Some of you may remember that I was working on creating my own language. I wrote a creation myth in it a little over a year ago, and with the exception of a few months, I’ve been trying to make daily diary entries in it as a way of not only recording my life but practicing my language.

I didn’t create this for any grandiose reason. I simply wanted a language that would express the way I think. I wanted to play with language itself and learn more about it. And, I wanted to learn a new language. But I’m fairly honest with myself about what I can, and will, realistically accomplish. I could learn a natural language no problem, except for the lack of anyone to speak it with. More importantly, natural languages are external things. Someone else created them. The rules are someone else’s, and to speak it correctly you have to learn, and abide by those rules. But, they’re all just abstract foreign things. They’re not anything you’ve grown up with (at least not the languages I’m interested in), or anything that conforms to your brain’s view of the world. And without someone else to speak it with, it’s a lot like rote memorization. You memorize their words, their rules, and just accept them. And free writing in a natural language before you really understand the rules can lead to some very bad habits based on misunderstandings, and the words you have to look up seem fairly random. It doesn’t make a lot of sense why a word sounds the way it does, or why it means such different things*.  Reading from books isn’t very doable either until you’ve built up a fairly decent vocabulary.

But creating your own language… that’s something else entirely. You aren’t memorizing someone else’s arbitrary rules. You’re creating constructs that rules flow out of. Words can sound however you want. Take “water” for example. To me English’s “water” doesn’t sound like anything I associate with the stuff of rain, rivers, and oceans. “Water” isn’t flowing, or bubbly. It doesn’t ripple or wave. But, lelea (lay lay ah), *that* sounds like water to me. So, that’s what water is. But, being me, I didn’t just use the rule’s I’d grow up with. I’d just end up with a cypher of English if I had, and I wanted to learn. So, I gave myself a few small restrictions which would have a significant impact on what I created. Sentences would have a Verb Subject Object order, there wouldn’t be a verb “to be”, and the concepts of Yin and Yang would be an integral part of word creation: pushing and pulling, male and female. To me the world is all about the push and pull of energy, and I wanted to help myself to see it in those terms. I also wanted it to sound similar to Hawai’ian and other languages that evolved from gift cultures, with their flowing tones. That evolved into a requirement that all consonants be separated by a vowel and never come at the end of a word. Somehow I ended up with a glottal stop like Hawaiian too, although that wasn’t intentional.

With those few tiny restrictions I’ve been building something that’s seriously challenged my mind and forced me to question so much about how English works, and what I really mean what I speak. Getting rid of the verb “to be” has been the most challenging. It is so ingrained into English that learning to speak without it has really taken work. But, it’s been so worth it.

In Olo ( the name of the language ) I’ve found a real sense of peace. I actively want to write in it at the end of the day; not to keep up my practice, but because the act of using it is so relaxing. If I go to bed without having written I feel like I missed out on something special, like a relaxing beer or glass of wine at the end of the day is for many.

I think a part of that may be that I keep my journals in a Moleskine, and writing on paper, in a different orthography is so removed from anything I do during the day. I believe that the different orthography is a huge factor. The act of drawing those foreign characters really does seem to affect my mind. I’m enjoying watching how those characters are evolving as my speed and comfort level increase. It’s like watching a natural language’s evolution in fast forward, because there’s no-one to make me stick with the old way. One of my characters started out looking like a “u” with a straight bar closing the top, but now the bar has remained and the “u” part has turned into a sort of attached curlicue. Writing in not only a different language, but a different orthography gives me an even greater feeling that this is *mine*… It’s something I can own as thoroughly as my own thoughts.

It’s also nice to know that in this language I can speak without reservation. If we spoke honestly with each other we’d hurt a lot of feelings. And, while most people do feel comfortable speaking honestly in their diaries, there’s always that lingering worry about what would happen if someone else came across it. But with Olo I don’t have that worry, at all. I do plan on eventually making my language reference public, but even if I did it would take enough tedious work to figure out what my diary said, that no-one would be likely to actually bother to figure out more than a few lines.

Because the vocabulary is still evolving, writing any sentence forces me to pause and question what I really mean, because so often we say things in our native tongue that aren’t really what we mean. We use idioms constantly; far more than most of us realize, but I don’t have that luxury. I’ve only three to work with in Olo (so far). We’re frequently talking around our meaning, because there’s no way to accurately express our true intent. But with your own language there’s always that option. It’s *your* language, and if there isn’t a word to express a concept you can create one, and you’re free from unintended connotations and implications. In English, for example, I could talk about “toil” but there are lots of negative connotations there. We don’t really have a word for work that you do that is simply undesirable, like washing dishes. You don’t really “toil” at washing the dishes, and it’s not really a hardship. It’s just undesirable work. A big part of most people’s lives is filled with undesirable work. In Olo, there’s a word that’s similar to “unpleasant” but without the negative connotations. It’s simply “not pleasant”. Combine that with the word for work and you can speak about work that is undesirable but not bad: pa’u hana.

If you need the ability to discuss something in a way your native tongue doesn’t adequately allow for, you can devise a way of doing it. As time goes on the rules your language accretes will make this a bit more difficult, but you’re unlikely to live long enough to make a language even a quarter as complex as English, unless you go out of your way to add complexity. But, if you, like me, are creating a language to express the way you see the world, or want to see the world, you’ll find things work out quite nicely.

I’m still rather slow, and as I write more I am constantly having to coin new words which sometimes take a while to get memorize, since many of them, like “doubt” don’t come up very often. New affixes arise, and force me to go back and alter a few existing words to conform to the new rules from time to time. But, the process is wonderful, and educational in so many ways. I hope that one day I may meet someone special and she’ll be wiling to learn it with me. I think the intimacy of a private language shared only between you and your lover would be an incredible thing. I may never meet someone like that. But, even if I don’t, I’m learning so much, about language, about myself, and about the world around me.

So what’s the point? Why have I written this?
I think the point was to speak about language creation, to give a little glimpse of what it can be, and what it is for me, to let some people know that it’s a legitimate option, and let others know that they are not alone in their desire to create a language. There are thousands of language creators around the world and it’s something with a long historical tradition. It’s certainly not for everyone, but what is? Conlangs have been brought into the public’s eye again with Na’vi, and learning it, like many conlangs, will provide you with a wonderful perspective on your native language. You’re also likely to find a small sense of community because it’s like joining an exclusive club for speakers only. But, creating one can give you a means of self expression you’ve probably never imagined. So many of us think with words of our native tongue, and every language has some concepts, and views of the world that it simply can’t express well, especially when you consider how tightly bound our language and culture tend to be.

Language creation is frequently a solitary act, but it can be a very rewarding one. Even if no-one else learns your language, there are many of us who will enjoy getting glimpses of it, and happily help each other with their creation. If nothing else the Conlang mailing list has proved an incredible resource for questioning English and learning about options that other languages present.

* Hawaiian’s  lāhai (just a random example) means: to poise aloft ( as a kite ) , to leap, or a short wing fence to guide cattle to a corral. To someone who didn’t grow up with the language it seems so arbitrary, and we’ve no way to know if it is, or we’re just missing something because we haven’t grow up with it or its culture.

A thought came to me this morning. Apple’s App store, and it’s apps. It’s a forest and trees kinda situation.

It’s much easier to find a tree by going to the forest.
The forest is huge filled with trees.
And the trees benefit from living close to each other.

But…

Each forest typically has only a handful of types of trees.
So, it’s not a great place to go for tree-choice.
Sure, there are plenty of trees in the forest, and they’re all unique,
but they all exist within a limited band of variation.

Then there’s the fact that a pine tree planted in a forest
isn’t really any different from a pine tree planted elsewhere.
As long as the two have the same soil, water, and sunlight
they’ll both grow up to be big strong pines.

Being in the forest doesn’t change the nature of the tree.

But, if you want more tree choices, you have to leave the forest.
Living in a forest forces certain limitations on it’s inhabitants.
You simply won’t find a Joshua tree in a Pine forest.
The soil is all wrong, and even if it was compatible soil,
the Pine trees would grow high and steal its sunlight.
The Joshua tree, if it survived at all, would wither.

Developers are a lot like Botanists.
We’ve seen beautiful trees from around the world.
We know what lives beyond your local forest.
We know the beauty that’s possible.
We know the myriad types of fruit we could consume.
But here in the Pine forest…
Well, the Pines are very pretty,
and we don’t mind pine nuts,
but we kinda crave a mango,
and an orange,
and an apple,
and…
and…

Wouldn’t you like one too?

—-

For those of you non-geeks who don’t understand the limited variation metaphor:

Apple limits any app that is sold on the App Store to a specific set of functionality. There’s a lot more your iPhone could do if you didn’t look for your trees (apps) in the Apple App Store forest. Unfortunately, to do that, you have to jailbreak your phone. Also, the app store hampers developers ability to make bug fixes. In contrast, Android apps are only limited by the phone and the Operating System (OS) that runs on it. There is an App Store equivalent on Android (they call it the Marketplace) which makes it easy to find apps. But there aren’t any real restrictions on what you’ll find there, or how quickly developers can update their apps with bug fixes. And, it’s not the only way to get an app. You can go to a web page and download an app, just like on your computer. Yes, the iPhone has a slicker OS right now, and yes, there are definitely more, and sexier apps in the App Store at the moment, but that doesn’t mean your choices aren’t being limited by Apple. It just means Apple got there first with a really nice device. Apple’s grown a great Pine forest, but it’s still a Pine forest and you’re not going to find any Mango there.

There are a number of people out there who have expressed an interest in learning Na’vi (the language spoken by the Omatikaya in Avatar ) and are getting verbally shat upon by the communities they dare to mention this in. And, I can understand the knee-jerk reaction that it’s silly to learn a language from a semi-random piece of popular fiction. But, I can also think beyond that.

Learning a language, any language, is a remarkable thing, especially in American society, and if you think about it, there is nothing more or less valid about a language that was created for a movie. Does it really matter how a language came to be? The fact is that it is a legitimate and speakable language. Koreans write in Hangul, a writing system that Sejong the Great made up from scratch less than 600 years ago. They didn’t need a writing system, they were getting by with Chinese characters. It just so happens that the Korean people seemed to agree they deserved their own writing system, so they switched, but it was no more a “real” writing system than any of the ones Tolkien created for his languages. There are two million Esperanto speakers, and maybe ten million who have studied it. It’s a conlang (constructed language) just like Elvish and Na’vi, the only difference being that it was created to bring world peace through improved communication instead of just being created for the sheer love of language.

So, should Korean’s stop using Hangul because some guy made it up? Should Esperantists throw in the towel? What about Esperantists who learned it as their first language? Esperanto, the Hangul writing system, Na’vi, and  Elvish are all “fictional”. None of them existed until someone got it in their head to go create it.

…this wouldn’t have been such a remarkable case from the perspective of time – as you already have entire regions of internet clogged with Tolkienfags who struggle to master his own fictional languages despite being unable to use english properly. – Random Ass-Hole

I’m not even going to bother pointing out the grammatical errors in that statement, but the sentiment is not uncommon. The logic however, is horribly flawed. Our native tongues are things so deeply ingrained in our thinking that it isn’t possible to step outside of them and analyze them without first learning something else. Think about it. How can you possibly analyze the limitations of a language without bias when your tool for analysis is the same language which is, of course, bounded by the same limitations and biases?

Seriously? Go learn an actual language, not something from a movie. – Ignorant Jerk

Ignoring the fact that Na’vi is, in a very real sense, an “actual” language. I would argue that learning Na’vi or Klingon would be much better choices than any of the Romance Languages for someone who is interested in leaning how language itself works. This is because both of these languages go out of their way to be very un-English. English, for example, is a Subject Verb Object language. Na’vi has no such restrictions. Through the use of accusative, ergative, genetive, dative, and topic marker suffixes speakers of Na’vi are able to construct their sentences in whatever way flows best. Can you say that about English? Do you with your years of practicing English even know what those are?

“Verbs in Klingon take a prefix indicating the number and person of the subject and object, plus suffixes from nine ordered classes, plus a special suffix class called rovers. Each of the four known rovers has its own unique rule controlling its position among the suffixes in the verb. Verbs are marked for aspect, certainty, predisposition and volition, dynamic, causative, mood, negation, and honorific, and the Klingon verb has two moods: indicative and imperative.

The most common word order in Klingon is Object Verb Subject, and in some cases the word order is the exact reverse of word  order in English. ” – Wikipedia

That’s not to say that there aren’t such significant variations amongst natural languages. Pretty much every twisted idea you can conceive of to warp a language has already been done by a natural language at some point in history. But what better way to learn your own language than to attempt to learn something so radically different from it that you are forced to question everything from word construction to sentence construction?

“Avatar? No, it is your idea of learning language used by in-movie characters that is disturbing, problematic and life wasting. NONE of us are bashing your fave movie.” – Random Ass-Hole

“How about, instead, you learn one of the hundreds of real languages that are in danger of dying out, and help preserve some of the collective heritage of humanity?
You know, instead of wasting your time learning a language made up for a film everyone’s going to forget about?” – Clueless Ass-Hole

“Please learn a dying human language if you’re going to bother learning a language at all.” – Polite, but ignorant.

Conlangers have a different take…

” I find the “languages are dying” line the most irritating thing someone can possibly say against the invention of a conlang. There is a lot of diversity of viewpoints in the conlang community, but there are certainly many of us who do care very deeply about endangered languages. Creating a new hobby language doesn’t affect natural languages any more than playing Monopoly affects the economy. Field linguists can preserve a record of the language, and members of that community can work to maintain or revive the language, but how exactly is it supposed to help endangered languages if we all stopped this conlanging business?

I think that [conlangers] are probably more keenly aware than most people that language is a community activity. (This just sort of slaps you in the face when you are the only person who knows your language.) I can learn an endangered language– probably pretty imperfectly at my age — but unless I can participate meaningfully in that language’s community or spawn a new community of speakers, it’s nothing more than hobby, just like making up entirely new languages. ” – M. S. Soderquist

conlangers simply are not equipped to save endangered langauges.

Linguistic fieldwork requires specialized skills which most of us do not have; while many of us may be capable of writing a fairly useful grammar of a language, hardly anyone of us have experience in conducting a linguistic interview and all that.  And documenting an endangered language is only the first step in preserving it; the much harder part of it is to create and maintain the social environment in which the language can flourish.  That is well beyond the possibilities of most conlangers, who are merely hobbyists in linguistics.

“While conlanging indeed does nothing to save endangered languages, it also does nothing to endanger languages, and most

… Indeed.  The survival of a language requires the existence of a community that speaks it, and a consciousness of the language’s value within that community. ” – J. Rhiemeier

A language is more than a collection of words and rules. It is the repository wherein a community encodes its values and viewpoints. Very recently we have learned to read Mayan, but no-one with half a brain would suggest that anyone is capable of creating any new writings in Mayan that actually capture the Mayan viewpoint. The same goes for ancient Egyptian. Sure we can read hieroglyphs and there are definitely people who can write in it, but again, we don’t truly grok it. We’re like computers parroting back words in accordance with some pre-defined rule-set. Even if you were to bring the handful of speakers together their usage would not reflect that of the original language even if it was syntactically correct, because we simply do not think like they did. We are not capable of observing the world around us the way they did.

The only people who can truly save a dying language are people who are part of its community of native speakers. Yes, an outsider can become part of that community. You, sitting there reading this, can pick some dying language and help save it. All you have to do is travel to where it’s spoken and truly become one with its community, assuming there are enough speakers to even form a community. You’d have to give up your way of life and take up theirs if you really want to save it, because language expresses a community’s perception of the world and the reasoning behind their actions in it. And you can not express that accurately if you do not share it yourself.

Which brings us back to Na’vi. Na’vi is not a dying language. If anything it is a blossoming language. Maybe it won’t survive, but there are thousands of people waiting excitedly for enough information to truly learn to speak it, and we will create a community around it. Some have even gone to great lengths to accurately piece together its rules based on the limited information we have at the moment. And almost anyone who attempts to learn it will learn more about their native language in the process.

Does it really matter that what is bringing us together is a “fictional” language? Isn’t it more important that people are coming together to participate in a creative, and educational act? Isn’t that an order of magnitude better than just sitting at home and watching the next episode of House?

Note: some names have been changed in order to better reflect the guilty.