Glossopoeia and the Internet

There’s an interesting article in the Los Angeles Times today, all about how the Internet is facilitating the spread of artificial languages (or conlangs). Made-up languages themselves are nothing new, of course. Whether for popular culture – for literature, like J.R.R. Tolkien’s Quenya and Sindarin or Anthony Burgess’s Nadsat; or for movies like the Star Trek franchise – or with the more altruistic goal of brokering world communication – Esperanto, Volapük, Ido, Solresol, and others – artificially constructed languages have been around literally for centuries (just ask Dr. Pangloss). But with the explosion of instanteous worldwide communication made possible by the Internet, any Tom, Dick, or Harriet’s new made-up language can suddenly attract speakers. Now that is a wild thought!

In the case of Sonja Elen Kisa and Toki Pona, as discussed in the Times article, her own private language (well, more or less private – she did post it online, after all) now has “more than 100 speakers today.” How strange would it be to create a language – for whatever personal reasons one might have – and then to start hearing, straight out of the blue, from complete strangers “singing Toki Pona songs, writing Toki Pona poems and chatting with Toki Pona words”? This is either really cool or really creepy – or perhaps it’s somewhere in between.

Toki Pona even has its own Wikipedia article, a sure sign of some success. And if you want to learn it yourself, there’s a wealth of information at its official site.

The Times article goes on to establish a background context using the examples of Klingon, Esperanto, Loglan, and Tolkien’s constructed languages. Surprisingly for an article of this type, the information on Tolkien is accurate and fairly detailed, referring to his “secret vice”, and correctly identifying four of his invented languages. The author, Amber Dance (and did you ever hear a name more suited to an, err, exotic entertainer? :), even gets it right that that the languages came before the speakers, before the myths, legends, and geography of Middle-earth, rather than vice versa (see Tolkien’s letters #131 and #180, for example).

One thing I’m curious about is why – from a psychological standpoint – people want to learn somebody’s made-up language. I do understand (rather well) the desire to create made-up languages. My friend Gary and I used to make them up years ago, largely inspired by Tolkien himself. We called them our “Artificial Dialects”, and though they usually never got much further than a sketch of the grammar and a small vocabulary (again following Tolkien’s lead), they were quite a valuable intellectual and imaginative exercise. One of our languages, Kindric, intended to accompany a fantasy novel I was writing at the time, eventually swelled to something like 10,000 words! In Kisa’s case, again, the creation of Toki Pona had a clear psychological motive, but what about the learning of it by all those people who’ve never met her? What motivates someone to make that kind of investment, to learn it, compose in it, sing songs in it, and so forth?

I guess they just enjoy it. Perhaps it’s just a leisure activity like any other. Perhaps they’d just say hakuna matata. Or in Toki Pona, ale li pona. (There! I’ve just written the first entry for the first Swahili - Toki Pona dictionary. The rest of you Toki Ponans, get on finishing that, will you? :)

One Month Online!

One month and twenty-four posts ago, I brought forth on the Internet a new blog, conceived in philology, and dedicated to the proposition that there’s more to Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling, Garner, et al., than meets the eye (or ear). Now I am engaged in a great — oh well, you get the idea!

In my very first post, I talked about the word, lingwë, which I’d chosen for the title of my blog, so I thought I’d commemorate the one-month “anniversary” (mensiversary? lunaversary?) of my blog by writing a little bit more about what else lingwë might mean.

I’ve found two interesting occurrences of lingwë — well, not the Quenya word, but something spelled like it. In my earlier post, I pointed out that lingwë is a sort of homophone of Italian lingua “language” (its plural, in fact, is lingue). Well, it turns out that Ludvic Lazarus Zamenhof used my spelling in the development of an early Proto-Esperanto. He called his first crack at a universal language, Lingwe Uniwersala — and there were a lot more w’s in it (pronounced as v’s), showing more of Zamenhof’s German/Slavic background. From a roughly contemporary account:

En l’année 1878, la langue était déjà à moitié prête, quoique entre la « língwe [sic] uniwersala » d’alors et l’Esperanto actuel il y eût encore une grande différence. [1]

The second one occurs in one of the two manuscripts of the late medieval poem usually referred to as La3amon’s Brut. The earlier manuscript (MS. Cotton Caligula A ix) reads: “& he makede ane he3e burh: / Albe Lingoe wes ihaten” (“and he made a noble burg: Alba Longa it was named”). But interestingly, the other manuscript preserving the poem (MS. Cotton Otho C xiii), written down about fifty years later, toward the end of the 13th Century, reads slightly differently: “and he makede one e3e bor3: / Albe Lingwe ihote” (emphasis added) [2].

Alba Longa was an ancient Mediterranean city, reputed to be the birthplace of Romulus and Remus (the legendary founders of Rome). The name is usually translated with some variation on “Long White City,” though the second element, Alba, is sometimes connected rather with the Alps or with Latin alba “dawn” [3]. As we already know from my discussions about Albus Dumbledore, all of these derive, in any case, from albus “white”.

Alba Longa as “Long White City” then naturally puts me in mind of Minas Tirith, the White City of Gondor — which, by the way, is in roughly the right place geographically to correspond to Alba Longa, if we undertake a projection of Middle-earth onto Europe, as some have done. And Tolkien himself informally placed Gondor in and around Italy more than once. Perhaps something deserving further research! [4]

So there you have it! We find another surprising appearance of “white”, with its hints of “elves”, the homophonic suggestion of language and linguistics, echoes of Harry Potter, the Swiss Alps that Tolkien visited in his youth, and Middle-earth geography — all encapsulated by a rather extraordinary accident in my choice of the name for my blog.

Now that’s fun for the whole family! :)

[1] L’Année Linguistique, publiée sous les auspices de la Société de Philologie. Tome I — 1901–1902. Paris: Librairie C. Klincksieck, 1902, pp. 318-9.

[2] La3amon. La3amon’s Brut. Trans. Frederic Madden. London: Society of Antiquaries of London, 1847, p. 10.

[3] Livy. [Ab urbe condita] Books I, XXI, and XXII. Rev. ed. Ed. J.H. Westcott. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1890, p. 5-6, 221n28.

[4] Judy Ann Ford has an article in Tolkien Studies Volume 2 (2005), “The White City: The Lord of the Rings as an Early Medieval Myth of the Restoration of the Roman Empire”, but she doesn’t mention Alba Longa. Which makes sense, as it precedes the Roman Empire. Such research might nicely bookend Ms. Ford’s.