Make your own language
How putting together your own language can stimulate linguistic creativity
I’ve been learning Esperanto on-and-off again for the past several years.
I even founded an extremely short lived college Esperanto Club, that just barely rose above the university’s requirement of five active members.
And we took a very liberal understanding of what an active member was.
For a brief moment, I had a vehicle to get people to ask me what Esperanto was.
Oh well.
The language was invented by L.L. Zamenhof as an international auxiliary language to connect the countries of the world across cultural boundaries.
I was introduced to it through a question on Jeopardy!
Ever since, I’ve gotten each question right in the couple other times it’s been a clue.
But… as we know, people don’t just make up languages purely for world peace.
Sometimes it’s for other nerdy reasons, as is the case with Klingon language.
There have been a wide variety of tongues invented across the fandoms, but few meet Klingon in its place with dedicated speakers.
Tolkien, language expert that he was, did invent several for Middle-Earth.
Why does any of this matter?
Well have you ever invented a language to be shared between you and someone else, such as Amy Farrah Fowler a la the Big Bang Theory?
Wow, that show feels tired.
Anyway.
Just as anyone who has invented their own game, constructing rules to hem in the means of communication.
Creating “conlangs,” or constructed languages, has almost become an extreme sport among the high fantasy worldbuilding community.
And the vivid details involved in creating this fundamental feature of an imagined society make fascinating food for thought.
This is a panned out view of how we already play with language.
It’s more than wordplay in poetry and prose.
This is a dive into the building blocks of communication.
Where would you begin if you were building a language?
With the sounds? With the structure? With something else?
And how do you think it would change how you use language after you’d gone through the process of building your own?
There’s a lot of food for thought there.
P.S.: Overall, Esperanto, I am now convinced, is not the future.
But perhaps the less Eurocentric and more logically ordered Lojban is.