Master file esperanto, Elvish, and Beyond: The World of Constructed Languages Revision 04/01/08 Title: Esperanto, Elvish, and Beyond: The World of Constructed Languages Original Exhibit Dates

The Conlang Manifesto

David J. Peterson

This is particularly why I find the condemnation of language creation by linguists so befuddling. Aside from art, though, language creation has other uses. First, creating a language allows one to better understand language itself. One who creates an ergative language is far more likely to understand ergativity in natural languages than one who does not, I say. What's more, this same understanding can ease foreign language learning considerably—not to mention linguistics itself. More importantly, it gets one thinking about the multifariousness and beauty of language, and one who can appreciate this is less likely to misunderstand, deprecate and stereotype those speaking other languages, which is one of the main causes of racism and ethnocentrism. In short, language creation is one of the keys to social harmony and world peace. If one is going to take anything seriously, certainly world peace is it, and if so, shouldn't language creation be given some credit too?

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Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange is a masterpiece of conlang fiction. Burgess constructed the teen “slanguage” of Nadsat using a brilliant combination of Russian, Cockney English, and other languages. The reader learns Nadsat as the story progresses, allowing the violent world of Alex and his droogs to unfold, literally, in their own words.
2.C.1. Image: Cover of The Color of Distance

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In Harry Harrison's West of Eden, dinosaurs have evolved into intelligent beings known as Yilané. But their old cities are dying, and they must colonize a new land across the ocean to survive. On an expedition, they find the land already occupied by humans and capture a child. The boy Kerrick must learn to live among the reptiles and learn their language, where one misunderstanding can mean the difference between life and death. The story continues in Winter in Eden and Return to Eden.
2.F.1. Image: Cover of Watership Down

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This classic work of speculative fiction contains what Jeffrey Henning of Langmaker.com has called "arguably the best naming language ever created" and "a minimalist virtuoso performance, a haiku of a language compared to the sonnet of [J.R.R. Tolkien's] Sindarin." Richard Adams gives us a glimpse of the rabbits' distinctive language (Lapine) and culture in Watership Down with sentences like: "But a Mark that's on ni-Frith and fu-Inlé silflay can generally spare Owsla for a Wide Patrol."
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Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc'd it to you, trippingly on the tongue.

~ Shakespeare, Hamlet (Act III, Scene 2)
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Suppose someone to assert: The gostak distims the doshes. You do not know what this means; nor do I. But if we assume that it is English, we know that the doshes are distimmed by the gostak.

~ C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning (This sentence illustrates the ability to discern relative meanings of words from a sentence’s construction.)
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I personally think we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.

~ Jane Wagner, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (as performed by Lily Tomlin)
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Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen.

~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kunst und Alterthum

CASE 3 CASE TITLE: Conlangers’ Inspiration: Languages & Linguistics
3.A. Text (Introductory Text at top of case under case header):

Conlangers, by the very nature of their craft, are intensely interested in languages and how they work. A few conlangers have chosen linguistics as a profession, but most are simply amateurs fascinated by the intricacies of syntax, grammar, phonology, and vocabulary of languages as diverse as English, French, Basque, Georgian, Tibetan, Zulu, and Murrinh-Patha. They assuage their curiosity by learning the differences between phonemes and morphemes, in investigating different case systems, and in collecting as much information as they can about how people across the world communicate. Conlangers then apply this knowledge to creating a language to see how these different facets of communication interact in a new context. Eventually, when they are confronted by a novel challenge or need a new way to construct a phrase, conlangers will once again plunge into the deep well of languages and surface with yet another interesting specimen with which to work.

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“The Conlanger’s ‘Bible’”

“Even though this book is intended for linguists doing fieldwork, it is an absolute must for those who create languages for fun. Why? Well, the purpose of the book is to teach a fieldworker how to write a descriptive grammar for the language s/he's working on. It points out everything that should be recorded, and gives examples of different phenomena from different languages. Well, guess what? A language creator is essentially a fieldworker working on an undiscovered language: his/her own. This book will guide a language creator in creating a grammar of his/her own language, and, when you get stuck, it's always helpful to see how natural languages do things. As a language creator, I highly recommend this book to anyone who creates languages.” ~ Amazon.com review by David J. Peterson
3.C.1. IMAGE: Photo of Noam Chomsky

SOURCE: http://www.spunk.org/library/writers/chomsky/images/sp000321.jpg

SOURCE: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/6/6e/20061014164127!Chomsky.jpg

Attribute to”

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Noam Chomsky

The MOST INFLUENTIAL and MOST CONTROVERSIAL figure in modern linguistics

“Chomsky has been called Copernican, Newtonian, Einsteinian, Planck-like. For both its significance and its revolutionary character, his work has been compared to that of Spinoza, Pierce, Wittgenstein, Darwin, and Freud. He is an angel, a God, an enfant terrible. Supporters criticize him with the inevitable caveat ‘Noam Chomsky is one of the half-dozen great geniuses of the twentieth century.’...Alternately, Chomsky has been described as satanic, the Enemy, a crank, an embarrassment. Generative linguistics [Chomsky’s theory of language] has been called a cult; generative linguists have been described as ‘born again.’... Today, people writing in Internet mailing lists work themselves into apoplectic rages about statements he allegedly made twenty years ago.” ~ Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (Viking, 2007) (Photo by Duncan Rawlinson.)

3.D.2. Image: Cover of Teach Yourself Finnish

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Case Systems:

Making a Single Word Do Extra Duty
A case system is where each word in a language receives a number of affixes to signify its function in a sentence. Putting a word through its paces in a case system is known as declining it or its declension. The one most familiar to many is Latin:
Declension of agricola “farmer”