The Universal Translator

Everything you need to know about 139 languages that don't really exist

Yens Wahlgren

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780750995924
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique

This is a book about languages that aren't real: those from countries that don't exist, alien languages, languages of mythological creatures and languages spoken in an imagined future or parallel universe. But they are also languages that are, to the highest degree, living on Earth thanks to their enthusiastic fans. Klingon, Valyrian, Syldavian, Na'vi, Lilliputian, Orcish – these are a few of more than 100 fictional languages that xenosociolinguist Yens Wahlgren delights in and unravels in The Book of Words. This is not a grammar book or a lexicon but rather an exploration through time and space, through worlds and universes arisen from the imagination, through pop culture and linguistic nerdship. Follow Wahlgren on a journey through the universes of Tolkien, Star Trek, Game of Thrones, Doctor Who and Marvel, from the complex and beautiful Elvish to the seemingly nonsensical yet surprisingly considered hoots of Pingu, and learn the creative and sociological value of constructed languages across the world (and beyond).

STARTING WITH THE ANCIENT GREEKS – OBVIOUSLY

Goídelc, Lingua Ignota, Balaibalan, Enochian, Utopian, Ringuam Albaras, Moonspeak, Lilliputian, Houyhnhnm, Nazarian, Quamite, Volapük, Esperanto, Solresol

‘I artamane Xarxas apiaona satra’ is the first known phrase of an artificial language in literature. It was the opening line from the King of Persia’s minister, Pseudartabas, in what was supposed to be made-up Persian in Aristophanes’ comedy The Acharnians, from 425 bce. The response to the aforementioned line was, ‘Does anyone understand what he is saying?’ Fortunately, someone present does understand Pseudartabas and lets us know that this introductory sentence means – ‘The great King is going to send you gold.’

Aristophanes understood the subtle art of using an artificial language to give the audience a sense of foreignness. Some years later in his comedies The Birds and The Frogs, he uses both a bird language and a frog language. Of the forty comedies he wrote, only eleven have been preserved, so who knows how many artificial languages may have been lost? Several well-known phrases are also attributed to Aristophanes, such as, ‘These impossible women! How they do get around us! The poet was right: We cannot live with them, and we cannot live without them.’

No more examples of constructed languages have survived from antiquity, but naturally the great thinkers of Ancient Greece mused upon linguistic–philosophical questions. In the dialogue Cratylus, Plato ponders the connection between things and their names – is it arbitrary, or is there a natural, essential relationship? Is there a natural connection between a word and what it signifies?

Another Greek author, Athenaeus, who was active in the third century CE, approached the phenomenon of artificial languages in his mammoth work, Deipnosophistae. He tells the story of a man from Sicily, Dionysius, who invents his own words for invariably Greek concepts.

English	Greek	Neologism
Virgin	parthenos	menandros (menei – wait; andra – husband)
Spear	akontion	ballantion (balletai enantion – ‘to throw at someone’)

These examples of neologisms – new words – are probably not a rigorous attempt to build a new language, but rather a playful demonstration that alternatives to familiar words are possible.

The first mention of the concept of an artificial language appears in the Old Irish manuscript, Auraicept na n-Éces, written mainly in the 1300s but with some sections estimated to date as far back as the seventh century. It tells of the learned Scythian King Fénius Farsaid, great-grandson of Noak, who came to the Tower of Babel to study the great language confusion shortly after it arose. He brought with him seventy-two scholars whom he sent out on a mission to study how the only language previously spoken had been divided into different languages. The scholars scattered in all directions, while Fénius established a headquarters at Nimrod’s tower to co-ordinate the work. For ten years, Fénius and the seventy-two scholars studied and compiled an artificial language, Bérla tóbaide – ‘the selected language’ – based on the best parts of each of the confused tongues. Fénius named his conlang Goídelc (Gaelic). A particular kind of Irish hubris, perhaps, that the legendary Fénius took on the godlike task of creating a language, as well as supposedly joining together what God had divided!

According to legend, Fénius also created, or possibly discovered, the perfect script for his new perfect language. He named the twenty-five letters after the twenty-five prime scholars of the seventy-two he had brought with him. However, Ogham is an alphabet from the early Middle Ages, mainly used in the Irish-language area. Its origins are not entirely clear, but it is unlikely to have been created by Fénius. Ogham is also called the Celtic tree alphabet because the letters are named after types of trees, and not after twenty-five scholars, as the legend would have it.

Fénius’ grandson, Goídel Glas (who composed Goídelc, according to some versions of the legend) then married Scota, a pharaoh’s daughter. After the pharaoh and his army were drowned by Moses in the Red Sea, the lovers fled and ended up in Spain. From a tower in Spain, Goídel Glas saw a beautiful green island, which turned out to be Ireland, where they eventually settled.

Lingua Ignota

In the twelfth century, we see clearer evidence of, and more than just individual sentences from, an artificial language. Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) could be the patron saint of conlangs. Canonised in 2012, she is also known as Saint Hildegard. Her constructed language, Lingua Ignota, was not the reason behind her canonisation; that was her life’s work as a nun, abbess, philosopher, mystic and physician.

Why Hildegard invented her own language and what she planned to do with it is a mystery. Since she was an abbess at a monastery in Rupertsberg, it seems fair to speculate that it was a mystical language for religious use. Or a secret language for her diary?

She described parts of the language in Lingua Ignota per simplicem hominem Hildegardem prolata, which has been preserved in two manuscripts. This document lists 1,011 words of her artificial language with explanations in Latin and sometimes German. It seems that these words are used with grammar borrowed from Latin. The only snippet that has been preserved is a Latin sentence interspersed with words in Lingua Ignota:

O orzchis Ecclesia, armis divinis praecincta, et hyacinto ornata, tu es caldemia stigmatum loifolum et urbs sciencia-rum. O, o tu es etiam crizanta in alto sono, et es chorzta gemma.

Oh orzchis church, girded with divine arms, and adorned with hyacinth, you are caldemias of loifolum wounds, and the city of the sciences. Oh, oh, you are crizanta in loud noise, and you are chorzta the jewel.

Unfortunately, only one of the words, loifol – ‘people’, appears in the glossary, which originally was probably more extensive than the 1,011 words that have been preserved. The glossary is arranged hierarchically, starting with the divine, then moving on to humans and animals and, lastly, things:

aigonz – God

aieganz – angel

diueliz – devil

inimois – human

jur – man

vanix – woman

peueriz – father

maiz – mother

limzkil – child

luschia – duck

sizia – beetroot

libizamanz – book

The Voynich Manuscript

The history of artificial languages doesn’t get much more intriguing than the case of a fifteenth-century manuscript discovered by a bookseller in 1912. It was written in an unknown language with an unknown script by an unknown author. The 240 pages of the manuscript depict unidentified constellations, mysterious plants, bathing women, astrological tables and long pieces of beautiful but incomprehensible text. Absolutely incomprehensible. Linguists and code crackers have been trying in vain to solve the mystery for over a century.

The first to try to solve the riddle was bookseller Wilfrid Voynich, who had dedicated his life to the search for unusual literature. In Villa Mondragone, Italy – one of the many mansions of the Jesuit order – in a chest packed with ancient, dusty volumes, he made the greatest discovery of his life with the eponymous manuscript. Voynich bought it from the Jesuit monks and devoted the rest of his life to trying to interpret the text. When he died in 1930, he had still not been able to decipher a single word.

Since then, linguists, cryptologists, occultists and various wannabe geniuses have tried to solve the mystery. Theories differ: a fifteenth-century prank; fake magic intended to impress people; or indeed some kind of written language. Voynich was also suspected of forging the manuscript himself as a cry for attention (or being deceived by a forger), but all sorts of expertise has gone into analysis of the book, including carbon dating, which placed its origin somewhere between 1404 and 1438. The book is genuine.

The document is written on vellum (calfskin) and consists of 240 pages containing 170,000 characters. A letter dated 1666 came with the manuscript, from Jan Marek Marci of Kronland, Rector of the Charles University in Prague at the time, to Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher of Rome. When asked to decipher the manuscript, Kircher discovered that it was once purchased by Emperor Rudolf II of Bohemia (1552–1612) for 600 gold ducats in the belief that it was an undiscovered work by the English Franciscan friar Roger Bacon, the genius polymath who predicted the invention of guns, aircraft, the telescope and the microscope. Could this be Bacon’s great encyclopedia of the sum of all knowledge?

There has also been speculation as to whether it is simply a conlang – an artificial language – perhaps for no other reason than to satisfy the author’s aesthetic taste for linguistics. William F. Friedman, one of the world’s foremost cryptologists who cracked the Japanese code during the Second World War, concluded that it was an artificial language after he and a group of cryptoanalysts failed to interpret the document. It must have been the only code that Friedman didn’t manage to crack.

But the most common theory is that it is a cipher. The language/script has been analysed in every conceivable way, and it does appear to be structured like a real language, not just random scrawls of decorative characters. The words are, on average, four to five characters long, which is consistent with many European languages. However, there are almost no character sequences with fewer than three or more than ten characters, which does not correspond to Western languages.

When experts examined the frequency of different characters, they saw that they follow a pattern comparable to those of natural languages, but some are arranged in an unnatural way within the words. Different pages in the manuscript are devoted to different subject areas and, quite logically, specific words appear more frequently on these pages than others. On the other hand, there are oddities, such as a specific sequence being repeated three, four or five times in a row on other pages.

Many literary works have been inspired by the enigma of the Voynich manuscript: thriller novels such as Codex by Lev Grossman; an orchestral piece by Hanspeter Kyburz; and the computer game Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, where players have to gather pages from it. In the game, the manuscript originated from an alien race that created humankind before becoming extinct.

A modern-day successor, Luigi Serafini, publish...