Does anybody here speak Klingon?

08 December 2005

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With roughly seven thousand languages already in the world, what possesses people to make up new ones? If the motive is idealistic, to create a single language to unite mankind in mutual understanding, there may be a flaw in that reasoning. Some of the bloodiest conflicts in history have been fought among people who speak the same language. Think of Vietnam or, for that matter, the American civil war!

Another motive seems to be to create an exclusive secret society. Children make up languages all the time to do that.

Then there are languages created for imaginary civilizations. Good examples are the Klingon language in the Star Trek television series, and Tolkien's Elvish language, spoken by citizens of Middle Earth in The Lord of the Rings.

Another reason is that thinkers have been frustrated at how imperfectly natural languages represent the world. In the 17th century, there were attempts to create a "logical" language, using symbols -- as in mathematics -- that could be understood regardless of what language the user spoke. But, while the invented languages were logical, they were also complicated, arbitrary, and hard for anyone but the inventor to learn.

The late 19th century saw a great flowering of attempts at a universal language, starting in 1880 with a language called Volapuk. Then came Esperanto, and languages with names like Novial, Interlingua and dozens of others. Almost all of them were based on Western European tongues, usually German, French, English, or Spanish. And most of them… are extinct. Once an invented language is launched onto the stormy seas of language usage it rarely survives the death of its inventor, no matter how clever or systematic it may be.

To me two of the most intriguing made-up languages are based on extraterrestrial or musical ideas. Even though it's fictional, Klingon is known even to non-linguists, and -- like Esperanto -- may be one of the rare languages that does outlive its creator. If you want to learn it, there are things to help, such as a grammar book and audio tapes, a multimedia Klingon tutor, and a dictionary -- in Portuguese and German, as well as English. There are even some international societies that try to keep the language alive. All of this for a made-for-TV invented language of roughly 2,000 words, designed to sound as alien and harsh as possible to capture the nasty nature of the Klingons. Here's a Klingon as Hamlet, pondering whether to be or not to be:

[insert Klingon sample]

The second language reminds me of the film "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" in which a haunting series of five tones gets a response from an alien spacecraft. One of the 19th century invented languages was based on tones, the do-re-mi system used to teach singing. It was called Solresol and used the 7 notes of the scale in combinations to create words. For example, fa-fa-do-fa was the word for "doctor," "fa-fa-do-la" was "a dentist." It was relatively easy to learn, and what made the language unique is that it could be sung, played or whistled as well as spoken! It was popular for quite a long time.

There have also been languages created for a scientific purpose, such as Loglan, which was invented in 1960. And one from1962, spelled B-A-B-M but pronounced Bo-A-Bo-Mu, the idea being that each letter represents a syllable. Or one from 1979 that uses a system of icons instead of letters to represent concepts and sounds. The list goes on.

You can find a lot of these language -- including the newest ones -- at www.langmaker.com .Would you like to create your own language, better than the ones we already have? If so, join the club. Among people who like languages, it seems to be a universal urge.

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes from Christopher Moseley, a linguist at the BBC in London. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. Visit us at www. coFc.edu/linguist. And, keep in mind that wherever you are and whatever you do... language makes a difference.