It’s well known that JRR Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings cycle to create people to speak the languages he had invented. But, in the television age, artificially created or invented languages – we call them “conlangs” – have been gaining increasing attention with the popularity of television series such as Star Trek and Game of Thrones, and films such as Avatar.
Fantasy and science fiction are the ideal vehicles for conlangs. Marc Okrand, an American linguist whose core research area is Native American languages, invented Klingon for Star Trek, while Paul Frommer of the University of Southern California created the Na’vi language for Avatar.
The fantasy series Game of Thrones involved several languages, including Dothraki and Valyrian, which were created by David J Peterson, a “conlanger” who has invented languages for several other shows. Most recently, fantasy thriller The City and The City featured the language Illitan, created by Alison Long of Keele University in the UK.
I teach how to construct languages and one question my students usually ask is: “How do I make a perfect language?” I need to warn that it’s impossible to make a language “perfect” – or even “complete”. Rather, an invented language is more likely to be appropriate for the context – convincing and developed just enough to work in the desired environment. But here are a few things to bear in mind.
With the current Big Data and Map reduce there are several online projects that constantly try to play with words Don’t forget the Natural Language processing (NLP) that is intended for even robots or AI to understand Language.
A perfect language can actually be a simple software filter that would scan large quantities of all the linguistic texts and identify the recurring patterns in different languages and use this with a new symbolism that can be both read by both human and machine would actually make the whole thing more Perfect and worth while. And don’t forget the amount of jobs and the literature that might get generated albeit be it only digital unless fully accepted by the larger sections of people after all it is something both human and machine can work with together. Instead of being forced onto or Influenced and oppressed upon? Maybe the Next Einstein could use this to influence the next generation for much larger good, peace and prosperity both locally and globally. This could provide a different angle or perspective into the thought process of creating a language even for machine only!
Continue reading “New Worlds : How to build a ‘perfect’ language”
