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Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Bienvenidos, Croeso and Welcome.
Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast.
Before we get started, I just wanted to give an update on how this podcast will be going forward. There will still be seasons of 3 months, but within those seasons, the episodes will only appear every other week. So, there will be most likely 7 episodes per season. This will allow me more time for research, where necessary, to tackle some more detailed topics.
Okay, let’s get into it. Today I’m talking about…
The Art of Language Invention: From Horse-Lords to Dark Elves, the Words Behind World-Building, written and narrated by David J Peterson
The author of this book creates fictional languages (Game of Thrones, anyone?) and this book is an attempt to put down in writing all their knowledge on the subject.
Who cares about made-up languages? Well, lots of people, and if you get things wrong in a show these days, you’ll hear about it. But how did this kind of thing start?
The author briefly details the first made-up language (12th century AD), back when languages started to be created for external or supernatural purposes, and goes on to philosophical languages for science, International auxiliary languages, so we can all converse more easily around the world, to artlangs, created for fictional reasons, to what they’re now all called, conlangs, short for constructed languages. This encompasses everything that isn’t a natural language.
Conlangs are a big thing these days, with the Internet and all, but the conlang movement started before the Internet was big and a community was built up, where people shared languages, tested them with some fun sounding games, for example, and generally learnt from each other. However, now everyone and anyone is trying to create languages, without the community, kind of groping around in the dark and reinventing the wheel. Hence the book.
So, there is a pdf available and it is uploaded to Spotify. You cannot see it, or at least I cannot see it on the Windows app, but I can see it on my Kindle app. Download it, you’re going to need it.
First, you get a list of terminology. None of it’s that difficult and most is easy to remember, because it does what it says on the tin! I think I’ve used that reference before. Anyway.
The book starts off with talking about sounds, because this is where the author starts when creating his languages. The author talks in some detail about the IPA symbols, in an entertaining way, getting you to practice some of them as you go along - I wonder how that works with a physical book. Anyway, it’s enough that you understand what’s being said, but not too technical. But if you’re thinking of creating a language, you’re going to have to get technical! I’m not. Learning existing ones is difficult enough.
You can also relate this to the languages you’re learning and those weird sounds you often have to make that don’t come naturally. I think it would take a while to get used to all the symbols, though. It’s a different way of thinking about words.
Interesting fact that I didn’t know, because I’ve never studied this topic. Consonants stop the flow of air and for vowel sounds air is unimpeded. How can I have not known that. Did you?
Anyhoo, there is a lot of detail gone into here about the different elements of sounds, but these are just a few snippets of information.
Each language has a kind of brand, which is how it sounds, how you can recognise it from another language. Eg, Italian and Spanish don’t sound the same, although many of the words are very similar. Each language has norms and words don’t usually go outside those norms. I suppose you’d say they’re regular. And then you get to English and everything goes haywire because it comes from many different sources. We like to be different!
Humans beings have a finite amount of breath. Have you ever had that feeling when trying to speak your target language that you don’t have enough breath to get to the end of a sentence or a phrase? Yeah, that. Of course, when you’re learning a language this is partly because you’re hesitating more, rather than speaking fluently. You probably don’t want this to happen with a conlang.
How does an alien speak? No, I don’t have a definite answer for you on that, but do remember you have to design your alien first, or it might not be able to speak, at all.
The author discusses how he created the Dothraki language from Game of Thrones (don’t tell anyone, but I’ve never seen it), which was interesting, because there were already words existing in the language that had to be worked around and sometimes changed, and, as if that wasn’t enough, there was the fact that readers of the books already thought they knew how to say the words - all differently, of course. I mean we all say those weird fantasy names differently, don’t we? We make up our own pronunciation rules. When you have actual language, that’s even worse!
Next, under the heading of words. Have you ever wondered how all those lists of how many words are in a language are created? If my memory serves me right, on Wikipedia you can see the general type of wordcount it is, but when the author went through all the things for what may, or may not count as a word, you could see it isn’t as easy a topic as you might think. Methinks all those ‘learn these 1,000 words and you can speak the language’ claims need to specify what constitutes a word to them.
It was here, too, that I discovered what all those doubled up words in Italian are called, you know like piano piano and fuggi fuggi. That’s reduplication and it enhances the meaning of the single word in some way. Reduplication. I looked it up again afterwards, when editing this script, and it’s not just duplicating the exact word. It can be two words that are almost the same, like hocus-pocus and chit-chat, where you’re repeating letters or sounds.
I discovered that languages like Italian and Spanish, where you can drop the pronoun, and usually do, are called pro-drop languages (well, that makes sense) and that the author believes there is nothing wrong with passive sentences. Okay, so you might not know what that’s about, but in writing, one of the so-called rules is to try to avoid passive sentences wherever possible. I’ve been hearing that for years and I do try to avoid it, but, funnily enough, I’ve never really thought about it when writing in Italian. I guess that freed up my writing a little, if nothing else. Note to self - do not start thinking about it now.
Also, the author references the fact that foreign languages always sound incredibly fast - ain’t that the truth, but that it is possible to create a conlang that doesn’t, by adding as much information to the noun as possible - and no, that’s not making those really long words like some languages have. It’s much more complicated than that.
We also hear about the major ways languages evolved and here I discovered why Italian has those double letters everywhere, you know, where you have to make them sound longer. It was acoustic interference. In other words, the words, originally in Latin, were, perhaps, awkward to pronounce, so they morphed, or rather were morphed by people, and eventually became double letters that took up the same amount of time. I think I got that right.
I learnt something about Spanish, too, under the written word section. Did you know that the ñ started out as a smaller n on top of an n? Kind of piggybacking. You can understand why that got changed - a bit awkward to write.
Oh my god, there’s a lot of information in this book, but I’m not going to say any more. And my conclusion on creating a written language? Definitely not for the faint-hearted.
But what would I recommend if you want to read this book and create your own language? I know that’s not, probably, many people, with regards to the latter, listening to this podcast, but … if you are not a trained linguist who will already know a lot about how words are pronounced, I would recommend that you get the paper version, because you’re going to need to be able to use it as a reference book, and the audiobook, so that you can hear the words being pronounced. The audiobook is fine on it’s own for those who just want to learn a little about this subject, but don’t want to act upon it, but the pdf that comes along with it, in my opinion, doesn’t cover enough of the text for anything else. I know that’s likely because they want you to buy a text-based copy, but it does make the audiobook a little confusing at times.
All in all, this was a fun book to listen to. The author is a good narrator and has a sense of humour in their writing - seriously, as the dragon flies? I feel like I need to use that myself, randomly, and see if anyone notices.
Link, as always, in the description, for the audiobook on Spotify.
That’s all for today’s episode. Don’t forget to join me again next time, for more language learning tips, tricks and tales and in the meantime, check out the A Language Learning Tale YouTube channel for additional, non-podcast content.
Ciao, salut, adiós, hwyl and bye for now.
Book Link on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/show/6IfkdWTc84i8AByNTndx8Q?si=ba0b8b23c29445a0