Re-Conlangs?
The other day, I ran across the Grammar of Arvorec. Arvorec is a Celtic language that appears to be a direct descendant of Gaulish. It's spoken on some islands off of Armorica, as well as here, there and elsewhere. It better preserves the lexicon of Gaulish than most any other language out there - track back a few basic sound changes and you're there. The grammar is greatly simplified, or at least it might be. Since nobody knows that much about how Gaulish grammar worked, who knows? If you are interested, though, in Gaulish, Arvorec would be one hell of a language to stumble across.
Too bad it's made up.
Arvorec is a conlang. Somebody with way too much time on his hands has written a grammar, compiled a lexicon and even created a corpus with everything from religious texts in earlier variants to recent newspapers.
I hope to have this much time on my hands one day!
What the creator of the Arvorec site has done, however, is something of a wonder. Were it not for the occasional acknowledgment of what he's up to, it would be easy to take his site for the product of a grad student documenting some little known dialect that he encountered while researching, say, Celtic language maintenance in the face of Francophone hegemony.
* * *
Looking at the Arvorec site, my thoughts went along a path they've been down before, but maybe a little further... It would be neat to see something like this for dead languages. The Arvorec site gives you everything you need to know to make a start in the language. If you found yourself where it was spoken with only a print-up of the website, you'd be happily chatting away in a day or three. Looking at the site, I thought it would be neat to find something like it, only, say, for Gaulish, or proto-Celtic or - imagine it! - proto-Indo-European!
I know the preliminary objection, of course. Arvorec is alive, if only in the imagination of its creator. The other languages are dead. And from a pragmatic standpoint, it's helpful to keep them that way - easier to pin 'em down. Yet, just as no two butterflies are exactly alike, no two speakers of a language are exactly alike. Pinning one butterfly does not mean you've figured out what Lepidoptera is all about. You've got to see them crawling as caterpillars, then flying, then withering all too soon, before you've got the slightest idea what butterflies are for. Just so, documenting a dead language is still an effort to hit a moving target. Sometimes you've got too much information - like Latin. Sometimes you've got too little, like Gaulish. And sometimes, like Indo-European, you've no concrete evidence at all. And so, be it Latin, Gaulish or Proto-Indo-European, what you've got is not an imperfect idea of something that exists somewhere in perfection, the Platonic essence of the Latin Language. What you've got is something that only exists here, today, and fleetingly, in the minds of those who try to understand and reconstruct. We reconstruct, then, for us, not for the past.
When we take a language like Gaulish and try to put it back together, we are trying, of course, to walk in the footsteps of a people from long ago, to see what they saw, to feel what they felt, and so, to know a little more about where we came from. But in the end, there's far less distance between reconstructing Gaulic from a couple thousand inscriptions and reconstructing Quenya from Tolkien's notes than one might think. In both cases, you're constructing a world you'll never see except in your mind's eye. So, why don't we run with it?
One of the big problems we have investigating a language like Gaulish is that even when we find a new inscription someplace, there's no one to tell us what it says. Sure, some experts piece it together as best they can. And then they write some articles arguing about this or that. But there are no native speakers handy. And there won't be. But could we get closer to having some?
Anybody who has studied French or Italian can read a bit of Spanish. Anybody with English and German can pick through Dutch. What if in addition to our careful reconstructions, limited only to what is specifically documented, we also created conlang versions of these tongues. You'd still want to be conservative in how you formulated them, but if it really made sense, you could be a little more generous with the forms that weren't attested but seemed likely based on the sound shifts and the way the morphology of subsequent languages went. The idea would be to create different versions - call them scholarly dialects - of how the languages might have turned out. Sample texts could be churned out in the different variants. Rather than looking for the one true version of the language, you'd be trying to get a feel for how much variation was permissible, the same way that even modern speakers have to work out, eg, how much language variation is permissible so that your grandparents can still understand you without your talking the way they do.
You can already see a little bit of this when you read, eg, the different versions of the Indo-European fairy tale that was dreamed up some years ago. It would be good to go a little crazier with it though. It would be fun to pick up a guide and learn how to order a beer if you found yourself in France a century or two before the Romans arrived. Or to know what to say if Genghis Khan's oldest ancestors arrived from a time warp and needed directions to Ulan Bator. Beyond the novelty, though, there's a serious scholarly aim, here. We don't study these languages and civilizations for the hell of it. We do so to learn about ourselves, about where we came from, where were going. To answer the question of whether democratic capitalism, global trade and the internet have made us something new or whether, 1500-5000 years on, people are still, basically, people. To be able to answer that question, we need to get past the 3rd person formulations about Proto-Celtic man ate this, hunted that and lived in a culture where goddesses as well as gods were much revered. We need to look for a way to live it. That way, when we find the next scroll or inscription, maybe our scholars will be conversant enough to read past the word or two they don't know, get the gist and have a real feel for what they're working on before the hard work begins.
To some extent, of course, what I'm proposing is already done. The museum diorama is certainly a conworld, and our reconstructions of Indo-European, from the standpoint of lexicon, at least, is one of the most developed of conlangs. I guess what I'm calling for, then, is the element of play that brings the page to life. While much of what the scholars offer is documented, much, too, is a leap of imagination - specifically the imagining that humans really were then and remain today basically the same so that we have any basis for interpretation at all. It would be neat to let our imaginations run still a little more wild so that maybe we could rouse as much enthusiasm in understanding where the Celts or the Goths or the earliest Turks came from, what they believed and how they talked, as we have for joining a few hobbits to capture a ring in the imaginings of one man who lived pretty close to our own lifetime.
Too bad it's made up.
Arvorec is a conlang. Somebody with way too much time on his hands has written a grammar, compiled a lexicon and even created a corpus with everything from religious texts in earlier variants to recent newspapers.
I hope to have this much time on my hands one day!
What the creator of the Arvorec site has done, however, is something of a wonder. Were it not for the occasional acknowledgment of what he's up to, it would be easy to take his site for the product of a grad student documenting some little known dialect that he encountered while researching, say, Celtic language maintenance in the face of Francophone hegemony.
* * *
Looking at the Arvorec site, my thoughts went along a path they've been down before, but maybe a little further... It would be neat to see something like this for dead languages. The Arvorec site gives you everything you need to know to make a start in the language. If you found yourself where it was spoken with only a print-up of the website, you'd be happily chatting away in a day or three. Looking at the site, I thought it would be neat to find something like it, only, say, for Gaulish, or proto-Celtic or - imagine it! - proto-Indo-European!
I know the preliminary objection, of course. Arvorec is alive, if only in the imagination of its creator. The other languages are dead. And from a pragmatic standpoint, it's helpful to keep them that way - easier to pin 'em down. Yet, just as no two butterflies are exactly alike, no two speakers of a language are exactly alike. Pinning one butterfly does not mean you've figured out what Lepidoptera is all about. You've got to see them crawling as caterpillars, then flying, then withering all too soon, before you've got the slightest idea what butterflies are for. Just so, documenting a dead language is still an effort to hit a moving target. Sometimes you've got too much information - like Latin. Sometimes you've got too little, like Gaulish. And sometimes, like Indo-European, you've no concrete evidence at all. And so, be it Latin, Gaulish or Proto-Indo-European, what you've got is not an imperfect idea of something that exists somewhere in perfection, the Platonic essence of the Latin Language. What you've got is something that only exists here, today, and fleetingly, in the minds of those who try to understand and reconstruct. We reconstruct, then, for us, not for the past.
When we take a language like Gaulish and try to put it back together, we are trying, of course, to walk in the footsteps of a people from long ago, to see what they saw, to feel what they felt, and so, to know a little more about where we came from. But in the end, there's far less distance between reconstructing Gaulic from a couple thousand inscriptions and reconstructing Quenya from Tolkien's notes than one might think. In both cases, you're constructing a world you'll never see except in your mind's eye. So, why don't we run with it?
One of the big problems we have investigating a language like Gaulish is that even when we find a new inscription someplace, there's no one to tell us what it says. Sure, some experts piece it together as best they can. And then they write some articles arguing about this or that. But there are no native speakers handy. And there won't be. But could we get closer to having some?
Anybody who has studied French or Italian can read a bit of Spanish. Anybody with English and German can pick through Dutch. What if in addition to our careful reconstructions, limited only to what is specifically documented, we also created conlang versions of these tongues. You'd still want to be conservative in how you formulated them, but if it really made sense, you could be a little more generous with the forms that weren't attested but seemed likely based on the sound shifts and the way the morphology of subsequent languages went. The idea would be to create different versions - call them scholarly dialects - of how the languages might have turned out. Sample texts could be churned out in the different variants. Rather than looking for the one true version of the language, you'd be trying to get a feel for how much variation was permissible, the same way that even modern speakers have to work out, eg, how much language variation is permissible so that your grandparents can still understand you without your talking the way they do.
You can already see a little bit of this when you read, eg, the different versions of the Indo-European fairy tale that was dreamed up some years ago. It would be good to go a little crazier with it though. It would be fun to pick up a guide and learn how to order a beer if you found yourself in France a century or two before the Romans arrived. Or to know what to say if Genghis Khan's oldest ancestors arrived from a time warp and needed directions to Ulan Bator. Beyond the novelty, though, there's a serious scholarly aim, here. We don't study these languages and civilizations for the hell of it. We do so to learn about ourselves, about where we came from, where were going. To answer the question of whether democratic capitalism, global trade and the internet have made us something new or whether, 1500-5000 years on, people are still, basically, people. To be able to answer that question, we need to get past the 3rd person formulations about Proto-Celtic man ate this, hunted that and lived in a culture where goddesses as well as gods were much revered. We need to look for a way to live it. That way, when we find the next scroll or inscription, maybe our scholars will be conversant enough to read past the word or two they don't know, get the gist and have a real feel for what they're working on before the hard work begins.
To some extent, of course, what I'm proposing is already done. The museum diorama is certainly a conworld, and our reconstructions of Indo-European, from the standpoint of lexicon, at least, is one of the most developed of conlangs. I guess what I'm calling for, then, is the element of play that brings the page to life. While much of what the scholars offer is documented, much, too, is a leap of imagination - specifically the imagining that humans really were then and remain today basically the same so that we have any basis for interpretation at all. It would be neat to let our imaginations run still a little more wild so that maybe we could rouse as much enthusiasm in understanding where the Celts or the Goths or the earliest Turks came from, what they believed and how they talked, as we have for joining a few hobbits to capture a ring in the imaginings of one man who lived pretty close to our own lifetime.
1 Comments:
Wonderful entry! I don't normally comment on random people's blog entries, but I'm a bit of a language fanatic myself, and this entry is just so brilliantly written that I couldn't resist leaving a note of admiration. :)
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