From Elvish To Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages, by Michael Adams

Though the title of this book is probably the most obvious and inevitable title for such a material since the movie bomb “From Justin To Kelly,” the title is not really a fair description of this book’s contents, while the subtitle only hints at what the author considers to be invented languages. While the title leads one to think that the book will focus on invented languages that spring from literary or entertainment purposes–and to be sure, there is plenty of this to be found–the author really has far more in mind, and there are some aspects of the author’s larger thesis that deserve a larger hearing than they get here. There is a wide variety to what the author considers to be invented languages, and they range in a threshold from languages involved in literature that are given to further plot or explore linguistic ideas and theories through auxiliary languages meant to help others to communicate despite language barriers, to revitalized languages like Hebrew, Cornish, Hawaiian, and Breton, where there is a substantial gap between an authentic language spoken by people in the countryside and a more formal and artificial prestige dialect invented by cultural activists, usually of an urban sort. Here the author hints at, but does not really discuss, the nature of artificial languages involving any attempts to deliberately create official and prestige dialects for any language, which would make the artificial language count to be truly massive indeed, though the author does not discuss this latter bit as much as could be the case.

In many ways, the invention of languages is itself a common human endeavor, one that I (and many others) have engaged in to one degree or another. Whether it involves coining words or inventing grammatical qualities, it seems to be a hobby (Tolkien called it a secret vice) which allows us to work out our thoughts about language in a thought experimental fashion. Yet at other points the invention of language can have malign consequences, as when it pits people against each other who have different thoughts as to how a language (like Cornish) can be brought back from the dead, or in the case of Breton and Hawaiian where leftist political activists seek to invent “pure” prestige dialects of endangered languages which no one speaks as a native and which do not reflect the historical grammar or the actual spoken nature of the language by those who speak the language at present and speak it best. It is interesting to ponder what leads people to interfere with languages that exist in the misguided attempts to save them or to make them easier to learn for those who wish to use a language they do not know but may wish to learn as some sort of dividing line between themselves and dominant mainstream cultures like the English or French around them. Language, which is meant to allow people to communicate together so that they may understand each other, all too often becomes a means to divide people or allow for the development and cultivation of separate identities.

Including its eight (!) appendices, this book is almost 300 pages long. The contents are divided into eight chapters (aside from the aforementioned appendices). The book begins with a discussion by the author/editor about the spectrum of invention, a spectrum which is not fully explored in the remaining essays/chapters (1). This is followed by an essay by Arden R. Smith that explores the complex and confounding nature of international auxiliary languages like Volapuk and Esperanto (2). After this there is a discussion of invented literary vocabularies like Newspeak (1984) and Nadsat (A Clockwork Orange) (3), by Howard Jackson. After this E.S.C. Weiner and Jeremy Marshall discuss the complexities of Tolkien’s famous invented languages for the Lord of the Rings and the remainder of his legendarium (4). Marc Okrand, Michael Adams, Judith Hendricks-Hermans, and Sjaak Kroon collaborate on a complex chapter about the invention and use of Klingon (5). This is followed by an essay by James Portnow on gaming languages and language games, which range from Simlish to the Al-Bhed substitution code of Final Fantasy X to languages invented to games that no one ended up playing because the games were so bad (6). After this there is a discussion of the “Oirish” inventions of Irish writers like James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Paul Muldoon, by Stephen Watt. Finally, the last essay, by Suzanne Romaine, explores revitalized languages as invented languages. The main text is then followed by eight appendices, on owning language (i), the zenith of Esperanto (ii), Nadsat and its critics (iii), a brief anthology of the commentary on Tolkien’s languages (iv), advanced Klingon (v), the language games of 1337 and other gaming languages (vi), the case for synthetic Scots (vii), and a reconstructed universal language (viii), after which the book ends with an index.