Tolkien could probably have given a very similar interview.
He created an ancient proto-elven language called quenya, and a modern elvish language evolved from it called sindarin. He created the language with specific goals in mind, working on it over his whole career, and the Lord of the Rings came into existence as a result, in the same way that a really nice hat rack tends to naturally accumulate hats.
He also created the Black Speech with the goal of making an ugly and harsh language, but apparently never got that far with it because he found it unpleasant.
It might be. But then again, at least in the U.S., many of the languages we consider 'ugly' sounding are not spoken by people that we (presently) exhibit a lot of negative biases towards. (Obviously I'm thinking of German here.)
It seems perfectly plausible to me that, just as there are unpleasant non-linguistic sounds, there could be languages that produce a greater number of unpleasant sounds in typical speech, to a person from any cultural background. Think: nails on a chalkboard. (I'm tempted to call these "objectively ugly" sounds, but of course having a social cause does not make something subjective.)
Of course, this is not to say that racism, or xenophobia are never the causes of these judgments. And, more subtly, some of our views about what sounds are 'ugly' may also be socially constructed, at least in part. And these views could relate to longstanding racial biases, among other factors.
tl;dr: Probably some of these judgments are facially racist, and others are caused by genuine assessments of the ugliness of sounds, but those judgments themselves may have social causes that include racist and xenophobic dynamics. But others still may well relate to perceptions that are hardwired, and not socially constructed.
All this complexity makes me hesitate before signing on to your view, though I do sometimes lean in that direction.
I always think that people dislike the sound of German because of its media representation. When it's only ever spoken like the political leaders in Triumph of the Will, it's understandably unpleasant. But I find spoken German quite beautiful (so much so I studied it throughout college).
A good example of nicely spoken German is "Die Bombe die Nicht Tickt" (a reading of a short story by a German band whose name eludes me). Also the main character in Goodbye Lenin.
Well, it bugs me because can native speakers really believe their own language to be ugly? Has a German ever said, "how ugly German is, if only I were born speaking something beautiful like Italian?"
If native speakers don't believe their own languages to be ugly, then it certainly seems like a xenophobic belief.
That's an interesting point. As a native speaker of English, there certainly are phrases that strike me as ugly, but usually it takes some reflection to see the ugliness. This makes me think that one's failure to see the ugliness in one's own language is just a result of being used to the way it sounds, ugly or not.
(By the way: yes, I actually have heard people say that they wished that they spoke another language because it sounds nicer than theirs. English speakers say this about French all the time -- though, as always, it's hard to say whether this is because French "really is" [whatever that means] prettier sounding, or due to cultural factors. I've also heard a native speaker of Korean say she wished she was an English speaker instead, because English is nicer sounding. This is just another anecdote, though. Who knows a person's real reason for saying such a thing. That's why this whole paragraph is, I now realize, in parentheses.)
One more thing: painting a language as ugly is a very broad thing to do. Is 99 Luftballons an ugly song because it's in German? Are Mussolini's speeches beautiful because they're in Italian?
In the original case of the orcs' Black Speech in Tolkein, they were a race incapable of saying anything pretty because of their language. These are the broad fantastical racism undertones that really bug me about Tolkein's mythology, and they mirror a real undercurrent in people's modes of thought.
I agree with your second paragraph. But I think the comparison with Black Speech has driven you a little off the mark about what people actually say about real languages. I don't think anyone says that you can't say anything pretty in a so-called "ugly language." They only mean that some tend to sound less pleasing than others. So with your 99 Luftballons example, nobody ever said that nothing in German can ever be nice sounding. And for the latter, I think you're conflating beauty with moral value. Personally, I don't know what Mussolini's speeches actually sounded like, so I can't comment.
Again, I cannot see how this is a difficult position to accept: some sounds sound worse than others. Spoken languages are made up of sounds. So why is it so hard to accept that some languages contain more pleasing sounds than others. Of course, as I've already agreed, there can be a lot more at work than this, including racism. But as a general proposition, I don't see how you can hold that judgments about what languages are ugly are fundamentally racist. I also don't see how you've addressed the issue that the categories of people that we regard as speaking an ugly language only weakly correlate (if at all -- obviously this is not a mathematical exercise so I cannot be too precise here, unfortunately) with groups to which we have broad racial biases.
I suppose I can't rule out that there are people out there in the U.S. or western Europe who would tell you, as a general proposition, that African and Middle Eastern languages are ugly. If so, those people are, I agree, letting their racial biases drive their aesthetic judgments about the qualities of language. But I don't think this is the typical case.
French and Italian [0] are considered romance languages, because among other things they sound pretty. Russian [1] (and I suppose most Slavic languages) just don't generally sound pretty. For what its worth, I speak Russian; not terribly well, but I speak it. Russian really isn't a language that sounds "pretty" or "silky", or whichever adjective you'd prefer.
The reason I decided to respond to you comment was a little more abstract than that though. People liking or disliking things about other kinds of people isn't racist. Some people just don't like things. I don't like black licorice (no idea who invented it, but I don't like it). I don't particularly care for traditional German food (I'll eat it, its just not my go to for food), and I don't think I'd ever wear a kilt to a wedding (I'm mostly Irish, then Italian, then Native American).
I don't think those things make me racist or xenophobic. At least, I don't think less of anyone who prefers any of those things. I just don't like them for me.
I think if we start claiming that not liking something like a language is racist, we're on a slippery slope indeed. For example, I don't like the color red. I don't like traditional Mexican music. Do either one of those things make me racist?
I'm not trying to attack by any means, I'm sincerely curious.
> French and Italian [0] are considered romance languages, because among other things they sound pretty.
No, they (along with Spanish and others) are considered "romance languages" because they descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of the common Romans of the late Imperial period. [0]
> French and Italian [0] are considered romance languages, because among other things they sound pretty.
Not relevant to your point, but just to clarify a common misconception: Romance languages are languages derived from Latin. The name means "language of the Romans", not "language of the amorous".
Not liking a language seems like a very far-reaching thing. There are people who were born into that language and have little choice but to use that language to communicate. They weren't born with only red clothes are being able to dance nothing but traditional Mexican music (btw, which traditional Mexican music do you not like? Huapango? Son jarocho? Rancheras? Bandas? There's not one musical style in Café Tacuba's Re that you like?).
But disliking a language is disliking something very entrenched within an ethnicity. I'm sure that there are Mexicans who dislike some of our traditional music, but how many Mexicans think that Spanish is ugly and are embarrassed to speak it? How many Germans think the same about German?
If indeed native speakers don't consider their own language ugly, then foreigners who think that seem to be exhibiting a kind of xenophobia.
> Not liking a language seems like a very far-reaching thing. There are people who were born into that language and have little choice but to use that language to communicate.
What does that have to do with anything? Nobody's indicting anyone for speaking a language. The question here is just whether some languages are generally more mellifluous.
> If indeed native speakers don't consider their own language ugly, then foreigners who think that seem to be exhibiting a kind of xenophobia.
Maybe, but it seems more likely to me that native speakers are just deaf to how their own language sounds to other people — similar to how most people don't think they have an accent, and are surprised what their voice sounds like recorded because they're used to hearing it rumble from within.
Saying something is beautiful or ugly is a value judgement, in this case a value judgement you're passing on what is usually an ethnicity's most common element: language. And this value judgement is upon a certain ethnicity. If you were to hear that Africans tend to be uglier than Swedes, wouldn't you consider that an uncomfortable value judgement to hear? Oh, but it's just your preference. There's nothing wrong with thinking that Swedes are prettier than Africans, and nobody should be considered racist or xenophobic for making such a claim.
Going back to language, if you're saying my language is ugly because of how it sounds to you, all I hear is that you don't know anything about it and you're referring to something unknown as ugly. It just seems like ignorance.
As to your second point, being unaware of one's accent and being unaware of one's own timbre are completely different things.
I'm not so sure. I don't think most people are racist against Klingons, but Klingon still tends to sound harsh — again, because it was designed that way (for example, it leans heavily on stops and affricates and tends to be produced in the back of the mouth). On the other hand, a lot of Americans exhibited a strange antipathy towards the French over the past decade, but it was never considered an ugly language.
Personal meaningless anecdote: When I was ~11 or so and I was really into DnD - I used to exclusively create elven characters. I would spend HOURS dreaming up elvish names for them and I almost always included the 'que' in their name. I had read LoTR, and I think this might have been subconscious.
For those interested in constructed languages, I recommend checking out Mark Rosenfelder's website http://zompist.com/. His Language Construction Kit in particular is a great resource: http://zompist.com/kit.html
I came here to recommend this exact book. I bought it on a whim and it's a fantastic read. Even if you never plan on actually making a language, it's fascinating to understand what goes into creating a complete language, from phenomes to words to phrases to a complete grammar.
A couple of years ago there was no book version of the LCK, but a very popular book on the zompist bulletin board was "Describing Morphosyntax: A Guide for Field Linguists", by Thomas E. Payne.
It's essentially an overview of all the weird morphological and syntactical features that the various languages of the world exhibit, so it can function as a great source of inspiration for conlangers as well.
That site is a time capsule: the hilariously out-of-date "EZ Home Test", the complaints about "Bob and Newt", a review of Snow Crash, references to various events that were current in the mid-90s. It's good that languages don't change very fast...
I highly recommend Carter's biography of Tolkien. I read it in my teens and thought everybody (and especially Tolkien fans) knew Tolkien started working on many of his fictional languages many years before and that both the languages and the stories evolved together.
A great example of languages evolving to new technology is "internet". Composed of "inter" (Latin), "net" (English) and "work" (English). You have a culture (English) with an external influence (Latin), that sees a grouping of connected computers and decides to compare it to a fishing net. Network describes the topology, not the function. We see that we need a society that has invented fishing nets to even describe the Internet. But a different society might've called it something else. For example, the Internet is often called a web, much like a spiderweb, which also looks like a net.
You can't just invent an alien language for a technologically-advanced society without thinking about how they got there.
...And there are people who just decide they need to (and are qualified to) make new words for new technology, and make a total botch out of it.
Case in point: Some Koreans decided to make "pure Korean" word for website. Nothing wrong with that in itself. But then they looked at "world wide web", and also looked at "homepage", and decided that "world" and "home" patched together makes perfect sense as a website.
So was invented the word nurijip, from "nuri" (an archaic word for "world") and "jip" (house). A Korean website is thus a "world-house". WTF is it supposed to mean?
Everybody around me just says "website" or "homepage", but I've seen nurijip quite frequently in news articles. I guess they're under extra pressure from know-it-all prescriptivists to keep our language "pure".
(Well, to be fair, sometimes people do coin a good new "native" word to describe new stuff. Sadly, that's not the case here.)
Reminds me of how in Anathem by Neal Stephenson, their word for the equivalent of the Internet is the Reticulum, which etymologically comes from Reticule. Reticule has the following fictional definition:
Reticule
(1) In Proto-, Old, and Middle Orth, a small bag or basket, netlike in its construction.
(2) In early Praxic Orth, a gridlike network of lines or fine wires on an optical device.
(3) In later Praxic and New Orth, two or more syntactic devices that are able to communicate with one another.
The Dictionary, 4th Edition, A.R. 3000
Sense 1 and 2 above actually do correspond to English. Sense 3 is constructed by using reticule as the root instead of inter-network.
An additional important point is that all the words in the book should be considered translations, since it's on another planet. For example, if they mention a "carrot" it should be considered a similar plant on their world, not a literal Earth carrot.
For all those interested, David J Peterson actually has a book coming out in September this year on how to go about constructing your own language. Loads of great resources can be found on http://conlang.org, and http://dedalvs.conlang.org/ (DJP's own conlang website) as well!
He told me it covered the essentials of language construction as far as his methodology goes, but I think it offers some insight into the development of other major and not-so-well-known conlangs as well.
I tried to do some conlanging in my school days, but I always hit the word invention bottleneck.
So I tried writing scripts to automate that.
Turns out making randomized phonemes sound good was too hard for me (probably still is, haven't tried in a while).
Kinda sad, really.
On Game of Thrones we accept for convenience's sake that the dominant on-screen culture speak English, despite this being, you know, an alien world. That's cheating on a huge scale if you think about it a little, so why not extend the cheating a little and re-use Lithuanian (say) or some other natural language as a proxy for Dothraki rather than going to all the trouble of inventing a whole new freaking language.
Historical Baggage. If someone starts speaking Russian, we've got a whole cultural idea of what it means for them to be speaking that language. I expect they wouldn't want to tint character personalities with biases from reality.
Which is why you wouldn't pick Russian. You need something more obscure and exotic sounding, that the vast majority of the audience wouldn't recognize. There are a lot of such languages. Possibly Lithuanian was too conservative. Basque anyone? For Dothraki you really just need something really alien sounding.
Early in Game of Thrones when Khaleesi (sp?) hooked up with the Dothraki warrior guy ("you are my moon" etc.) I would infuriate the office GoT geek by my inability to remember any of the names in general, and my humorous (to me) habit of referring to said warrior as "the Klingon dude" in particular. To me if he looks like a Klingon and sounds like a Klingon...
Unlike Tolkien, George R.R. Martin never created full-fledged languages for his books, but he did make up a bunch of words. I guess they didn't want to replace those with different words from other real-world languages.
One of the challenges for David Peterson was to 'retrofit' the languages he created to what Martin had already made up. He coined a bunch of words and phrases for the books, and those needed to make sense and be grammatically correct in the newly created languages.
The phrase "valar morghulis", meaning "all men must die" in High Valyrian is a nice example. Peterson made the -ar suffix indicate the collective number. This is expressed by 'all' in English, but in many languages this is a separate number from singular and plural. He also added a paucal number (meaning "a few"). vala (man), vali (men), valun (a few men), valar (all men).
Thanks, I didn't know any of that. So my modified proposal is to add these words and phrases as deltas on top of your selected natural language. Still saving 99%+ of the work involved in inventing a new language.
Of course you are right, and I suppose I am basically speaking with tongue in cheek. I am sure inventing languages accounted for an absolute minuscule percentage of the lavish GoT budget. So why not use the opportunity to be a perfectionist and do something very cool and fun ?
Still if you are ever looking to create your own fantasy series on a shoestring, maybe my idea has merit...
53 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadHe created an ancient proto-elven language called quenya, and a modern elvish language evolved from it called sindarin. He created the language with specific goals in mind, working on it over his whole career, and the Lord of the Rings came into existence as a result, in the same way that a really nice hat rack tends to naturally accumulate hats.
https://www.academia.edu/4901880/Elvish_Linguistics_The_Scie...
It seems perfectly plausible to me that, just as there are unpleasant non-linguistic sounds, there could be languages that produce a greater number of unpleasant sounds in typical speech, to a person from any cultural background. Think: nails on a chalkboard. (I'm tempted to call these "objectively ugly" sounds, but of course having a social cause does not make something subjective.)
Of course, this is not to say that racism, or xenophobia are never the causes of these judgments. And, more subtly, some of our views about what sounds are 'ugly' may also be socially constructed, at least in part. And these views could relate to longstanding racial biases, among other factors.
tl;dr: Probably some of these judgments are facially racist, and others are caused by genuine assessments of the ugliness of sounds, but those judgments themselves may have social causes that include racist and xenophobic dynamics. But others still may well relate to perceptions that are hardwired, and not socially constructed.
All this complexity makes me hesitate before signing on to your view, though I do sometimes lean in that direction.
A good example of nicely spoken German is "Die Bombe die Nicht Tickt" (a reading of a short story by a German band whose name eludes me). Also the main character in Goodbye Lenin.
If native speakers don't believe their own languages to be ugly, then it certainly seems like a xenophobic belief.
(By the way: yes, I actually have heard people say that they wished that they spoke another language because it sounds nicer than theirs. English speakers say this about French all the time -- though, as always, it's hard to say whether this is because French "really is" [whatever that means] prettier sounding, or due to cultural factors. I've also heard a native speaker of Korean say she wished she was an English speaker instead, because English is nicer sounding. This is just another anecdote, though. Who knows a person's real reason for saying such a thing. That's why this whole paragraph is, I now realize, in parentheses.)
In the original case of the orcs' Black Speech in Tolkein, they were a race incapable of saying anything pretty because of their language. These are the broad fantastical racism undertones that really bug me about Tolkein's mythology, and they mirror a real undercurrent in people's modes of thought.
Again, I cannot see how this is a difficult position to accept: some sounds sound worse than others. Spoken languages are made up of sounds. So why is it so hard to accept that some languages contain more pleasing sounds than others. Of course, as I've already agreed, there can be a lot more at work than this, including racism. But as a general proposition, I don't see how you can hold that judgments about what languages are ugly are fundamentally racist. I also don't see how you've addressed the issue that the categories of people that we regard as speaking an ugly language only weakly correlate (if at all -- obviously this is not a mathematical exercise so I cannot be too precise here, unfortunately) with groups to which we have broad racial biases.
I suppose I can't rule out that there are people out there in the U.S. or western Europe who would tell you, as a general proposition, that African and Middle Eastern languages are ugly. If so, those people are, I agree, letting their racial biases drive their aesthetic judgments about the qualities of language. But I don't think this is the typical case.
French and Italian [0] are considered romance languages, because among other things they sound pretty. Russian [1] (and I suppose most Slavic languages) just don't generally sound pretty. For what its worth, I speak Russian; not terribly well, but I speak it. Russian really isn't a language that sounds "pretty" or "silky", or whichever adjective you'd prefer.
The reason I decided to respond to you comment was a little more abstract than that though. People liking or disliking things about other kinds of people isn't racist. Some people just don't like things. I don't like black licorice (no idea who invented it, but I don't like it). I don't particularly care for traditional German food (I'll eat it, its just not my go to for food), and I don't think I'd ever wear a kilt to a wedding (I'm mostly Irish, then Italian, then Native American).
I don't think those things make me racist or xenophobic. At least, I don't think less of anyone who prefers any of those things. I just don't like them for me.
I think if we start claiming that not liking something like a language is racist, we're on a slippery slope indeed. For example, I don't like the color red. I don't like traditional Mexican music. Do either one of those things make me racist?
I'm not trying to attack by any means, I'm sincerely curious.
[0] http://www.orbilat.com/General_Survey/List_of_Romance_Langua...
[1] http://www.russiaslam.com/2012/stories/the-russian-language-...
No, they (along with Spanish and others) are considered "romance languages" because they descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of the common Romans of the late Imperial period. [0]
Has nothing to do with sounding pretty.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages#Origins and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages#Name
Not relevant to your point, but just to clarify a common misconception: Romance languages are languages derived from Latin. The name means "language of the Romans", not "language of the amorous".
But disliking a language is disliking something very entrenched within an ethnicity. I'm sure that there are Mexicans who dislike some of our traditional music, but how many Mexicans think that Spanish is ugly and are embarrassed to speak it? How many Germans think the same about German?
If indeed native speakers don't consider their own language ugly, then foreigners who think that seem to be exhibiting a kind of xenophobia.
What does that have to do with anything? Nobody's indicting anyone for speaking a language. The question here is just whether some languages are generally more mellifluous.
> If indeed native speakers don't consider their own language ugly, then foreigners who think that seem to be exhibiting a kind of xenophobia.
Maybe, but it seems more likely to me that native speakers are just deaf to how their own language sounds to other people — similar to how most people don't think they have an accent, and are surprised what their voice sounds like recorded because they're used to hearing it rumble from within.
Going back to language, if you're saying my language is ugly because of how it sounds to you, all I hear is that you don't know anything about it and you're referring to something unknown as ugly. It just seems like ignorance.
As to your second point, being unaware of one's accent and being unaware of one's own timbre are completely different things.
It's essentially an overview of all the weird morphological and syntactical features that the various languages of the world exhibit, so it can function as a great source of inspiration for conlangers as well.
A great example of languages evolving to new technology is "internet". Composed of "inter" (Latin), "net" (English) and "work" (English). You have a culture (English) with an external influence (Latin), that sees a grouping of connected computers and decides to compare it to a fishing net. Network describes the topology, not the function. We see that we need a society that has invented fishing nets to even describe the Internet. But a different society might've called it something else. For example, the Internet is often called a web, much like a spiderweb, which also looks like a net.
You can't just invent an alien language for a technologically-advanced society without thinking about how they got there.
...And there are people who just decide they need to (and are qualified to) make new words for new technology, and make a total botch out of it.
Case in point: Some Koreans decided to make "pure Korean" word for website. Nothing wrong with that in itself. But then they looked at "world wide web", and also looked at "homepage", and decided that "world" and "home" patched together makes perfect sense as a website.
So was invented the word nurijip, from "nuri" (an archaic word for "world") and "jip" (house). A Korean website is thus a "world-house". WTF is it supposed to mean?
Makes me twitch every time I hear it.
(Well, to be fair, sometimes people do coin a good new "native" word to describe new stuff. Sadly, that's not the case here.)
And always cause people to smile when they hear it. :)
An additional important point is that all the words in the book should be considered translations, since it's on another planet. For example, if they mention a "carrot" it should be considered a similar plant on their world, not a literal Earth carrot.
DJP has stuff up at dedalvs.com , dothraki.conlang.org , dedalvs.tumblr.com , twitter.com/Dedalvs, &c. &c.
Is the idea similar to Zompist's Language Construction Kit?
He told me it covered the essentials of language construction as far as his methodology goes, but I think it offers some insight into the development of other major and not-so-well-known conlangs as well.
Is that a transcription error? Surely "consonantal root", right?
"Your audience is lazy" is rule number 2 or 3.
Early in Game of Thrones when Khaleesi (sp?) hooked up with the Dothraki warrior guy ("you are my moon" etc.) I would infuriate the office GoT geek by my inability to remember any of the names in general, and my humorous (to me) habit of referring to said warrior as "the Klingon dude" in particular. To me if he looks like a Klingon and sounds like a Klingon...
One of the challenges for David Peterson was to 'retrofit' the languages he created to what Martin had already made up. He coined a bunch of words and phrases for the books, and those needed to make sense and be grammatically correct in the newly created languages.
The phrase "valar morghulis", meaning "all men must die" in High Valyrian is a nice example. Peterson made the -ar suffix indicate the collective number. This is expressed by 'all' in English, but in many languages this is a separate number from singular and plural. He also added a paucal number (meaning "a few"). vala (man), vali (men), valun (a few men), valar (all men).
Still if you are ever looking to create your own fantasy series on a shoestring, maybe my idea has merit...