For an artificial world to look natural, it needs its own artificial language.
Professor Tolkien knew a lot about non-existent universes. “It's easy to invent a green sun,” he said, “it's more difficult to create a world in which it would be natural.” For him, a philologist, a specialist in Old Germanic and Old English literature, the main element of such naturalness was, of course, the languages of peoples and creatures living in the fictional world. It was the construction of artificial languages that was the real passion of the ancestor of fantasy, and over his long life Tolkien invented several dozen of them. He saw the heroes and events described in his famous books simply as a background on which languages exist and develop. “Rather,“stories”were composed in order to create a world for languages, rather than the other way around,” the writer explained. - In my case, first comes the name, and then the story. I would rather write in Elvish. " Fictional languages,"Artlangs", a great many have been invented in literature and cinema. Professional linguists also contributed to the creation of some, but few can boast of such scrupulous elaboration as Tolkien's. The professor worked out in great detail grammar and writing, and most importantly - history: unlike most other artificial languages, we know about Tolkien's how they changed over time.
Our expert: Alexander Piperski, Ph. D. in Philology, Associate Professor of the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian State University for the Humanities, author of the book "Construction of languages: from Esperanto to Dothraki", which is being prepared for publication by the publishing house "Alpina Non-Fiction"
Sindarin
John Tolkien, "The Lord of the Rings"
Slender linguistic diversity is perhaps the main secret of the amazing authenticity of the world described by Tolkien. The author invented no less than fifteen Elvish languages alone, and after his death, an almost finished sketch of the book "Lammas" was published, stylized as the learned work of a linguist from Middle-earth. The fictional author, speaking about the dialects of his fictional world, attributes their origin to the Valarin, the language of local deities, and divides them into three large families. Oromean includes Avarin, Quenya, Telerin, Sindarin, and other Elven languages, as well as Rohan and most human languages in general. Khuzdul and other languages of the gnomes are attributed to the Aulean family, the "black dialect" of orcs and other evil creatures to the Melkian family. The most famous of Tolkien's languages were the Elvish Sindarin and Quenya,which reflected his passion for the languages of northern Europe. Morphology - the structure of words - was borrowed for Quenya from Finnish. The phonology of Sindarin - the structure of the sound system - inherits Welsh.
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Alexander Piperski: - Tolkien borrowed a lot from natural languages. Thus, the proto-elven plural ending -ī disappeared during the development of Sindarin, causing an alternation of vowels at the base of the word: brannon ("lord") and brennyn ("lords"), urug ("orc") and yryg ("orcs"). This is how the irregular forms of the English plural arose: man ("man") and men ("men") - comes from the Germanic * mann- and * manni-. Foot ("leg") and feet ("feet") - from * fōt- and * fōti-. This alternation is even more common in Welsh.
Dothraki
George Martin and David Peterson, Game of Thrones
The fantasy world of the A Song of Ice and Fire novels is almost as detailed as Tolkien's. Languages are also mentioned in them, and for effect, the characters pronounce a few words either in the rough language of the Dothraki horsemen, or in “high” or “low” Valyrian, reminiscent of the classical and folk versions of Latin or Arabic. But when it came to filming Game of Thrones, HBO turned to the Society for the Creation of Languages, and a young linguist David Peterson won the competition to develop Valyrian and Dothraki. Peterson did not have much source material: there are no more than thirty Dothraki words in Martin's books, and a noticeable part of them are proper names. This gave the linguist a lot of room for imagination. And he began with the very word "dothraki" (dothraki), raising it to the verb dothralat,"Ride a horse". Already from him is formed the word dothrak, "rider", the plural of which is dothraki.
Alexander Piperski: - The grammar of the Dothraki language turned out to be quite simple, although not without refined features. For example, nouns are divided into two large classes: animate and inanimate, and the information about animate is unpredictable. In general, large and active living things and phenomena, as well as active parts of the body, will be animate, and the rest of the concepts will be inanimate, but there are many exceptions. As in Russian, the declension of nouns depends on animation. Thus, in Dothraki, inanimate nouns do not change in numbers, but animate ones do. The inanimate word yetto can be translated as "frog" or "frogs", but shiro is only "scorpion" because it has a separate plural form - shirosi, "scorpions."
Newspeak
George Orwell, 1984
The language of the fictional totalitarian state of Oceania is heavily modified and "coarse" English, emphasizing the heavy atmosphere of dystopia. In Newspeak, an extremely scanty set of adjectives remained, which generally happens with natural languages. For example, in Igbo, which is spoken by about 20 million people in Nigeria, there are only eight adjectives: big, small, old, new, dark, light, good and bad. By the way, in Newspeak such a combination is impossible. Many antonymous pairs in it are formed using the negative prefix un- ("not"). The writer cites the words good ("good") and ungood ("bad", "bad") as examples. In addition, Newspeak borrowed from the language of the Soviet era a fondness for abbreviations and compound words. We, confidently using words like "foreman" (work manager) or "head teacher" (head of the educational department),this love is easy to understand.
Alexander Piperski: - The main feature of Orwellian Newspeak is, of course, vocabulary. It consists of three layers, dictionaries A, B and C. Dictionary A includes the most ordinary, everyday words, the number of which is minimized. Glossary C contains specific technical terms. The most interesting is dictionary B. It contains complex words specially designed for political needs: for example, goodthink and its derivatives. Dictionary B is difficult to translate into ordinary language - "Oldspeak". For example, the phrase "Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc" means "Those whose ideas were formed before the Revolution do not fully perceive the principles of English socialism."
Klingon
Gene Roddenberry and Mark Okrand, Star Trek
David Peterson's direct predecessor is Mark Okrand, creator of the Vulcan and Klingon languages for Star Trek. It is worth saying that the humanoid, but extremely warlike inhabitants of the planet Klingon received a very suitable language: at the same time similar to the earthly and unusually frightening. It is one of the most sophisticated artificial languages, supported by Microsoft's Bing translation system, and the enthusiastic Klingon Language Institute publishes classical literature translated into this artlang. However, Mark Okrand, in the preface to the authoritative "Klingon Dictionary," writes that the Klingons themselves, although proud of their language, prefer English to communicate with outsiders.
Alexander Piperski: - The Klingon language is especially famous for its phonetics. There are two dozen consonants in it, and it seems that this is not much - but among them there are very rare sounds, for example, tlh (voiceless, fused "tl") and Q (pronounced "kh" very deep in the mouth). But even more unusual for terrestrial languages is the word order in Klingon sentences: complement - predicate - subject. For example, the phrase “puq legh yaS” translates as “the officer sees the child” and “yaS legh puq” means “the child sees the officer”. Of all the possible orders of subject, predicate, and object, this one is the second most rare. In the World Atlas of Language Structures, it is represented only in 11 languages out of 1377 in the sample, and seven of them are common in South America.
Na'vi
James Cameron and Paul Frommer, Avatar
Linguist Paul Frommer was brought in to work on Avatar even before the script was completed. So the blue-skinned three-meter humanoids of the planet Pandora, who appeared on the screens four years later, already spoke in full their own language, numbering about a thousand words. Unlike Russian, the Na'vi language has an agglutinative structure: our ending in the word "wide" already contains information about gender and number, and in Na'vi (as well as Tatar, Japanese and other agglutinative languages), each detail will need to be used separate element (formant), as if to say "wide - one - she". But the word order in Na'vi sentences is familiar to us: subject, predicate, object. The system of numbers invented for this language is very unusual. In addition to the singular and plural - as in Russian - as well as the dual - as in Old Russian,- there is also a triple number, as in some languages of Oceania. Nantang ("serpentine") turns into menantang ("two serpentines"), pxenantang ("three serpentines") and only then into aynantang ("many serpentines").
Alexander Piperski: - The Na'vi language uses a three-part sentence construction: the subject (subject) of a transitive verb is indicated in one way, the addition (object) in another, and the subject of an intransitive verb in a third. For example, the sentence Nantang-ìl frìp tute-t ("The snakewolf bites a man"): here the subject of the transitive verb ("serpentine") has the exponent -ìl, and the object of the transitive verb ("person") adds the exponent -t. In the sentence Nantang-Ø hahaw - "The snakewolf is sleeping" - the subject of the intransitive verb is marked with a zero ending -Ø. In Russian, the subject of a transitive and intransitive verb is denoted in the same way, and "serpentine" in both Russian sentences has the same form. Languages with a three-part construction are rare, but exist: this is how, for example, the North American Indian language of non-Persian works.
Roman Fishman