Language construction. From Esperanto to Dothraki

The other day I finished reading a book by Alexander Pipersky, a linguist and popularizer of science, about artificial languages. To be honest, I wasn’t particularly interested in linguistics before this book, but now I think it’s worth it. Alexander is so simple and interesting about this science that it is difficult to break away. The book is not about linguistics in general, but rather about artificial languages: a brief history of their research and the principles of classification. Interestingly, the author decided to go against the main trend in linguistics that

Linguistic science usually does not consider artificial languages a worthy object of study. His popular science work clearly shows that there is still meaning in the study - it is at least interesting:)

The book itself consists of 6 chapters, each of which is immersed in a particular class of conlangs (constructed languages) 1. Unattainable ideal This chapter discusses logical and philosophical languages. In such languages, the main goal is to create a logical language without flaws and see how this will affect the thinking of native speakers in this language:) The languages Loglan, Ro, Toki Pona, Ifkuil are mentioned here. It is cool that the author shows different languages and explains the concept - this allows you to compare the concepts of languages and their implementation, and sometimes see the opposition - for example, the Toki Pona language with minimal rules and the transfer of the basic essence and the Ifikuil language, where you can convey the subtlest meanings, but it is quite difficult to do this:)

2. Invention of signs - here we are talking about languages that claim to be logical and express the deep properties of the world order, but not with the help of letters, but with the help of pictures. This chapter begins with an analysis of the typology of signs, where three types are distinguished depending on how the signifier and signified are related: icons, indices and symbols.

• Icons - signs in which the signifier is somehow similar to the signified (fence-picture) signifier and signified are related by contiguity in space, time or in the chain of cause and effect (barking) Signs-symbols - signifier and signified are connected by a conditional connection, which is determined by agreement (dog) Next, the author examines the language of road signs, transcendental algebra, blissymbolic and paleneo.

3. Seeking understanding - here we are talking about international, auxiliary languages, like, well-known Esperanto. It is funny that in this chapter we are talking about the complexity of languages and the author recalls the complexity of Kolmogorov and towards the end of the chapter we are talking about the redundancy of information in artificial and natural languages and how they differ. In a nutshell, in natural languages there is ... an excess of ... information, who ... calls ... to raise pro..skies, but in artificial languages the authors throw out this redundancy. This makes it easier to form a message, but the receiver interprets it more difficult, especially if there is interference, for example, due to noise, the interlocutor did not hear some of the sounds. In general, in this chapter, the author talks about Solresol, Volapiuk, Experimento. (Here he talks about agglutinative languages and about inflective, as well as about their difference.), latino sine flexione, interslovene. I really liked this chapter.

4. Languages are natural, but not quite. The author describes how some languages that are considered natural were once constructed. For example, he shows how a common German language was constructed from different German dialects and how Martin Luther contributed to this with his translation of the Bible, also mentions a similar story with Italian and Dante Alighieri and his Divine Comedy. Other stories focus on Nynorsk in Norway and Hebrew among Jews.

5. Fictional worlds This interesting part is devoted to the artificial languages of the Elves of Tolkien. (syndarin)Star Trek Klingons, Game of Thrones Dothraki, James Cameron's Avatar Na'vi, George Orwell's novel Newspeak 1984 others

Continuation in next post.

#SelfDevelopment #Writing #PopularScience