I spend my days learning exotic languages. And no, I don’t mean those fantastic made-for-books-and-TV ones like Klingon, Elvish and High Valyrian (although I wish I did - how cool would that be?).
The languages I study as part of my work are, however, just as exotic and infinitely more interesting because these just happen to be the languages of ancient cultures that have only recently been touched by the modern world.
Endangered Languages
I’m currently studying the grammar of a beautiful language called Warlpiri - spoken in the deserts of North Central Australia - in collaboration with a team of close friends - who like me, refuse to see the world’s lesser-known languages become swamped by linguistic bullies like English, Spanish, French, Mandarin, Hindi and Russian. We hope to bring languages like Warlpiri and many other language from the Australia onto the world stage - imagine apps for learning these languages, songs and movies available to download. Netflix offering the options to have subtitles in Warlpiri and Arrernte and Wiradjuri. And so many others.
A distant dream? Maybe.
The sound files playing on my computer right now are of the soft ejective sounds and nasal vowels of Navajo. How do I teach an English-speaker how to say “béésh łichíiʼii bee ééhoozinígíí”?
“Béésh łichíiʼii bee ééhoozinígíí” by the way, is the Navajo word for “Internet”. Navajo words are like pure poetry, description after description layered to create an overall dynamic portrait. This one literally means “the copper with which knowledge came to be”.
But why copper? Well remember that in the old days, the very first form of telecommunications introduced by white people to the Navajo was the telegraph. And old telegraph wires used to be made from copper.
On my desk is a printed copy of a grammar of Classical Nahuatl, the official language of the former Aztec Empire. Nahuatl dialects are still spoken in many parts of Mexico, thankfully, yet to be swamped by Spanish. One of my favourite Nahuatl words is “tōtoltepōhua” meaning “to count eggs”. The “tōtolte-” part means “egg” and is literally made up of the words “turkey” and “stone”.
Why would an egg be a “turkey stone”? In ancient Mesoamerica, turkeys were the most common form of domesticated bird and if you wanted eggs, you got them from the turkey in your yard. So languages give us a snapshot, a window into a lost world. Losing any language however small in terms of number of speakers, is an utter tragedy to humanity as a whole.
Fantasy languages
I got bitten by the Tolkien bug a few years ago in Oxford. I blame Mr Tolkien for opening my eyes to how the setting for a fictitious world could be layered with detail after detail. Everything from how the characters looked and dressed to what they ate to what languages they spoke.
And this is what Tolkien took to new heights. Not only did he invent fictional languages - essentially creating a whole new field - conlanging (as in, “constructed” + “language”), he set down entire etymological histories and language families detailing the evolution of the phonology and grammar of countless languages.
They don’t make them like Tolkien anymore.
While George R.R. Martin is a genius at building tightly crafted political stories, his lack of understanding of human linguistics shows. I mean everyone on Westeros still speaks the same Common Tongue after tens of thousands of years? Come on, real-world Russian and Ukrainian diverged into separate tongues in less than a thousand years. Afrikaans began splitting off from Dutch and evolving into a new language in the 18th Century, about 200 years after William Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet.
So no, if there is one constant, it’s that languages are not constant.
So Tolkien got me fiddling with languages.
One dark stormy night, fueled by too much caffeine and too little restraint with the whiskey, I came up with these:
A language of touch and texture, “spoken” by sentient rodent-things in the pitch-black tunnels of an underground continent on a fantasy world. Imagine little furry creatures, touching each other with their multiple tails, drawing delicate patterns of nouns and adjectives on each others’ skins. A touch-language as expressive as any human tongue but unburdened by sound.
Or a visual one, “spoken” by colourful sorcery-wielding fish-insects inhabiting that volatile space between the sea and the sky, flitting above the waves and “singing” to each other by showing off the bioluminescence and vivid chromatophores of their graceful bodies?
How about a language of taste? Imagine multi-headed (yes, with multiple heads!) entities feared for their ability to twist and shape living flesh.
Imagine being a human on a world where the most feared beings competing with you for resources happen to be round balls of red fur with eight heads, “speaking” to each other by vomiting colourful sacs of volatile compounds into each others’ mouths. How would they structure their thoughts?
Stories of alien worlds
As you probably noticed, I have an extreme dislike for humanoid aliens. I mean, there are probably more distantly-related species on Earth that have evolved into crab-like forms than any other. I kid you not. Scientists call this “carcinisation” and lots of animals on our planet have crabified themselves as part of whatever evolutionary pressures that Mother Nature has thrown at them over millions of years.
So why do we need to constantly come up with humanoid aliens? In science fiction, when the edges of the universe are the limit?
So come with me if you want to see really weird extraterrestrials!
Of disgruntled, fashionable ogresses and rebellious pixies
I’m currently working on both a novel. Subscribers will get to read the serialised versions right here, chapter after chapter fresh from the oven of my frazzled mind.
It’s set in an alternate 19th Century England where, faced with a surge in obnoxious and vulgarly foul-mouthed fairies terrorising her rolling hills, Queen Victoria is forced to appoint fairywards - essentially mystical jailors armed with the skills to capture supernatural creatures.
One of these intrepid men has also just discovered that his late father, himself a prominent fairyward and advisor to Royalty, had left him (as wise fathers are wont to do before their untimely ends) an unusual inheritance - a grumpy but extremely fashionably-dressed shape-shifting ogress bound in servitude to their family for the next few centuries. Oh and the pixies imprisoned on his estate are planning a jailbreak. Plus, the foreign family next door appears to be illegally importing monstrous fairy creatures from Southeast Asia…
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