Who Needs a New Language?

A former DMV employee in California developed a new language that he called Ithkuil. He had spent three decades on it! In 2004 he posted the entire nine yards on the web: “Ithkuil: A Philosophical Design for a Hypothetical Language”, detailing the grammar, syntax and lexicon of Ithkuil. I came across this strangely intriguing development in an article that appeared in the New Yorker in December 24/31 issue, written by Joshua Foer.


The first thought that popped into my head was: “Does the world need a new language?” There are thousands of them already in existence. What’s the point? Then I thought of movies and TV shows in which the characters break into tongues. “Lord of the Rings” comes to mind. I learned that Tolkien had invented this language that he wanted to try out, and he pretty much wrote the Lord of the Rings books just to get the word out! And there’s Star Trek with Klingon. And the Game of Thrones with Dothraki.


While I admire the ingeniousness (bloody mindedness?) of the creators of these languages, I always felt it was pretentious. Languages constructed from scratch as in a laboratory might have logical completeness and soundness, but they come across as sterile. And no real person wants to speak them. Just think of the “global” language Esperanto.


Growing up in India, I spoke four languages: English (the medium of instruction in school), Hindi (compulsory second language), Marathi (language of the state of Maharashtra to which Bombay belongs), and Tamil (“mother-tongue” of my parents). I enjoyed the diversity, and each language bespoke a different culture, a different way of seeing the world, a different sensibility to life. Later in life, I picked up Turkish. Yet I have barely scratched the surface. If you really must throw in some made up language into an American movie or TV show, why not use one of the more arcane of the thousands of languages spoken by real people in the real world? It will be as equally foreign to the average watcher, and much less expensive to produce.

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Published on January 03, 2013 12:44
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