tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jul 05 00:41:41 1993
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House languages
Tolkien's achievement is certainly a remarkable one -- perhaps even
unprecedented. That a person could invent a set of languages "from
scratch", with enough depth and internal cohesion that a whole
community of people actually bother to learn (about) them and discuss
them... Truly remarkable.
I started thinking about the idea of a "house language". Tolkien
includes languages like that, as does Frank Herbert in the Dune books
(although it helps a lot if you've got multi-generation total recall,
I suppose). More specifically, I was thinking about how I'd go about
coming up with a house language for *my* house. My wife and I both
speak English, Cantonese and French, and so usually have a language
available that nobody knows but us. Our three children speak English,
a little Cantonese, and no French -- which means that my wife and I
use French as our "secret" language when the kids are around.
Let's say that we wanted a secret language that only our "house"
speaks. It would have to have the following attributes:
- Very easy grammar.
- Easy to generate enough vocabulary to talk about pretty much
anything that we want to.
- Phonetically easy, but "foreign sounding". (That knocks Khoisa
right out. :-)
Basically, I could either pick an invented language or a natural
language. I know of basically two classes of invented languages:
- Artificial languages like Esperanto, Volapuk, Ido, etc, designed to
be learned by a lot of people as a neutral second (world) language.
- Imaginary languages like Quenya and Klingon, invented by somebody to
lend verisimitude to a (usually alien) culture and people.
Some obvious choices among natural languages are:
- A Creole. Creoles are generally pretty simple languages. Either a
French Creole (Haitian, Reunion, ...) or an English Creole (Belize,
Lesser Antilles, ...) would be a good candidate. These have the
advantage of being living languages, spoken by a bunch of people
(Lesser Antillean Creole has nearly 1,000,000 speakers), but are
*really* easy. On the other hand, they're way toward the "slangy"
end of the spectrum.
- Something else with few speakers and an easy grammar. There are
maybe 6,000 languages out there, only fewer than 200 of which are
spoken by 1,000,000 or more. Surely there's *something* out there
somewhere that fits the bill. We could be the first family on our
block to talk about whether to order pizza or Thai food -- in
Samoan! :-)
Among invented languages:
- Esperanto. It's a complete language, with a literature, and
linguistic community, etc, etc. Hardly anybody speaks it, so it'd
be pretty "safe" as a secret language. Could even use it to comment
source code (except that there are groups in Europe that do that).
One major "problem" is that it's *really* easy to understand even if
you've never heard it before. It was designed to be. So it sort of
loses as a "secret language", except maybe in the US. :-)
- Quenya. Certainly sufficiently "foreign". The major problem is
that it's no less complex linguistically than other (?) natural
languages. It'd be hard to learn -- I can't imagine getting to the
point where I could converse with my 10 year old in it.
- Klingon. To some extent, the same problems as with Quenya. The
difference is that, mind-boggling though it might seem, there is
actually a Klingon Language Camp. It also has a non-latin script
and a standard latin transcription (Okrand's, from his Klingon
Dictionary). The major problems are that the existing vocabularly
is pretty tiny, and that it was *designed* to be a very harsh
sounding language. I'm not sure that I want to draw *that* much
attention when speaking it.
- We could make something up. I suppose I could start with something
else as a grammatical base, plug in some phonetics, write a program
with some Bayesian heuristics to generate a core vocabulary...
Hmmm. Has anybody written a language generator program?
So... what does the collective wisdom of the net think? What's the
best way to come up with a house language?
_________________________________________________________________
Scott Deerwester | The Hong Kong University of
Internet: [email protected] | Science and Technology
Phone: (852) 358-6985 | Department of Computer Science
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