..et al: Esperanto and Artificial Languages

Artificial Languages

Since the language you speak influences your thoughts, speak some unusual languages and open your mind to unusual thoughts.

A conlang is a constructed language, more commonly known as an artificial language. Unlike C and Java, which are artificial languages created by humans for computers to use, conlangs are created by humans for humans to use.

Over the centuries, hundreds of conlangs have been created, and certainly many more projects that are private have never been published. Many conlangs were created with a specific purpose in mind, such as J.R.R. Tolkien's Elvish languages Sindarin and Quenya, which were created for their sheer beauty. Others were created for a laugh or to be used in movies or books.

Some languages are working languages, however, designed to liberate and empower human minds in a specific way. Esperanto, for example, was designed to break down cultural barriers between people of different cultures, and Lojban was designed to remove as many limitations on human thought as possible.

In Action

Here are six well-known constructed languages that can help you think and express yourself in novel ways.

Esperanto

Esperanto is the most widely spoken conlang on Earth, with an estimated 2 million speakers, putting it on par with Lithuanian, Icelandic, and Hebrew.¹ It was designed in 1887 by Dr. L.L. Zamenhof as a kind of neutral, universal second language that would allow native speakers of all languages to meet one another on even ground, with none having an intrinsic fluency advantage.

Esperanto is extremely simple, regular, and easy to learn. It's also extremely flexible. To quote Esperantist Ken Caviness, "It's been used in all conceivable circumstances for over 100 years. Whatever you have to say, you can say it in Esperanto."

One common complaint about the vocabulary of Esperanto is that it is too Indo-European, and most Esperanto words do indeed come from West European languages. However, Esperanto's agglutinative grammar is more akin to other language families. In any case, Esperanto speakers come from all over the world—it's especially popular in China—and I have had mind-opening, preconception-destroying conversations on many subjects with people from many lands in Esperanto.

Esperanto has a wealth of translated world literature, and it can literally open doors for you with its Pasporta Servo, an amazing international hospitality service of friendly people in many different countries who make free lodging available for traveling Esperantists. A wide variety of Esperanto learning materials is available on the Web, as are volunteers who will teach it to you free of charge via email. If you're waiting for an engraved invitation to the world, one of those could probably be arranged, too—with an Esperanto postage stamp.

Lojban

Lojban is an elaborate constructed language that was designed to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (see the "How It Works " section of this hack). It's the more robust descendant of the original Loglan project, which was designed by Dr. James Cook Brown. The project forked because of an intellectual property dispute; you might say Lojban is to Loglan as GNU/Linux is to Unix.

Lojban is designed to remove as many restrictions as possible on "creative and clear thought and communication." To this end, its grammar is based on propositional logic, and it has a culturally neutral vocabulary that was algorithmically derived from the six human languages with the most speakers (Mandarin Chinese, English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, and Arabic).

Lojban's grammar is more regular than even Esperanto's, so much so that it can be fully specified on a computer with a program such as YACC. This highly regular grammar leads to Lojban's famous audiovisual isomorphism, meaning that spoken Lojban can be unambiguously transcribed; you even pronounce punctuation. Lojbanists speculate that this feature might be useful for human-computer communication. Science fiction has beaten them to it, however; the characters in Robert Heinlein's 1966 novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress use Loglan for just that purpose.

In short, Lojban is a kind of super-language designed to shoot off your Sapir-Whorfean linguistic shackles and blow your mind open. Give it a try.

Klingon

Klingon is another popular conlang. Professional linguist Marc Okrand developed it for the Star Trek movies, as the language of the Klingons, an alien race.

Dr. Okrand explicitly designed Klingon to be alien, to stretch the human brain by violating human linguistic universals. For example, its syntax uses a word order seldom observed among human languages. Dr. Okrand has a puckish sense of humor and has added other features that are hard for humans to wrap their minds, lips, and larynxes around, but despite this, Klingon has a devoted fan base.

Here's an example of how Mark "Captain Krankor" Mandel, Chief Grammarian of the Klingon Language Institute, hacked his mind with Klingon. You can, too!

Mandel offers a story about the way Klingon makes him feel. During one of the annual qep'a', he went out on a mission to pick something up for the convention. A light rain was falling; he felt wet, tired, and a little droopy. But he strengthened his resolve by saying a Klingon phrase to himself: jISaHqo', which he says could be translated as "I refuse to care," "I will not care," and "I refuse to let this bother me." In English he would only have had the weaker phrase, "I don't care," which wouldn't have conveyed the strength of his intentions. He smiles at the memory. Thinking in Klingon reminded him that being irritated by a little rain was the sort of thing only a foolish human would do.²

AllNoun

More a constructed grammar than a constructed language, Tom Breton's AllNoun has a vocabulary and a grammar that consist entirely of English nouns, thus embodying an idea first proposed in Jack Vance's 1958 science fiction novel, The Languages of Pao.

An AllNoun sentence is a web of relationships with a weirdly static, timeless feel. Here's an example of a sentence written in AllNoun:

act-of-throwing:whole Joe:agent ball:patient

And here's a rough transliteration:

In some context, there is an act of throwing, and the agent of that act is Joe, and the patient is some ball.

which conveys this basic intended meaning:

Joe throws the ball.

You might think that act-of-throwing is an attempt to smuggle a verb into the sentence, but in a full constructed language, as opposed to the prototype project that AllNoun is, that hyphenated word would be a timeless, tenseless noun in its own right.

With only one part of speech, AllNoun's grammar is extremely simple. Paradoxically, if you try hacking your mind with AllNoun, you might find its simplicity to be the most difficult, yet most rewarding, aspect of this language.

Solresol

Solresol was developed in 1817 by Jean Francois Sudre. It was the first international auxiliary language comparable to Esperanto to receive serious attention. Its most salient feature is that it is composed entirely of musical notes. For example, its name, which means simply language, consists of the notes sol-re-sol from the Western solfege scale (do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti (or si), do).³

Although the principle of forming antonyms by reversing the notes in a word is interesting (for example, fasimisi means advance and simisifa means retreat), there's probably not much in Solresol to broaden your mental horizons.

Its real value instead comes from enabling you to communicate multimodally. You can express Solresol syllable-notes via singing, playing a musical instrument, flashes of light, semaphore, spoken language, written language, musical notation, and so on. You can even use it to add another information "channel" for modifying the meaning of verbal language.

How It Works

The controversial Sapir-Whorf hypothesis⁴ states that there is a direct relationship between the categories that are available in a language and the way the speakers of that language think and act. While if it were true that language completely determined thought, people would never have any thoughts that they could not express (and we know that's not true), there have nevertheless been some suggestive experiments in this area. For example, it was recently shown that one Amazonian tribe without words for numbers greater than two cannot count reliably higher than two or three.⁵ Skeptics have pointed out that causation may run the other way: the tribe never developed words for numbers because they never needed to develop the concepts.⁶

As mentioned earlier, Lojban was designed to be a comprehensive test of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that enabled its speakers to think logically, clearly, and creatively. However, it's doubtful that there will ever be a full-scale experiment of the sort its designers envisioned, because there may never be many fluent speakers of Lojban, and the number of native speakers is approximately none.

Design Your Own

You can learn a lot about language and the human mind by creating your own language. Does that sound audacious? The Language Construction Kit web site⁷ by Mark Rosenfelder explains how to create your own language sounds, alphabets, words, grammar, even speaking and writing style, as well as an imaginary history for your language, and a family of related languages.

Here are a few tips for doing so, partially inspired by Newitz and Palmer's flowchart in The Believer ⁸ but mostly indebted to the Language Construction Kit. For a crash course in linguistics and cross-cultural human thought styles, and much more information than I can possibly convey here, please visit that site.

Models

First, you'll need a basic model and approach for designing your new language:

Decide whether you want your language to be "natural" (full of irregularities, like English), or "unnatural" (simple and logical, like Esperanto and Lojban).
Steal from some languages very different from English, such as Quechua, Swahili, and Turkish.

Sounds

Give some thought to how you want your language to sound when spoken:

Learn something about the disciplines of phonetics and phonology, so as not to make newbie mistakes with the sounds of your language.
Learn about how vowels and consonants work, including how to invent new ones.
Decide how your language stresses words.
Decide whether your language uses tones (like Mandarin Chinese) and, if so, how they work.
Design your conlang's phonological constraints. For example, tkivb could never be an English word, but it might be OK in another language.
Are you designing a language for aliens? If so, make sure your conlang sounds really weird.

Alphabets

Every written language needs an alphabet, the basic building blocks of words:

Develop a Roman orthography—that is, a way of spelling your language with the Roman alphabet.
If appropriate (for example, for a fantasy language), develop a new alphabet, too.
Use diacritics and accent marks if you want, but not haphazardly.
Alternatively, invent pictograms, logograms, a syllabary, or some other way of writing your language.

Word building

Once you've got your alphabet, consider how the letters will be used to form words:

Determine whether you want a small or a large vocabulary.
Develop a vocabulary that respects your conlang's phonological constraints. You can write a computer program to generate random words within those constraints.
Determine whether you want to borrow words from other languages a little, a lot, or not at all.
Decide whether your language uses onomatopoeia and other sound symbolism (e.g., buzz, tinkle, gong, rumble, etc.).
Be careful not to just reinvent English idioms.

Grammar

Grammar is one of the most complex aspects of a conlang, and even the Language Construction Kit doesn't address it fully. Here are a few issues you'll have to face:

Determine whether you have nouns, verbs, and adjectives. (Lojban makes do with one part of speech for all three, and adverbs, too.)
Determine your pronouns: I, you, he, she, it, and many more are possible.
Determine the order in which parts of speech appear in sentences (in English we use SVO, or subject-verb-object).

Style

Give your language a distinct personality and feel:

How is politeness expressed in your language?
What forms does poetry use in your language? Rhyme and meter? Alliteration, as in Old English? Counting syllables, as in Japanese haiku?

Language families

Assign your language to a group of speakers:

If your language belongs to an imaginary people, is it derived from other imaginary languages? Tolkien's languages were related in a huge imaginary tree.
Does your language have dialects?

Speaking and writing

Once you've created your language and formed a group, get communicating!

End Notes

Esperanto: Frequently Asked Questions. 1999. "How many people speak Esperanto?" http://www.esperanto.net/veb/faq-5.html.
Newitz, Annalee. 2005. "The Conlangers' Art." The Believer, May 2005. http://www.believermag.com/issues/200505.
Wikipedia. 2005. "Solfege." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solfege.
Wikipedia. 2005. "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_Hypothesis.
Gordon, P. 2004. "Numerical Cognition Without Words: Evidence from Amazonia." Science, 306: 496–499. http://faculty.tc.columbia.edu/upload/pg328/GordonSciencePub.pdf.
Gordon, P. 2005. "Author's Response to 'Crying Whorf'." Science, 307: 1722.
Rosenfelder, Mark. 2005. "The Language Construction Kit." http://www.zompist.com/kit.html.
Newitz, Annalee, and Chris Palmer. 2005. "Build Your Own Conlang." The Believer, May 2005. http://www.believermag.com/issues/200505.

..et al

Friday, October 26, 2007

Esperanto and Artificial Languages