Zompist Bboard Again

And then, while I'm writing tons and tons of stuff, I might as well try to list most of the "famous conlangs" or conlangs and pseudo-conlangs from famous or once-famous books, television, and movies which I have studied or documented and deciphered. When I write more major posts, a few times a year, I list them so that I can recall my triumphs.

I should maybe make this a separate post.

(Now, I am pioneering often in my studies and it's usually because, more or less, no one cares or it's just too hard or too uninteresting for it to have been explored or done before. Be that as it may.)

( Note: Conlangs or "psuedo-conlangs" are usually not as elaborate or large as the most elaborate of conlangs. Many of these works just contain 20 words or a few sentences. Pakuni, Klingon, maybe Atlantean, and Na'vi but not Dothraki have sizeable corpuses, corpora. The Voynich Manuscript is notably huge. )

Conlangs or pseudo-conlangs I've documented and deciphered, by work where they occur:

C 1200s, books, Lingua Ignota pseudo-conlang by St. Hildegard.
C 1200s, British Museum Manuscript "Armenian Twin". My opinion upon careful examination: Asemic Writing Hoax.
C 1400s, The Voynich Manuscript. My opinion upon careful examination: Asemic Writing Hoax. I think this is, however, also a unique source for European folklore and Pagan beliefs regarding "The Fairy Land".
There are c 1700s AD variants of the Japanese Writing System called Jindai moji which were hoaxes for a native ancestral script to Japanese. As opposed to its actual origin in Chinese writing. I have either studied these or even done special study into them. And also the c 500 BC I Ching symbols and such.
C 1800s, Codex Rohonc. My opinion upon careful examination: Asemic Writing Hoax.
( There may be one or two other "asemic writing hoaxes" which I found but cannot remember.)
( Many other 1800s and earlier works contain major and minor invented names which are quite clever in composition and reference. This tradition is on-going.)
C 1910s to 1940s, books, complete works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan, Barsoom, and other once-popular works. Also the c 2009 "John Carter" film based on the Barsoom series. Its language was done by the Avatar conlang person. These many works contain no sentences and maybe 10 pseudo-conlangs represented by 200 invented words imitating various combinations of natural languages. Despite not being real conlangs, I consider Burroughs' creations of greater variety than those of Tolkein.
1950s, film, The Day the Earth Stood Still.
1950s, film, Forbidden Planet.
1970s, television, Land of the Lost. Also the 1990s and 2000s tv series and film. Original Language by Professor Victoria Fromkin.
1970s onward, films, Star Wars.
1980s, film, Dark Crystal.
C 1998, film, Blade. Language by Professor Victoria Fromkin.
2001, film, Atlantis the Lost Empire. I did most of the decipherment work about Winter 2006 but built on fundamental work by Paul Sherrill of Okemos, Michigan, USA, my peer in age and home state, among a few others. Language by Marc Okrand, PhD Linguistics.
( Perhaps other works I forget. )

Conlangs or pseudo-conlangs I've studied (inasfar as possible*), by work where they occur:
*Words marked with an asterisk have yet to be documented and deciphered by anyone, at least publically.

( I have discovered in my readings various "ritual languages" which are sorts of modern and historic conlangs or pseudo-conlangs which occur in "anthropological" or "ethnographic" settings. C 1200s Tangut may contain one, notably. These things are distinct from types of codes. I have read some academic literature discussing such things, as well. The indication is that conlanging has always existed but seldom survived for discovery due to its limited interest. Before printing, all books had to be copied by hand and so the evidence I have found is that thousands and thousands of books and written works have been lost and mostly decomposed since the invention of writing. )
( There is also the phenomena of "asemic writing" which is writing without meaning, perhaps in imitation of some real writing, for art or added product value.)
( I have also studied many known historic codes via books and websites.)
( I have also found at least 3 known historic collections of writing systems from c 900s, 1200s, and 1200s, which claim to preserve writing systems or samples of them which are elsewhere not known to exist and possibly fictions. One of them is associated with Ogham and another is a sizeable work of some Arabic scholar, the c 900s one. )
( There are also other pseudo-conlangs or pseudo-conscripts which I have encountered and listed in various places. Some written or spoken gibberish cannot be proven to be a conlang whereas it has been popular for a long time to create code alphabets for writing languages. )
C 1500s, books, Gargantua and Pantagruel; Gullivers Travels.
C 1500s, book, I have also studied the Philosophical Language of the Real Character book.
1950s, books, The Lord of the Rings and others related to it. The corpus for the 10 or so languages of Tolkein is not very large but for number and elaborateness, no one has beat him. Except maybe the recent David Peterson of Game of Thrones fame.
1980s, films etc, Klingon and Vulcan from Star Trek Works. Languages by Marc Okrand, PhD Linguistics.
This includes the monumental decipherment and development of the Vulcan Language by Mark Gardner and his Team. I am even in regular contact with both Marc Okrand, Klingon creator, and Mark Gardner, what fortune.
C 2000s, tv series, a Ferengi Conlang occuring in Star Trek Deep Space Nine, deciphered by David Salo, translator and quasi-creator of Lord of the Rings movie franchise languages.
C 2005, video game, Jade Empire.* This is a very major conlang which has yet to be documented and deciphered.
C 2010s, film, Avatar, the Na'vi Language. The maker of this language also did the language for the c 2009 John Carter film based on the novels of the creator of Tarzan.
C 2010s, tv series, Game of Thrones, Dothraki and Valyrian Languages.
C 2010s, tv series mostly, Other languages by David Peterson, maker of Dothraki.*
( Others I can't remember.)

Then I've also studied some conlangs that were presented online, usually via Zompist Bboard or the major conlanging facebook groups that I had access to. In person, though, I have studied few conlangs which were not my own. I have seldom met in person any other conlangers, my whole live long. Well, I have met few scholars of Egyptian Hieroglyphic in person and I have studied it almost weekly for 10 years now.

Bob wrote: ↑Mon Feb 10, 2020 9:48 pm1980s, film, Dark Crystal.

There was a conlang in The Dark Crystal?

KathTheDragon wrote: ↑Tue Feb 11, 2020 6:41 am

Bob wrote: ↑Mon Feb 10, 2020 9:48 pm1980s, film, Dark Crystal.

There was a conlang in The Dark Crystal?

If I remember, there's 3 or 4. They're very short, each with only a couple sentences. There's also 2 or so conscripts but they might be pseudo-conscripts. There might be an interesting symbol system, too, non-writing. There was a released statement about one of the conlangs that it was based on Egyptian Hieroglyphic (Middle Egyptian) and Ancient Greek or something like this. And I even found that to be true and tried to look up most or all words in that one.

I don't think I put my work on the Dark Crystal Conlangs for free online. I just get busy with things and not a lot of people are interested any aside from little old me. I do a lot of research in my free time but then it's even more of an investment of time to get it free online. And that's not even trying to publish or sell it, which I have never tried and have not that much hope regarding.

Here's the guide to my websites, you can just search it for the language or movie name to see if I put it online yet. But I just searched it and found nothing for "Dark Crystal" the 1980s Jim Henson puppet movie. I think I liked Labyrinth better but that was the one with all the conlangs, more of his take on The Lord of the Rings. The 1980s was like that, there was an animated version of LOTR and then the Star Wars creator did a film like that, Willow. I wonder if there were any conlangs or pseudo-conlangs in it. He arranged at least one real conlang and one pseudo-conlang for 1983's (?) Return of the Jedi but maybe all pseudo-conlangs and pseudo-conscripts for the previous Star Trek films.

And then these works were all in part derivatives of that very successful 1970s kids sci-fi television series in the USA, Land of the Lost. But I think it got the idea of having an invented language from the success of the Lord of the Rings books. But Tolkein was himself probably inspired by pseudo-conlangs and invented words in the works of Edward Leer, maybe Gulliver's Travels, maybe c 1910s Edgar Rice Burroughs works (the creator of Tarzan and once very popular works).

Guide to "Any Language at All" Encyclopedic Website and Other Websites by Me
https://anylanguageatall411.blogspot.co ... w=flipcard

Hearing that Tolkien may have been inspired by Burroughs is like hearing that Michelangelo got the idea for the Sistine Chapel ceiling from a rude drawing in the men's room.

Also, we might want to point out that the conlangs in The Dark Crystal are not the same as in the newer TV show. In the movie, the Podling language is random Slavic words (similar to the fictional language spoken by Tom Hanks in Terminal), while in the show it's a proper conlang.

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Tue Feb 11, 2020 11:38 pm Hearing that Tolkien may have been inspired by Burroughs is like hearing that Michelangelo got the idea for the Sistine Chapel ceiling from a rude drawing in the men's room.

I don’t necessarily agree with this. Even though Tolkien’s languages are highly detailed, pretty realistic and fully worked out, while Burroughs’ ‘conlangs’ scarcely deserve the name (I quite like Bob’s name of ‘pseudo-conlangs’), it is certainly within the realms of possibility that Tolkien may have been inspired by Burroughs in some way. For instance, perhaps he could have been inspired by the aesthetic of Burroughs’ languages: we all know that Tolkien was unusually receptive to the sound of languages (think ‘cellar door’, or his statements about Welsh and Finnish). (And pseudo-conlangs often have interesting sounds, to make up for their absolute lack of meaning: for instance, even though I am no fan of the movie, I do think Star Wars is pretty good at making interesting-sounding ‘languages’ which still mean absolutely nothing whatsoever.)

(Just to be clear: I do think that Burroughs’ and Tolkien’s works are so different that it is quite unlikely the latter was inspired by the former. But I disagree with you in that I do think it’s possible.)

But I disagree with you in that I do think it’s possible.

who said it was impossible? I didn't even say it was unlikely.

I don't know much about Burroughs, but Wikipedia tells me that 'A Princess of Mars' was released in 1912, by which time early 'Qenya' sketches look decidedly, um, Tolkienian.

But! A possible common inspiration for both Tolkien and Burroughs would be H. Rider Haggard (King's Solomon's MInes, She)

I don't remember a fictional language being mentioned at all in Rabelais. I'd be interested in a quote

I would add Dante to the list, with the cryptic "Pape Satàn, pape Satàn aleppe!"

And Jules Verne. In 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Captain Nemo converses with his crew using a language of his own design. We don't see much of it, but we know that 'Nautron respoc lorni virch' means 'There's nothing in sight'.

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Wed Feb 12, 2020 7:13 am

But I disagree with you in that I do think it’s possible.

who said it was impossible? I didn't even say it was unlikely.

Sorry! I must have misread you then.

Moose-tache :

Tolkein says something like he was inspired by Burroughs in his letters, though. The same quote implies he looked down on stuff like that. But from what I read otherwise, he probably read stuff like penny dreadfuls when he was a kid. Which is more or less what Burrough was a writer of.

He also didn't seem to like hippies. Oh, Tolkein.

There's a newer TV show? I thought they were making another movie. That was last I heard. Neat. There's also conlangs in the newer TV show? I should look into that. Wow, I didn't know that.

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bradrn :

I could be wrong about it. I know Burroughs' pulp fiction was really popular in its run.

I've recently done some reading into all the many chivalrous romances like King Arthur from the middle ages. I've read again and again that Tolkein had read a lot of them and that matches with what I've read of those works. There's just all sorts of European classics or historical works and epics which I've recently read some of and which I've read that Tolkein knew of or probably knew of. So it seems he worked much of that sort of thing into his work.

But I do still puzzle why he put so much effort into describing each day's weather. Maybe that's a novel thing. These old medieval works are also windy and poetic, so maybe that's where he got it. I read the books between the ages of 13 and 20 and liked them a lot.

Burroughs works are almost all in the public domain, so I just downloaded them all and fed them into a word frequency software. Then I looked for non-English words and studied them. They were invented words based on a variety of real and exotic languages: Latin, Greek, Turkish, Persian, these come to mind.

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Ars Lande :

I've looked into King Solomon's Mines and "She" over the years, into my studies in Atlantis in fiction.

By 1912? Huh. Well, I think The Hobbit was written in the 1930s and then The Lord of the Rings in the 1950s, so maybe it still was an influence. Were all the other conlangs he made for those books just after-thoughts? Quenya seems to be the only one he worked on all his life or at least for a long period of time.

Rabelais' "Gargantua and Pantagruel" is often said to contain many long words composed of Ancient Greek word parts for the amusement of the c 1600s French who would have known Ancient Greek. Then there's also a part where two characters meet and exchange sentences in 4 conlangs or pseudo-conlangs. Maybe all these invented words were excluded from the translation you were reading.

I haven't gotten into them much because they're all said to be scatological humor and dirty jokes. You know, Rabelais. Somehow I accidentally ran into a fairly recent anthology book of academic articles about the works of Rabelais and sure enough, one gave an overview of the odd language things and invented words in his works. But it didn't go very in-depth.

Yes, I forget the Dante thing. There's a few other examples of invented words and character names in Dante, too.

I've encountered some other examples over the years and have maybe put many on my websites and facebook posts. But I have yet to try to gather them all into a single list like what I've done for hieroglyphic writing systems on my academia.edu profile. Some day, maybe.

Wow, really? I never heard of that from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. See, whenever I pick up some old novel or something, I always notice conlangs or pseudo-conlangs that no one else has seemed to notice.

Bob wrote: ↑Thu Feb 13, 2020 10:03 pm I've recently done some reading into all the many chivalrous romances like King Arthur from the middle ages. I've read again and again that Tolkein had read a lot of them and that matches with what I've read of those works. There's just all sorts of European classics or historical works and epics which I've recently read some of and which I've read that Tolkein knew of or probably knew of. So it seems he worked much of that sort of thing into his work.

I’m not surprised Tolkien knew about those works — after all, his primary field of study was Old English.

Burroughs works are almost all in the public domain, so I just downloaded them all and fed them into a word frequency software. Then I looked for non-English words and studied them. They were invented words based on a variety of real and exotic languages: Latin, Greek, Turkish, Persian, these come to mind.

I’ve actually never read Burroughs — could you provide a link?

By 1912? Huh. Well, I think The Hobbit was written in the 1930s and then The Lord of the Rings in the 1950s, so maybe it still was an influence. Were all the other conlangs he made for those books just after-thoughts? Quenya seems to be the only one he worked on all his life or at least for a long period of time.

I seem to remember reading that it was actually the other way around — the conlangs and world came first, and only afterwards did he write books about them.

Bob wrote: ↑Thu Feb 13, 2020 10:03 pm
By 1912? Huh. Well, I think The Hobbit was written in the 1930s and then The Lord of the Rings in the 1950s, so maybe it still was an influence. Were all the other conlangs he made for those books just after-thoughts? Quenya seems to be the only one he worked on all his life or at least for a long period of time.

Yep, the conlangs came first, and if we're talking about the idea of creating conlangs... Welll, he had that very early. (Quite possibly inspired by invented words in earlier works, of course!)

Rabelais' "Gargantua and Pantagruel" is often said to contain many long words composed of Ancient Greek word parts for the amusement of the c 1600s French who would have known Ancient Greek. Then there's also a part where two characters meet and exchange sentences in 4 conlangs or pseudo-conlangs. Maybe all these invented words were excluded from the translation you were reading.

I haven't gotten into them much because they're all said to be scatological humor and dirty jokes. You know, Rabelais. Somehow I accidentally ran into a fairly recent anthology book of academic articles about the works of Rabelais and sure enough, one gave an overview of the odd language things and invented words in his works. But it didn't go very in-depth.

Ah, yes, of course! I somehow didn't count them are they're humorous, but standard, French / Latin / Greek derivations... There might be pseudo-conlangs (a neat term, btw) in the later which I haven't read.

I'd advise, well, anyone to read Rabelais, at least Gargantua. There's a lot of dirty jokes, of course, and gallons of wines floating liberally, but it's very good, over the top fantasy, really unlike anything we read these days. And it's actually rather deep -- Rabelais was a very bright scholar, and it shows.

Re Tolkien:

But I do still puzzle why he put so much effort into describing each day's weather. Maybe that's a novel thing. These old medieval works are also windy and poetic, so maybe that's where he got it. I read the books between the ages of 13 and 20 and liked them a lot.

That, and it's an old storytelling trick. It's particularly useful in fantasy: describing mundane reality in detail helps with suspension of disbelief, plus the fantastic element are all the more dramatic.

Take the opening chapters of LOTR for instance: it's so true to life, as a description of a country gentleman throwing a huge party (with annoying penny-pincher relatives that you have to invite anyway) that you completely accept that everyone is a little person with furry feet, and that Bilbo will pull up a magic ring at the end.
Or Dracula: I don't believe in vampires, and neither did anyone in 19th century Britain, and they were cliché even then. But let's say you have a boring solicitor doing boring real estate deals... and out of the blue, here come the fangs. You're hooked.
Or Stephen King. Eldritch abominations? Yawn. Been there, done that.... I don't believe in Lovecraftian things from outer space. But I believe in small town America, so after it's been established as a setting, I buy the stuff about kids being eaten in the sewers.

Tolkien did read and write Old English, but of course that has nothing to do with knights and dragons. All the chivalric stuff emerged in the mid-to-late middle ages, but even that his little to do with Tolkien's style. The most obvious influences on his writing is Scott. Nineteenth century romanticism is as distant from medieval Arthurian legends as Kesha is from Gregorian chants, despite the medieval setting of works like Ivanhoe. And of course Ivanhoe read like a parody by the mid-twentieth century when LotR came out. The book was savaged by critics who thought it was a zombie of hundred-year-old tropes brought back to life, as if an author from our time wrote a "lost cause" Southern Gothic novel featuring "Negro Jim and 'Lizbeth." It was called "the death knell of Romanticism." Because that's what it is: the emphasis on emotion and individualism, the total absence of sex beyond longing gazes, the total absence of economics beyond an anachronistic level of abundance, heavy handed condemnations of industrialization and glorification of nature, and an incredibly awkward relationship between humanism and divine right monarchy that seems to go right over the author's head. Am I over-generalizing? Probably. People have literally written books about Tolkien's literary influences. But to me, I've always felt that LotR is Walter Scott's posthumously published final novel.

Back on topic: should we add "the local dialect of San Lorenzo" from Cat's Cradle to the list of pseudo-conlangs? I've always felt that it did excellent work from a story perspective, in part because it's so ad-hoc and incomprehensible. It feels like Vonnegut is just making it up as he goes along.

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Fri Feb 14, 2020 4:27 pm Tolkien did read and write Old English, but of course that has nothing to do with knights and dragons.

Beowulf has a dragon. But I was thinking more about things like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (which even has Tolkien listed as an editor!):

Siþen þe sege and þe assaut watz sesed at Troye,
Þe borȝ brittened and brent to brondeȝ and askez,
Þe tulk þat þe trammes of tresoun þer roȝt
Watz tried for his tricherie, þe trewest on erthe:
Hit was Ennias þe athel, and his highe kynde,
Þat siþen depreced prouinces, and patrounes bicome
Welneȝe of al þe wele in þe west iles.

(Although now that I look into it, it appears to be Middle rather than Old English. But the point still stands that this was one of Tolkien’s major fields of research.)

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Fri Feb 14, 2020 4:27 pm The most obvious influences on his writing is Scott. Nineteenth century romanticism is as distant from medieval Arthurian legends as Kesha is from Gregorian chants, despite the medieval setting of works like Ivanhoe. And of course Ivanhoe read like a parody by the mid-twentieth century when LotR came out. The book was savaged by critics who thought it was a zombie of hundred-year-old tropes brought back to life, as if an author from our time wrote a "lost cause" Southern Gothic novel featuring "Negro Jim and 'Lizbeth." It was called "the death knell of Romanticism."

I’m a bit confused by this: are you talking here about Ivanhoe or LotR?

bradrn » Fri Feb 14, 2020 1:50 am :

A link? Well, his name is Edgar Rice Bourroughs. I found a lot of his works on Project Gutenberg, really finely typed up and ready for input into a word frequency software.

You're right, he made the conlangs and world first, then did one book, it was very successful, so he surprised everyone with the giant sequel. So the first one was like Peter Pan and then the second was more like, "Okay, well, here's my Faerie Queene. (Bulging eyes.) Publish it and we'll probably all be set for life. It's like a giant narrative Grimm's Fairy Tales that vaguely seems to reference WWII and is all kinds of modern. The kid'll eat it up."

...

Ars Lande » Fri Feb 14, 2020 4:37 am :

I think I got "pseudo-conlangs" from David Peterson's The Art of Invented Languages. Which I bought in Barnes and Noble years ago now and have pretty much read cover to cover by this point. I go back to it for inspiration now.

WOW, did you know I'm probably the only person to own the Vulcan Language book made of Mark Gardner's website (without his permission, it turns out!) and has been for sale on Lulu.com .

Rosenberger, the maker of this forum, did a book. Oh, my family has to have it! I think in a couple years our library will have it. I lost most of my Klingon corpus, too, and still need to regain it. I really should, I'm so into this stuff.

...

Huh, no joke. A recommendation for Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel.

...

Wow, you really hit The Lord of the Rings, Dracula, and Stephen King on the head. Though I haven't read enough Dracula to know.


...

Moose-tache » Fri Feb 14, 2020 5:27 pm :

You people are all clearly brilliant.

I have heard of Ivanhoe but don't remember much about it except that it is popular in Europe.

Yeah, you should add that one. I never heard of it but why not. I'll make a note and then it's already in the thread, so it'll wait for later.

....

bradrn Post Fri Feb 14, 2020 6:12 pm :

Ah.

Bob wrote: ↑Tue Feb 18, 2020 9:56 pm bradrn » Fri Feb 14, 2020 1:50 am :

A link? Well, his name is Edgar Rice Bourroughs. I found a lot of his works on Project Gutenberg, really finely typed up and ready for input into a word frequency software.

Oh, you’re just using Project Gutenberg. I suppose that should have been the first place I looked. I don’t have much to read right now… maybe I’ll go and have a look at his books then.

(By the way, did you know that you don’t just have to copy and paste the headers of our posts? There’s a ‘quote’ button next to every post (looks like a double quotation mark), and if you press that it’ll give you a text box for your reply which includes the text of that post. There’s a list of posts at the bottom of the reply page too, so you can use that to quote from multiple posts. Just telling you about this in case you aren’t aware of how to do this yet… I think it took me a while to figure it out as well!)

Rosenberger, the maker of this forum, did a book. Oh, my family has to have it! I think in a couple years our library will have it. I lost most of my Klingon corpus, too, and still need to regain it. I really should, I'm so into this stuff.

I do highly recommend zompist’s books — they’re really informative! Although you may not be interested, since they mostly consist of an introduction to linguistic concepts. But he has just released a new book containing a section about conlanging history (the description states ‘from Tolkien to Edgar Rice Burroughs to Richard Adams’), so you might be interested in that one.

Ars Lande wrote: ↑Fri Feb 14, 2020 3:37 am

But I do still puzzle why he put so much effort into describing each day's weather. Maybe that's a novel thing. These old medieval works are also windy and poetic, so maybe that's where he got it. I read the books between the ages of 13 and 20 and liked them a lot.

That, and it's an old storytelling trick. It's particularly useful in fantasy: describing mundane reality in detail helps with suspension of disbelief, plus the fantastic element are all the more dramatic.

That, and the fact that much of the action takes place outdoors. Under those conditions, the weather really matters a lot. Brrr!

bradrn » Fri Feb 14, 2020 1:50 am :

I do highly recommend zompist’s books — they’re really informative! Although you may not be interested, since they mostly consist of an introduction to linguistic concepts. But he has just released a new book containing a section about conlanging history (the description states ‘from Tolkien to Edgar Rice Burroughs to Richard Adams’), so you might be interested in that one.

Oh, I'd be interested. I've wanted to buy them for a long time and I collect books on conlanging. As much as I can, when I think of it. I just want to see what he says and how he says it. I could get some inspiration.

I've wanted to get his books for a long time now.