Watching the presentations at the conlang conference got me thinking that I might like to make a language of my own. I came up with lots of ideas: a pan-conlang hybrid, formed from the features of various other invented languages; a language that used English words, but with different functions and meanings from those they have in English; a language whose phonemes were physical objects that had to be juggled in distinct patterns to make words; a language where every word is defined by its relationship to one specific concept; a language where the mesage has to be physically eaten and digested to be understood—immediacy of communication could not be a factor in that culture. I realized as I came up with these ideas that they were too “clever.” I had no desire to sit down and fill out the details of how any of them would work. I was moved not by the muse but by a desire to impress, to be seen as creative or original. I wanted to inspire that feeling of delight, to get the admiration and the respect that I had seen expressed for certain conlang projects, but I didn’t want to do the work. I was that guy who wants to play guitar in order to get the girls, that woman who wants to write a novel so she can go to fancy New York cocktail parties. I wasn’t driven by a need to practice the art, to satisfy a personal vision; I just thought it would be cool for other people to think my language was cool.
I guess I don’t have it in me. I’m not a language creation artist. But I can still be a language creation art appreciator, which itself takes a certain amount of work and background knowledge. The more you know about language and linguistics in general, the better you can enjoy the truly elegant or complex idea, and the better you can tell the good stuff from the lazy stuff, the mature solutions from the beginners' mistakes. One of the presenters, John Quijada (whose own language, Ithkuil, has been thirty years in the making and claims as its influences the “consonantal phonology and verbal morphology of Ubykh and Abkhaz, certain Amerindian verbal moods, Niger-Kordofanian aspectual systems, Basque and Dagestanian nominal case systems, Wakashan enclitic systems, the Tzeltal and Guugu Yimidhirr positional orientation systems, the Semitic triliteral root morphology, the evidential and possessive categories of Suzette Elgin’s Láadan, and the schematic word-formation principles of Wilkins' Analytical Language and Sudre’s Solresol”), compared the activities of the conlangers at the conference to a convention of biologists getting together to create an animal. “They would know and appreciate what they were doing, but it might be hard to explain to nonbiologists why some choices were praised as brilliant, some got a laugh, and others got a groan.”
At a very basic level, language invention is an expression of the creativity that is latent in all of us. Children like to draw pictures, playact scenes, and make up little tunes, and many of them also go through a phase where they experiment with sounds and invent their own words. When my son was two years old, he started saying, “Goaji, goaji, goaji,” with a strange Hindi sort of intonation, to represent “talking going on.” (He would say it when he heard a foreign language—though he never heard Hindi—or when people were talking around him without paying attention to him.) I don’t know why he settled on goaji except that it just felt right to him. This doesn’t mean he is any more likely to grow up to be a language inventor than he is to continue his passion for coloring into adulthood, but the raw urge to create is there, as it is in everyone. As with painting, or music, or acting, only in some does that urge take root and blossom into a lifelong passion.
The language inventors of previous eras spent a lot of energy trying to convince others of the practical justifications for doing what they did. They had rational reasons for making their languages. But the artistic drive has always been there. In a recent book on Hildegard von Bingen’s twelfth-century language, the medievalist Sarah Higley (herself an accomplished conlanger and science fiction author working under the pen name Sally Caves) argues that the purpose of Hildegard’s language was personal expression, that she “looked upon her invention as a purer way than even Latin, Greek, or Hebrew to dignify and describe her world.” It wasn’t, as some scholars have argued, a secret code for her nuns to use or the spontaneous product of a religious trance. It was the first published conlang.
You can see the art in the way John Weilgart, the creator of aUI, felt so sure that “ah” was the sound of space and “j” was the sound of evenness. Or in the way Johann Schleyer stubbornly clung to his beloved umlaut when the Volapük reformers argued that it hurt their international chances. It was there for Wilkins in his quest to make sense of the universe and order it accordingly, and for Suzette Elgin when she filled Láadan with her favorite natural-language features. It is even there in Esperanto, which Tolkien once praised for intuitively capturing the right balance between engineering and aesthetics. He criticized one of its competitors for looking too much like a “factory product,” for seeming “made of spare parts” and being without the “gleam of the individuality, coherence and beauty, which appear in the great natural idioms, and which do appear to a considerable degree (probably as high a degree as is possible in an artificial idiom) in Esperanto—a proof of the genius of the original author.”
The artistry is obvious to the Esperantists, who tell stories, write poetry, and make jokes in what only they can fully appreciate as a quintessentially Esperanto way. It is there for the Lojbanists, one-upping each other by composing tongue twisters, riddles, and plays on words that work only in Lojban. It is there for the Klingon speakers, who put up with an awful lot of abuse in order to do what they love.
I finally ran out of time to study for my Klingon test. I went into the test feeling confident but weary. I was ready to go home. I needed to get back into the world and reassert my coolness.
First I had to endure the institute’s business meeting, where at least thirty minutes was devoted to a discussion of whether the journal HolQeD should continue to be published in a print version in addition to the electronic version. (Pros: “It’s neat to be archived at the Library of Congress.” “There’s one on display at the Museum of Peace in Uzbekistan.” Cons: “It costs too much.” “It’s redundant.”) “Who cares?” I grumbled under my breath from the back of the room, where I was flipping through my flash cards one last time.
Finally, the room cleared, leaving me, Louise, and a couple of other, more advanced test-takers. I dug in as soon as the test was laid in front of me, knowing my fragile web of mnemonics wouldn’t last very long. I filled it out quickly. I couldn’t remember the word for “sergeant” (bu') or the translation for ngungu' (identify), but otherwise I breezed through. I handed it in and went out to wait in the lobby with the rest of the qep’a' attendees while it was being graded.