aliens, you’ll probably want to give
them really different sounds (if they have speech at all, of course). The
Marvel Comics solution is to throw in a bunch of apostrophes: “This is
Empress Nx’id”ar’ of the planet Bla’no’no!” Larry Niven just violates
English phonological constraints: tnuctipun. We can do better.
Think about the shape of the mouth of your aliens. Is it really long?
That suggests adding a few more places of euticulation. Perhaps the airstream itself works differently: perhaps they have no nose, and therefore
can’t produce nasals; or they can’t stop breathing as they talk, so that all
their vowels are nasal; or the airstream is at a higher velocity, producing
higher-pitched sounds and perhaps more emphatic consonants. Or per
haps their anatomy allows odd clicks, snaps, and thuds that have be
come phonemes in their languages.
46
LANGUAGE CONSTRUCTION KIT
Several writers have come up with creatures with two vocal tracts, al
lowing them to pronounce two sounds at once, or accompany them
selves in two-part harmony.
Or, how about sounds or syllables that vary in tonal color? Meanings
might be distinguished by whether the voice sounds like a trombone, a
violin, a trumpet, or a guitar.
Suggesting additional sounds is difficult and perhaps tiresome to the
reader; an alien ambience can also be created by removing entire pho
netic dimensions. An alien might be unable to produced voiced sounds
(so he sounts a pit like a Gherman), or, lacking lips, might be stymied by
labials (you nust do this to de a thentrilocooist, as ooell).
Orthography
Once you have the sounds of your language down, you’ll want to create
an ORTHOGRAPHY— that is, a standard way of representing those
sounds in the Roman alphabet.
You have something very close to this already—your phonemic realiza
tion. There’s nothing wrong with just using this as your orthography.
You have some choices, however.
Don’t try to be too creative here. For instance, you could represent /a e i
0 u/ as 6 e ee aw u, with the accents reversed at the end of the word.
An outlandish orthography is probably an attempt to jazz up a phonetic
system that didn’t turn out to be interestingly different from English.
Work on the sounds, then find a way to spell them in a straightforward
fashion.
If you’re inventing a language for a fantasy world, take account of how
English-speaking readers will mangle your beautiful words. Tolkien is
the model here: he spelled Quenya as if it were Latin, didn’t introduce
any really vile spellings, and kindly indicated final e’s that must be pro
nounced. Still, he couldn’t resist demanding that c and g always be hard
(I couldn’t either, for Verdurian), which probably means that a lot of his
names (e.g. Cirdan) are commonly mispronounced.
Marc Okrand, inventing Klingon, had the clever idea of using upper and
lower case letters with different phonetic values. This has the advantage
of doubling the letters available without using diacritics, but it’s not
very aesthetic and it sure is a tax on memory.
As an example of different approaches, here are some alternative trans
literations for the same Verdurian sentence.
From Rosenfelder, Mark. 2010. The Language Construction Kit.
Yonagu Books: Chicago.
SOUNDS
47
Mira rasfolzeca fo fase med imocul.
Mira rasfolzheca rho faase medh imochul.
Mira r a s f o l s E k a
r o
fa:se me6 imot/ul.
A loving mother does not abandon a strayed son.
The first is the one I actually use, inspired by Czech orthography- c for
ch, s for sh, etc. The second uses digraphs, uglier but more suitable for
naive English speakers and for ASCII applications, such as the early
web. (In the Unicode era you can generally find any character you
want.) The third uses IPA; never a bad choice, but sometime awkward
(e.g. if you use unusual vowels and need to mark tone or nasalization).
Avoid ee and oo for [i u]; they’re highly marked as English spellings. If
people can handle sushi they can handle mira.
If you’re inventing an interlanguage, of course, you shouldn’t worry
about English conventions; create the most straightforward romanization you can. You’re only asking for trouble, however, if you invent new
diacritic marks, as the inventor of Esperanto did.
M ultiple transliterations
A sense of variation among the nations of your world can be achieved
by using different transliteration styles for each. In my fantasy
world, for instance, Verdurian Darcaln and Barakhinei Dhdrkalen are
not pronounced that differently, but the differing orthographies give
then a different feeling. Surely you’d rather visit civilized Darcaln than
dark and brooding Dharkalen? (Tricked you. It’s the same place.)
However, these systems should be motivated—ideally each orthography
is a good representation of the native writing system (or, for unwritten
languages, its phonology). Verdurian and Barakhinei each have their
own native alphabets, so the differing orthographies suggest this.
Developing multiple languages, even if they’re just naming languages,
can give a map a pleasing sense of complexity. Eor instance, here are
some of the names from the continent of Arcel on Almea:
Witsi?popok
Zonydn
Belesdo
Uytai
Siad ^ 0
Sme
Gleij
Hsanda
Rimasaca
Prahmai
These ten names represent eight different language families, of widely
different phonologies and phonotactics. None of the diacritics or un-
48
LANGUAGE CONSTRUCTION KIT
usual characters is decorative; all are straightforward representations of
the particular languages.
D ia c r it ic s
Some advice: never use a diacritical mark without giving it a specific
meaning, preferably one which it retains in all uses. I made this mistake
in Verdurian: I used 6 and u as in German, but e somewhat as in Rus
sian (indicating palatalization of the previous consonant), and a as a
mere doubling of a. I was smarter by the time I got to Cuezi: the circum
flex consistently indicates a low-pitch accent.
Avoid using apostrophes just to make words look foreign or alien.
Since apostrophes are used in contradictory ways (they represent the
glottal stop in Arabic or Hawai’ian, glottalization in Quechua, palataliza
tion in romanized Russian, aspiration or a syllable boundary in Chinese,
and omitted sounds in English, French, and Italian), they end up sug
gesting nothing at all to the reader.
W r itin g s y s te m s
The next chapter discusses grammar, but once you have a phonology,
you can create an ALPHABET or other writing system for your language.
If you want to do so now, turn to the section on Writing Systems (p.
176).
Acoustic phonetics
So far we’ve been concentrating on ARTICULATORY PHONETICS—how
sounds are produced. There’s also ACOUSTIC PHONETICS— how they
are perceived by the ear and brain. To explain this would take a fairly
long digression into the physics of sound waves, and wouldn’t really
improve your conlangs. But a couple of facts may be of interest.
Naively, we may feel that we speak a sound at a particular frequency.
Really the sound wave is composed of a series of harmonics at various
frequencies, with various peaks. The lowest peak is the FUNDAMENTAL
FREQUENCY, which we perceive as the pitch of the voice. The higher
peaks are called FORMANTS.
•
As you raise the pitch of your voice, the fundamental frequency
changes, but the formants do not.
•
The location of the formants changes for each vowel.
SOUNDS
49
Here’s a plot of the first two formants (Fi and F2) for a particular
speaker, in this case Canadian professor Kevin RusseU:
F.
1500
1
2000
1
300 400 -
• i
1000
_________ _ l _________
• u
• I
• e
• U
• 0
500 600 -
• 0
• e
• A
700 800 900 -
• se
• a
By this time, this picture should remind you of something—namely, the
charts of vowels earlier in the chapter. So now you know what’s really
going on: openness corresponds largely to variation in Fi, and frontness
to F2.
Russell’s web page (see the Web Resources page) contains a good short
introduction to acoustic phonetics.
FROM ELVISH
TO
KLlNqoN
Exploring Invented Languages
MICHAEL ADAMS
OXEORD
U N IV E R S IT Y PRESS
OXJFORD
U N IV E R S IT Y PRESS
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp
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First published 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,
or as expressly perm itted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate
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Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover
and yon must im pose the same condition on any acquirer
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Data available
Typeset in Minion by Cenveo, Bangalore, India
Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper by
Clays Ltd, St Ives pic
ISBN 978-0-19-280709-0
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
1 The Spectrum of Invention
Michael Adams
i
2 Confounding Babel: International Auxiliary
Languages Arden R. Smith
17
3 Invented Vocabularies: The Cases of Newspeak
and Nadsat Howard Jackson
49
4 Tolkien’s Invented Languages
Jeremy Marshall
75
E. S. C. Weiner and
5 ‘Wild and Whirling Words’: The Invention and
Use of Klingon Marc Okrand, Michael Adams,
Judith Hendriks-Hermans, and Sjaak Kroon
111
6 Gaming Languages and Language Games
135
James Portnow
7 ‘Oirish’ Inventions: James Joyce, Samuel Beckett,
Paul Muldoon Stephen Watt
161
8 Revitalized Languages as Invented Languages
Suzanne Romaine
185
APPENDICES
1 Owning Language
227
2 Esperanto’s Zenith
234
3 Nadsat and the Critics
242
4 Tolkien’s Languages: A Brief Anthology of Commentary
249
Contents
*
Advanced BQingon
256
L4ngu4ge G4m35 in G4ming I4ngu4g35
261
The Case for Synthetic Scots
266
A Reconstructed Universal Language
272
Index
279
VI
I rK J
TIi € Spec+runi of
Invention
MICHAEL ADAMS
Jtv€ry
year, thousands of English professors in the United States,
perhaps around the world, receive a circular offering them ‘Shakespeare
in the original language’—Klingon, the invented language of a warrior
race in the invented future world of the television and film franchise.
Star Trek. There are scholars of Klingon: they have written grammars
and lexicons of the language, as well as translations, and they communi
cate with one another in refereed journals, one of them written entirely
in BQingon (see Appendix 5 ). They treat Klingon as though it were a
natural language, like English or Chinese, but Klingonists had to invent
the language in order to write about it. To many of the circular’s recipi
ents, the enterprise of translating great literature into a ‘fake’ language
seems plain silly; they probably beheve the scholars responsible for it are
inhabitants of a lunatic fringe.
Language, the kind in which we speak and write every day, began as
a biological and social phenomenon in prehistory. From that hypothet
ical point forward, almost all of the world’s languages have developed
1
TIi € Sp€ctrMHi of Invention
* -------------------------------------------------------------------
from the proto-language. Every new ‘natural’ language, when it was
new, was a fresh sprig from an ancient root. One might think the
plethora of naturally developed languages sufficient for human pur
poses, but invented languages suggest otherwise: inventing a language
is intimidating work; no one would attempt to invent one unless
driven by a serious purpose or aspiration.
And also by a sense that the language we have isn’t always the language
we want. As Suzanne Romaine writes later in this book (Chapter 8),
‘A similarity of purpose and motivation drives inventors of all new
languages whether in the real or fictional world. The perceived need for
them arises from dissatisfaction with the current linguistic state of affairs.
Recognition that language can be used for promoting or changing the
social, cultural, and political order leads to conscious intervention and
manipulation of the form of language, its status, and its uses.’ Natural
languages are themselves responsible for the dissatisfaction. As Arika
Okrent notes in her excellent, partially participatory account. In the Land
o f Invented Languages, ‘The primary motivation for inventing a new lan
guage has been to improve upon natural language, to eliminate its design
flaws, or rather the flaws it has developed for lack of conscious desigii
Looked at that way, invented languages almost seem inevitable: ‘Why not
build a better language?’. It is no surprise that ‘the urge to invent lan
guages is as old and persistent as language itself’ (Okrent 2009, 11- 12).
Invented languages are curious artefacts of culture and may be
worth investigating on that basis alone. But they are really much more
than curiosities. For one thing, there are many more invented lan
guages than one might guess—we know about nearly a thousand
around the world and throughout history, in fact, and we can only
guess at how many schemes ended up in the fire or a mouse’s nest.
Okrent (2009 , 298 - 314 ) provides a splendid, comprehensive list, but it
is incomplete nonetheless, because people insist on inventing yet more
languages. For instance, a Parisian under the pseudonym Frederic
Werst recently published Ward (2011 ), a novel in W ardw es^ (with a
parallel French translation), a language over which he has laboured
2
Tht Spfctrwivi of Invention
--------------------------------------------- « ------------- --------------------------------
for decades (Sage 2011 ). When everything is counted up, there have
been roughly as many invented languages as there are natural ones,
though, of course, the invented languages occasion relatively little use.
Klingon is not alone, in other words, and many other invented lan
guages are also culturally significant, with magnitude of significance
in the eye of the beholder: Modern Hebrew, Esperanto, Orwell’s
Newspeak, and the languages of Tolkien’s Middle-earth come to mind.
In such company, and for good reasons, Klingon appears less silly, its
speakers at least somewhat less crazy.
The origin and development of each invented language illustrates its
inventor’s sense of language, what it is, and what it should do, in linguis
tic and historical terms; each also implies its inventors’ and users’ dis
satisfactions with the language(s) already available to them. As Okrent
suggests, this mirroring justifies a second, informed look at invented
languages, because ‘language refixses to be cured a n d ... it succeeds, not
in spite of, but because of the very qualities that the language inventors
have tried to engineer away’ (2009, 17). But invented languages do much
more than scratch the itch of natural language: each expresses one or
more among a wide range of purposes and aspirations—political, social,
aesthetic, intellectual, and technological. Each invention originates in a
complex human motive. Even more than natural languages, invented
languages both reflect and urge the cultures in which they are proposed,
appreciated, and occasionally even used.
Recovering the language of Adam
Language—you can’t live with it and you can’t five without it.
Dissatisfaction with natural language is really a psychopathological dis
satisfaction with being human, because language’s design flaws, not to
mention the mutual unintelligibility of the world’s many languages, are
OUR FAULT. At least, that’s how the story goes. As the literary historian
Russell Fraser puts it, ‘In the Garden of Eden, Adam spoke a language in
which one word conveyed the root meaning of one thing without the
3
TIi € Sp€C+rtiWi of |iiv€iition
-------------------------------- --------------------------------
possibility of confusion. His language was semiotic’ ( 1977, ix). Or, per
haps we should say it was ‘onomastic’, a language of names, for ‘out of the
ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of
the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them;
and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name’
(Genesis 2 :19). We still exercise this prerogative (see Appendix 8).
Though fallen from grace and expelled from Eden, humankind appar
ently continued to speak this language of one-to-one correspondences
between words and things, but this linguistic purity, like all terrestrial
purity, was too good to last. Our presumptuous ancestors attempted to
build a tower to Heaven, and a jealous God was displeased:
Now the whole earth had one language and few words ... And they
said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the
heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves ’... And the Lord came
down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built.
And the Lord said, ‘Behold, they are one people, and they have aU
one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and
nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.
Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, that they
may not understand one another’s speech’. So the Lord scattered them
abroad from there over the face of aU the earth, and they left off build
ing the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord
confused the language of aU the earth. (Genesis 11:1-9)
Ever since, language engineers have attempted to build not just a better
language, but the original language, in order to unify the peoples of the
world and, let’s be honest, to regain Eden and our innocence, to reach a
perfect human state by means of unambiguous speech and clear com
munication. Inventing the perfect language, however, is a lot like build
ing a tower to Heaven—enterprising, yes, but already proscribed, history
doomed to repeat itself, so we shouldn’t expect success any time soon.
This impeccable logic has not deterred language inventors. Recovering
the language of Adam, after all, would make a career—a sort of linguistic
alchemy, it is the ultimate, elusive challenge. In the seventeenth century.
4
T1i€ SpedTMkvi of Inveiotion
------------------------------ * -----------------------------it was an inteEectual preoccupation of scholars across Europe, who pur
sued, as Arden Smith explains later in this book (see Chapter 2 ), ‘what
was called a “real character”: a universal written language that could be
understood by speakers of all tongues’ People who harbour this ambi
tion aren’t crazy, exactly, but, as Fraser puts it, ‘They are profoundly
optimistic’ ( 1977, x). And though no one, not the seventeenth-century
scholars nor the inventors o f twentieth-century logical languages like
Loglan (see Appendix 1), has ever reconstructed Adam’s language or
convinced any great number of people that they have, the attempt to
purge language of ambiguity has produced valuable by-products. Fraser
points out that ‘the mathematical research of John Wallis anticipates the
discovery of the differential calculus’ ( 1977, 82), and we wouldn’t want
to do without the differential calculus or
the symbol Wallis invented
to mean ‘infinity’. Inventing languages, even if they don’t turn out as we
hope they wiU, is hardly a waste of time.
Are all invented languages essays in the language of Adam, or at least
in linguistic perfection? Arguably, no, yet the myth is often at least in
the backs of the inventors’ and users’ minds. Its presence is felt most
strongly in the creation of International Auxiliary Languages (lALs)
like Esperanto, Volapiik, Spokil, and many others, which direcdy
address the ‘interlinguistic problem’ of mutual unintelligibUity, whether
God confounded human language or it got confusing all on its own
(see Chapter 2 and Appendix 2 ). But when a community is first dis
persed and then relocated (as in the case of Jews and Israel), or when a
minority language is overwhelmed by the hegemony of an authorized
one (as in the case of Cornish and English),, then reconstruction (of
languages like Modern Hebrew and Cornish) shares some purposes
with the quest for Adam’s lost language (see Chapter 8).
The languages Tolkien invented for the peoples of Middle-earth,
especially the Elves, are not attempts to recover or even to imitate Adam’s
language, but they are aspirational, in two senses that correspond to
the centuries-old search for it. First, Tolkien laboured for decades at
his Elvish languages, and even if he didn’t intend them to represent
5
Tlie Spectrum of Invention
----------------------------- ----------------------------universally perfect language, he wanted them perfect in themselves,
and he clearly thought they were beautiful, as do many of his readers
(see Chapter 4). Second, Tolkien also enjoyed the challenge of doing
something inconceivable to most people; for him, inventing languages
was as irresistible as Everest to the mountain-climber. He loved English
and other natural languages, but he thought he could make something
as good, maybe better, because ‘a living language ... is not constructed’,
so is misaligned with our linguistic needs, ‘and only by rare felicity will
it say what we wish it to’ (Tolkien 1983, 218). I guess that amounts to
one sort of dissatisfaction Romaine and Okrent have in mind. In The
Lord o f the Rings, the Elves are about to return to Valinor from their
exile in Middle-earth, a paradise regained. Perhaps there is a whiff of
the Garden of Eden about Elvish after all.
In the dystopian worlds of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and
Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, invented language functions
in an anti-language of Adam. Burgess’s anti-hero, Alex, glibly distracts
us and himself from the violence he perpetrates with his Nadsat, the
criminal argot of teens in his time. Alex’s England is no other Eden,
demi-paradise, nor his language, the language invented for him, Eden’s
language; rather, both are dark, moralized consequences of Babel, the
mutual unintelligibility and anti-sociality of people living on the same
street. Where the language of Adam is unambiguous, transparent,
Orwell’s Newspeak is deHberately obscure, a language of prevarication,
not the one with which Adam delved and called a spade a spade. Yet
without the very notion of the language of Adam, would its antithesis
be possible? The language of Adam may figure, however minutely, in
many an invented language, but even as it serves as a unifying theme,
we must consider the variety of invented languages as well.
The spectrum of invention
We continually create new words in order to fill lexical gaps, where
there are things or concepts not yet covered by words; we encounter
6
TIi € Sp€ctrwni of lnv€h+ioii
-------------------------------- * --------------------------------
new species of flora or fauna, new physical entities (quark), political
and financial institutions change (freedom fries ‘French fries’ [see
Chapter 8], euro ‘unit of currency’), we create new products and
services and so also create brand names and trademarks for them. In
the journal Am erican Speech, the column ‘A mong the New Words’,
currently written by Ben Zimmer and Charles Carson, is a quarterly
chronicle of this phenomenon, though it captures only a tiny fraction
of new words, many of which are coined on the fly, for specific but
ephemeral purposes. While natural languages depend on (relatively)
stable structures, their vocabulary is constantly renewed, but what
we do naturally and inevitably, even when it’s creative, is not usually
classified as ‘invention.
A good bit of new vocabulary, the ephemeral part of it, is slang.
Slang is interesting in the current context because it lies at one end of
the spectrum of linguistic invention. As I argue in Slang: The People’s
Poetry (2009), slang is ‘inevitable’ in a sense: social animals, we are
always more or less simultaneously attempting to fit in and stand out,
and slang is a means of doing so. It’s a mode of performance that iden
tifies us, marks aflUiation with one group but not another, and amounts
to poetry in everyday speech. As Barry J. Blake observes, ‘Language is
a means of communication, but a good deal of language use’, including
slang, ‘is deliberately obscure’ (2010,1). We can be vague in everyday
speech in our familiar natural language, but ‘deliberation’ is a step
towards ‘invention.
According to Blake, ‘Slang expressions tend to be self-consciously
inventive, but some are rather forced and probably too clever to achieve
wide circulation or longevity’ (2010,203). ‘Self-consciously inventive’ is
obviously a step beyond mere ‘inventioii Surely, it is the linguistic attitude
of the genius at SlangSite.com who invented the word accipurpodentally
‘accidentally on purpose’, who doubtless revelled in the pleasures of
lexifabricography, another item included in SlangSite’s dictionary.
Slang is itself‘accipurpodental’, and the focus o f‘lexifabricography’ is on
fabrication. Slang is inventive language and is usually invented, though
7
T1i € Spectruu^ of lnv€Htiovi
--------------------------------------------------------------------------- It- --------------------------------------------------------------------------
many common items are used without speakers retaining any sense of
that invention—it is not an invented language, however, though, like
slang, some kinds of invented languages are ‘forced and probably too
clever to achieve wide circulation’.
According to Paul Baker, Polari is ‘a secret language mainly used by
gay men and lesbians, in London and other UK cities with an estab
lished gay subculture, in the first 70 or so years of the twentieth cen
tury’ (2002,2), an amalgam of criminal cant, theatre jargon, back and
rhyming slang, Romani, Yiddish, and many other elements, with some
unique grammatical features. Baker provides the following example:
‘Well hello ducky, it’s bona to vada your dolly old eek again. Order to
your mother dear. Take the lattie on wheels did you? Fantabuloas! Oh
vada that cod omee-palone in the naff goolie lally drags. Vada her
gildy ogle fakes! Get dooey versa! I’ve nanti dinarly!’ (2002,2).
Most people would consider Polari a specific slang, but it is, from
a structural point of view, wonderfully complex. As Baker concludes,
‘In reference to Polari, I have also had to consider the question “What
is a language?” carefully. Although some speakers used Polari in a
complex and-creative way that meant it was mutually uninteUigible
to outsiders, others merely employed it as a limited lexicon’, so ‘Polari
cannot be called a language in the same way that English, French,
Italian etc. are languages’ (2002,154). But among well-versed speakers
and at the peak of its development, Polari was more than just words;
slang is not a language but is sometimes a step closer to one than
‘mere’ vocabulary (see Adams 2009,165-73).
In order to characterize Eolari, Baker, following the linguist Michael
Halliday, finally settled on a linguistic category called ‘anti-language’:
Anti-languages can provide (multiple) lexical items for concepts con
sidered important to a particular ‘anti-society’—they allow the anti
society to remain hidden, the shared language acts as a bonding
mechanism and means of identification, and, most importantly, the
anti-language allows its users to construct an alternative social reality
and alternative identities for themselves. (2002,154)
8
T1i € Sptctrwkvi of lnv€Htioii
-------------------------------- * --------------------------------
Burgess’ Nadsat certainly serves this purpose for Alex and his cro
nies in A Clockwork Orange, but lALs and Klingon serve similar pur
poses for their users. These purposes aren’t exclusive—you can learn
Esperanto to promote world peace, but that would be an alternative
social reahty, and Esperantist is an alternative identity, the shared
language a means of bonding with fellow Esperantists. Inventing
languages and using invented languages are all about alternatives
that express, if not quite ‘anti-’, at least a certain dissatisfaction with
language available around us.
In Slang: The People’s Poetry I argue that slang self-consciously
tests the parameters of language, what is possible, what you can get
away with, and so is always, in a very strong sense, an anti-language.
An invented language, the creation or use of it, similarly tests lan
guage, but with a much higher level of commitment. I also argue that
slang is poetic, and in a review of the book, Marcel Danesi suggests
that I am pointing to an ‘originating force of poeticism, revealing the
presence of a creative impulse in humans in the ways they create and
use language’, a ‘poetic competence’ (2010, 507-B) parallel and allied
to linguistic competence (the innate ability to learn language) and
communicative competence (the innate ability to use language in
human affairs).
Poetry, or the poetic impulse, is thus inseparable from language,
and, like slang, an invented language is an expression—a sustained,
detailed, ambitious expression—of that impulse. While many think
inventing languages is odd from a linguistic point of view (it might
otherwise be justified by goals like constructing the alternative world
of a fiction, or promoting world peace, or making money), it isn’t
really. It’s perfectly natural to test ‘the limits and systems of discourse’
(Fraser 1977) by means of the ‘originating force of poeticism’; indeed,
such testing may be essential to full ownership of language. Perhaps
taking the trouble of inventing a whole language is overdoing it, but
Okrent is right that invented languages are actually always about natu
ral ones and about the linguistic and communicative competencies
9
TIi € Sp€c+rMi/M of Invention
------------------------4 -----------------------------underlying our language behaviour, whatever else they may also be
about.
Because self-consciously inventive language, like slang, and full
blown invented languages, like Esperanto and Tolkien’s Elvish, share so
many characteristics and yet are generally distinguishable from one
another, it is best to see them on a spectrum of linguistic invention. The
caveat generally’ is necessary because it is hard to tell whether Polari
(following the colour spectrum) is red, like slang, or orange, or on the
verge of orange; or whether Klingon, which isn’t yet fully developed or
codified, belongs in the same colour as Elvish or Volapiik, for which the
rules are more fully elaborated. This book attempts to illustrate various
points along the spectrum, so includes chapters on vocabularies like
Newspeak and Nadsat, as weR as languages with complete grammars,
like lALs and reconstructed languages. It includes a chapter on lin
guistic invention in literary style, not just ‘inventive’ language (which
we expect from James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Paul Muldoon, the
subjects of the chapter in question) but ‘self-conscious invention’ of
idiosyncratic authorial anti-language (writers are always dissatisfied
with the language they are given), invention more as a matter of
practice than of principle, it might be said. Of course, the full-blown
invented languages come into this account as well.
The spectrum o f m otives
Invention of a whole language, or of language on a smaller scale,
then, can be driven by any number of motives. There is no reason to
assume that each invention depends on one and only one motive,
or even on one and only one type of motive. 'Ihough we accept the
‘negative’ motive that dissatisfaction with available natural languages
drives invention of alternative languages, positive motives are also
plausible. This book illustrates as many motives for inventing lan
guages as the language or languages investigated in the various chap
ters support.
10
The Spec+ruikvi of luveto+ion
------------------------------ * -----------------------------Certainly, there are linguistic motives for inventing a language. For
instance, one might fill a ‘language gap’, that is, supply a language for a
group, fictional or real, otherwise without an adequate language—
Klingon was invented partially from this motive, as are reconstructed
languages, like Modern Hebrew and Hawaiian (see Chapters 5 and 8,
as well as Appendix 8). One might invent a language like Loglan (dis
cussed briefly in Appendix 1) in order to explore what is linguistically
possible, to probe linguistic limits, truths, assumptions, etc., or like
any number of lALs in order to fulfil hnguistic possibilities (simplicity,
for instance) left unreaUzed in natural languages (see .Chapter 2 and
Appendix 2). One might also invent a language to practise linguistic
or philological technique (to some extent) for its own sake and to
accomplish difficult linguistic or philological things gracefully, with
out apparent effort (what Baldassare Castiglione, in The Book o f the^
Courtier (1528), calls sprezzatura, a word he invented to fill what he
saw as a lexical gap in Italian, with which, on this point, he was dis
satisfied). Tolkien’s languages are motivated thus (see Chapter 4), and
so is Klingon in its later stages of development (see Chapter 5 and
Appendix 5).
Though it captures a mode of conduct, sprezzatura is also an aes
thetic term: sprezzatura is evident in equestrian exercises, Rembrandt’s
brushstrokes, Mozart’s talent for composition, Oscar Wilde’s emi
nently quotable wit. As already suggested, hnguistic motives easily
cooperate with aesthetic ones. In inventing a language, one may aspire
to make a thing of beauty, as Tolkien did with Elvish (see Chapter 4).
Of course, beauty is in the eye o f the inventor, and some speakers find
Klingon more attractive than Elvish; Loglan’s attempt to make sym
bolic logic ‘speakable’ (see Appendix 1) suggests not only an interest
in a useful language, but one whose structure reflects mathematical
elegance. The inventor may also find aesthetic value in the very act
of invention (whatever the outcome): in his lecture about inventing
languages, ‘A Secret Vice’, Tolkien frequently mentions and sometimes
discusses the pleasure of doing so. O f course, one may invent language
11
T1i € Spec+rwuo of Invention
-----------------------------
ik
-----------------------------
to promote plot, theme, or character in a literary work, as in A Clockwork
Orange (see Chapter 3), The Lord o f the Rings (see Chapter 4), Star Trek
(see Chapter 5), or various gaming worlds (see Chapter 6); to develop a
distinctive voice, as in Finnegans Wake (see Chapter 7); or to promote
the interactivity essential to a satisfying multiplayer online role-playing
game experience (see Chapter 6).
Inventing a language may also be a political act: reconstructed
and renewed languages (Neo-breton or Maori, for instance) identify
cultural space and celebrate cultural heritage (see Chapter 8), while
lALs attempt to erase linguistic borders in the interest of universal
understanding and the world peace to which it supposedly would give
birth (see Chapter 2). Inventing a language may promote intersections
of culture and ideology, or provide political or cultural voice to those
silenced or inhibited by natural language (or the lack of it), for instance
by Irish or Scottish writers dissatisfied with British English (for both
motives, see Chapter 7 and Appendix 7), or Hawaiians recovering
from the imperial domination of American English, or Jews establish
ing Israel with a language, Hebrew, that hadn’t been spoken in nearly
two millennia (see Chapter 8).
Many of the aforementioned converge with personal and biograph
ical motives. An inventor may be dissatisfied with natural language
on linguistic terms but also feel a profound sense of alienation with
surrounding circumstances prompting spiritual renewal in the imagi
nation, as in Tolkien’s recourse to inventing languages in the trenches
during the First World War (see Chapter 4). Or, invention may reflect
the inventors’ sense of affiliation with a social group, as with the slang
of online gamers (see Appendix 6). Or it may respond to an inventor’s
sense that being ‘inside’ a language has a spiritual dimension or that
making one up is spiritual exercise. In ‘A Secret Vice’, another of
Tolkien’s favourite words is personal.
Two other powerful personal motives are fame and money, some
times operating simultaneously, at others mutually exclusive. Certainly,
inventors of game languages or Klingon, working for profit-making
12
Tht Sptctrwkn of Invention
-----------------------------
-----------------------------
firms, have a financial stake in the languages they invent, whether in
the form of a salary or a proprietary interest. Uncovering the ‘secret’ of
language, recovering the language of Adam, like alchemy, could be
done for its own sake or for the motives outlined above. But it could
also be a means of making gold from base elements and thereafter
being rich as Croesus. Edward Rulloff, a nineteenth-century American
thief and murderer who was also a dedicated linguist, was, at the time
of his execution, writing what he supposed was the ultimate philo
logical work. He hoped to sell his book to a government or private
buyer for $500,000, sure that someone would buy it because knowl
edge, even philological knowledge, is power. Theft was merely a stop
gap, a series of advances he couldn’t wrangle from a pubUsher. You can
read the whole, unbelievable story in Richard W. Bailey’s linguistic
true-crime account. Rogue Scholar: The Sinister Life and Celebrated
Death o f Edw ard H. Rulloff (2003). Inventing a language or owning
one can be quite lucrative, and practical motives predominated
in invention of Klingon and the several gaming languages discussed
in Chapter 6, though the terms on which one can own language, even
a language, are complicated (see Appendix 1).
Still other motives for inventing a language are not only possible,
but amply illustrated in the ensuing chapters. Those outlined here are,
frankly, obvious, but human motivation is often subtle. The foEowing
passage from Tolkien’s ‘A Secret Vice’ shows just how subtle:
Some of you may have heard that there was, a year or more ago, a
Congress in Oxford, an Esperanto Congress; or you may not have
heard. Personally I am a believer in an ‘artificial’ language, at any rate
for Europe—a believer, that is, in its desirability, as the one thing ante
cedently necessary for uniting Europe, before it is swallowed by nonEurope; as well as for many other good reasons—a believer in its
possibility because the history of the world seems to exhibit, as far as
I know it, both an increase in human control of (or influence upon) the
uncontrollable, and a progressive widening of the range of more or less
uniform languages. Also I particularly like Esperanto, not least because
13
Th« Spfc+rwuo of Invention
it is the creation ultimately of one man, not a philologist, and is there
fore something like a ‘human language bereft of the inconveniences
due to too many successive cooks’—which is as good a description of
the ideal artificial language (in a particular sense) as I can give.
No doubt the Esperantist propaganda touched on all these points.
I cannot say. But it is not important, because my concern is not with
that kind of artificial language at all. You must tolerate the stealthy
approach. It is habitual. But in any case my real subject tonight is a
stealthy subject. Indeed nothing less embarrassing than the unveiling in
public of a secret vice. Had I boldly and brazenly begun right on my
theme I might have called my paper a plea for a New Art, or a New
Game, if occasional and painful confidences had not given me grave
cause to suspect that the vice, though secret, is common; and the art (or
game), if new at all, has at least been discovered by a good many other
people independently. (Tolkien 1983,198)
Tolkien’s motive, private pleasure in linguistic invention, is
approached obliquely, by contrasting the type of language he invents
with what it is not (that is, an lAL). Is inventing languages a New Art
or a New Game? In raising the possibility of ‘game’, Tolkien has anti
cipated one of the subtler motives identified by James Portnow in his
chapter on gaming languages, below.
The plan of this book
Including this introduction, this book comprises eight chapters.
Chapter 2, by Arden Smith, who has a Ph.D. in Linguistics from
the University of California at Berkeley and is a noted scholar of
Tolkien’s languages, is about International Auxiliary Languages from
seventeenth-century interest in a ‘real character’ into the twentieth
century—it is an impeccably informed and breathtaking survey, with
an unusual emphasis on Volapiik, a predecessor of the more famous
Esperanto, which is also discussed in some detail. Chapter 3, by Howard
Jackson, now retired from a career as a professor of linguistics, writes
14
TIi€ Sp€ctrwi/n o f |iov€h+ioh
----------------------------- ----------------------------informatively and insightfully about Orwell’s Newspeak and Burgess’
Nadsat, two invented vocabularies prominent in the popular imagina
tion, but not always understood, at least in terms of the motives for
their invention. Chapter 4, on the languages of Middle-earth, is writ
ten by E. S. C. Weiner and Jeremy Marshall of the O ^ o rd English
D ictionary, co-authors with Peter Gilliver of a splendid book about
Tolkien and the OED, The Ring o f Words (2006). Klingon is the subject
of Chapter 5, written partly by Marc Okrand, who invented the lan
guage, and partly by Judith Hendriks-Hermans and Sjaak Kroon,
who have considered it sociolinguistically—I have stitched thencontributions into a chapter, adding a fair amount of material in the
process, and acknowledge myself (unexpectedly) as a co-author. James
Portnow, game designer and game design journalist, has contributed
Chapter 6 which, I believe, is the first serious account of languages
invented for online role-playing games. My colleague Stephen Watt, of
Indiana University, has supplied a sophisticated and wide-ranging
chapter on linguistic invention in the work of major modern Irish
writers (Joyce, Beckett, and Muldoon, with some Shaw added for per
spective). Finally, Suzanne Romaine, one of the world’s pre-eminent
linguists, has contributed Chapter 8, bn reconstructed and renewed
languages.
The several chapters discuss the origin and development of the
relevant languages, describe their structures and vocabularies, their
fictional purposes (when they are languages of fiction), their social
purposes (when they operate in the real world or some hybrid of real
and imagined worlds, as in games), and the motives behind their
making. The book assumes that people invent languages for good
reasons, and that it’s our business as authors and editor to expose and
clarify them—we hope readers will read about them critically, but
with sympathy.
For each chapter there is a complementary appendix, written by
me, the editor. In some cases, appendices particularize topics raised in
their chapters; in others, they introduce new but related topics; in all
15
Th« Sp€ctrwno o f Invention
------------------------------ ----------------------------cases, they attempt to bring chapters into contact with one another, to
make something whole out of several chapters by even severaller
hands. I suppose that I have tried to invent a book from what I was
given, but not from dissatisfaction. Rather, on reading the chapters,
I realized how rich the book’s argument is and wondered whether,
perhaps, we could, well, not recover the language of Adam, but never
theless understand something about the relations between language
and human nature, not by means of what human nature gives, but by
what we can make of it.
References
Adams, Michael. 2009. Slang: The People’s Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bailey, Richard W. 2003. Rogue Scholar: The Sinister Life and Celebrated Death o f
Edward H. Rulloff. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Baker, Paul. 2002. Polari— The Lost Language o f Gay M en. London and New York:
Routledge.
Blake, Barry J. 2010. Secret Language: Codes, Tricks, Spies, Thieves, and Symbols.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Danesi, Marcel. 2010. ‘The forms and functions of slang’. Semiotica 182; 507-17.
Fraser, Russell. 1977. The Language o f Adam : On the Limits and Systems o f Discourse.
New York; Columbia University Press.
Gilliver, Peter, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner. 2006. The Ring o f Words: Tolkien
and the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
May, Herbert G., and Bruce M. Metzger. 1977. The N ew Oxford A nnotated Bible with
Apocrypha. New York: Oxford University Press.
Okrent, Arika. 2009. In the Land o f Invented Languages. New York: Spiegel 8c Grau.
Sage, Adam. 2011. ‘What’s the Wardwesan for ...? After 20 years of toil, Fr^ddric Werst
has published a book in a language that no one understands’. The Times (2 February);
4-5.
Tolkien, J. R. R. 1983. ‘A Secret Vice’. In The M onsters and the Critics and O ther Essays,
edited by Christopher Tolkien, 198-223. Boston; Houghton Mifflin.
Werst, Fr6d^ric. 2011. Ward. Paris; Editions du Seuil.
In this module, we learned the basic phonological patterns in natural languages and
how those did or did not feed Klingon phonology. We also learned that the functions of
an invented language are sometimes associated with the phonological characteristics of
the language (e.g. Klingon has characteristics that are not common in human
languages, as Klingon is a language spoken by non-humans).
Now pick one motivation for inventing a language and suppose you are creating a
language driven by the motivation. Share your ideas with your classmates on the
following points.
1. What is the motivation that you chose?
2. What phonological characteristics do you want your language to have? (Give
at least one characteristic)
3. Why do you want your language to have those characteristics? Explain,
referring to the motivation
In a page, summarize the story of the 'Queen of Sheeba and the founding of the
Solomonic kingdom’.
Wild
Whirling
Words:
The lhv€htioh
Use of Klihcjoh
MARC OKRAND, MICHAEL ADAMS,
JUDITH HENDRIKS-HERMANS, AND SJAAK KROON
Accord ihcj to the 2006 edition of the Guinness Book of World
Records, the world’s ‘largest fictional language’ is Klingon. Though the
hook acknowledges that there is no way of knowing how many speak
ers the language actually has, it nonetheless asserts that ‘there is little
doubt’ that Klingon is the ‘most widely used language of its kind’. The
appropriateness of the listing, of course, depends on what other lan
guages ‘of its kind’ there may be and, perhaps more fundamentally, on
what ‘kind’ of language Klingon is.
Klingon is a constructed language tied to a fictional context, rather
than a constructed language like Esperanto (see Chapter 2) or a recon
structed one like Modern Hebrew (see Chapter 8) intended for use
among speakers in everyday circumstances. Klingon started out as
111
The Invention i^nd Use o f Klinsjon
I
------------------------------------------» -------------------------------------------
1
1
nothing more than a few Hnes of dialogue in a film, and, once devised,
owes its current shape as much to the practicalities of moviemaking as
it does to careful design, and its place in the record book—deserved
or not—to the phenomenon known as Star Trek. Arika Okrent, in her
very informative and clever book. In the Land of Invented Languages,
asserts that ‘Klingon is a solution to an artistic problem, not a ling
uistic one’ (2009, 282), intended to enhance the fiction of Star Trek
by more fully realizing the speech of those populating the imagined
universe of the films and television shows that make up the Star Trek
franchise. In a sense, then, in the case of Klingon, necessity was the
mother of invention.
■
Origins
Klingon is a language devised for the Klingons, a fictional race of
humanoids sometimes allied with but more often in conflict with mem
bers of the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek movies, television
programmes, video games, and novels. Klingons first appeared in
‘Errand of Mercy’ (23 March 1967), an episode of the original Star Trek
television series, in 1967. In a later episode that same year, ‘The Trouble
with Tribbles’ (29 December 1967), the fact that Klingons spoke their
own language was first noted (one character boasts that half of the
inhabitants in their quadrant of the galaxy are learning to speak
‘Klingonese’). Other than character names (and the word ‘Klingon’),
however, no ‘Klingonese’ was ever spoken in the original Star Trek
television series, which stopped producing new episodes in 1969.
After a ten-year hiatus, the series re-emerged on the big screen with
the premiere of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). The first several
lines of dialogue in the film are spoken by a Klingon captain in a lan
guage never heard before, translated in subtitles. Before his fleet of
ships mysteriously vanishes, within the first few minutes of the film,
the captain barks out half a dozen or so commands (subtitled) and
also gives what is presumably a description of his fleet’s circumstances
4
TIi€ |iiv€ntioM A,nd Use of Kliii
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