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Home , Adjuvilo, Enochian, Idiom Neutral, Interglossa, Klingon language, Spokil

Notes of a Fringe-Watcher

Klingon and Other artificial Languages you speak ? ike a native!

MARTIN GARDNER

ccording to Genesis there orig- Why God and the angels would gripped the minds of hundreds of lin- inally was only one human find this curse amusing is hard to fath- guistic cranks, who during the next language, the tongue spoken om. At any rate, who can doubt that three centuries proposed more than A the multiplicity of world languages is three hundred artificial or semi-artifi- by Adam and Eve. Why did Adam name the elephant an elephant? an enormous barrier to world peace. cial tongues. Because, goes an old joke, it looked like Clearly world unity would be greatly The first major effort was the 600- an elephant. Then a terrible tragedy augmented if somehow the babble of page Essay Towards a Real Character occurred. The Hebrews tried to scale tongues could be replaced by a single and Philosophic Language (London, the heavens by building the Tower of language. 1688), by John Wilkins, Bishop of Babel. God was so offended by this In ancient times Greek, , and Chester. His book was greatly admired hubris that he said: Arabic served as languages for by Leibniz. All of Wilkins' words are large clusters of nations. French was self-defining in the sense that they con- Behold, the people is one, and they once Europe's international diplomatic vey their triple classification as to have all one language . . . and now language, and for centuries Latin was genus, species, and subspecies. For nothing shall be restrained from the favored language of scientists and example, his word for salmon is them.... Go to, let us go down, and scholars. Around Mediterranean ports zana—za for fish, for scaly, and a for there confound their language, that they may not understand one anoth- lingua franca, Italian mixed with other red. The language was spoken and also er's speech. So the Lord scattered tongues, became a common form of written with symbols resembling mod- them abroad from thence upon the communication. Swahili, a Bantu ern shorthand. The Bishop wrote other face of all the earth. (Gen. 11:6-8) speech mixed with Arabic, has long eccentric works, including one arguing been the lingua franca of East Africa. that the moon was inhabited by intelli- In Paradise Lost (Book 12) Milton Today, for better or worse, the new gent creatures. His philosophic lan- described it this way: international language is English. In a guage was caricatured by the French few years there will be more non-native writer Gabriel dc Foigny as an To sow a jangling noise of words speakers of English than native ones! Australian tongue in his novel The unknown: Only France is trying desperately to Adventures of Jacques Saleur (1676). Forthwith a hideous gabble rises keep its fingers in the dike. The Encyclopaedia Britannica (14th loud In the seventeenth century, among edition) lists the following other totally Among the Builders; each to other calls such philosophers as Descartes and synthetic languages: (1817), Not understood, till hoarse, and all Leibniz, and the Scotsman George Lingualumina (1875), Blaia Zimondal in rage. Delgarno, the notion arose that per- (1884), Cabe aban (1887). and As mockt they storm; great laughter haps a completely artificial language, Zahlensprache (1901). Ro, invented in was in Heav'n based on logic, with simplified gram- 1904 by Edward P. Foster, an American And looking down, to sec die hubbub strange mar and spelling, might serve to unify clergyman, had a monthly periodical And hear the din. nations. This grandiose dream quickly called Roia. Solresol, created by musi-

SKEPTICAL INQUIRER • JULY/AUGUST 1995 3 cian Jean Francois Sudre, combined the of the music scale {do, re, mi, . . .) to produce some 12,000 words. The plan was to send messages by playing a tune. The Britannica does not mention , perpetrated in France by A. Nicolas in 1887, or Alwato, the creation of Stephen Pearl Andrews, a nineteenth- century American attorney and aboli- tionist. Alwato was part of Andrews's 761-page crank work The Basic Outline of Universology (1872), and he elaborated on it in other books. All his ended in . A human is ho, the body is hobo, the head is hobado, and society is homabo. A vegetable is zho, an animal is zo, a dead animal is zobo, and a live one is zovo. Because no completely synthetic lan- guage has yet obtained much of a fol- lowing, one might suppose that efforts of this sort have ceased. Not so! The TV series "" has spawned a gutteral extraterrestrial language spoken by the warriors of the empire. It was invented in 1984 for the film Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, by . (He has a doctorate in linguis- tics.) Poetry has been written and wed- dings performed in Klingon. "Star Trek" fans are rapidly mastering the language, much to Okrand's amazement, because he does not speak it. He designed the language as a joke—its word for "love" words for such concepts as God, holy, in . A at the end of a word is "bang"—but now his peculiar lan- atonement, forgiveness, compassion, indicates a . For example, gradaj guage has developed a life of its own. or mercy. Is all this a put-on? The hundoj means "big dogs." There are newsletters in Klingon and an answer (in Klingon) is HISlaH (yes). More than 30,000 books, including audiotape on conversational Klingon On a more useful level than totally Shakespeare, Dante, the Bible, and the spoken by Michael Dorn, who plays a contrived languages are the semi- Koran have been translated into Klingon, Lieutenant Commander , artificial ones based on a blend of nat- Esperanto. A recent of chief of security on the United ural tongues. Of these, by tar the most Lewis Carroll's Alice books calls Federation of Planets , successful has been Esperanto, the Humpy Dumpy Homito Omleto, in "Star Trek: The Next Generation," brainchild of Lazarus Ludwig meaning Little-Man Egg. Some hun- the second "Star Trek" television series. Zamenhof, a Warsaw eye doctor. His dred periodicals around the world have The Institute, first book about it, Lingvo Internacia been written in Esperanto, one of the headed by Lawrence Schoen, a psy- (1887) bore the pseudonym of Dr. oldest issued by the Vatican. Reader's chologist at Chestnut Hill College, Esperanto. The word means "one who Digest publishes an Esperanto edition. Philadelphia, is said to be working on a hopes." It expressed Zamenhof's Here is the Lord's Prayer in translation into Klingon of Shake- quixotic desire that Esperanto would Esperanto: speare and the Bible.* The Bible will become the world's second language. Patro nia kiu estas en la cielo, not be easy, because have no Based on Europe's major tongues, sankta estu via nomo; venu regeco The Institute publishes a quarterly journal Esperanto's 16 simple grammatical via; estu volo via, kiel en la cielo, tiel called HolQeD (horn "Hoi," meaning language, rules have no exceptions. Spelling, ankau sut la tero. Panon nian ciuta- and "QeD." meaning science). It recently spon- using 28 letters, is uniform and pho- gan donu al ni hodiau; kaj patdonu sored a contest for palindromes written in al ni suldojn niajn, kiel ni ankau netic. As in Alwato, all nouns end in o. Klingon. For information, send an SASE to KLI, patdonas al niaj suldantoj; kaj ne Box 634, Flourtown, PA 19031-0534. end in a, in as, and knoduku nia en tenton, sed libetigu

4 SKEPTICAL INQUIRER • JULY/AUGUST 1995 nin de la malbono. priest.* It uses 27 letters, accents all And if you've decern luck. words on die last , and adds The ultimate residuum You'll find is Volapuk! The movement peaked in the "ik" to all adjectives. The "iks" give it a 1920s, especially among one-worlders, strong icky sound. Some notion of its but even today about two million peo- ugliness can be gained from Volapuk's Many short-lived attempts from ple read and speak Esperanto. wording of the Lord's Prayer: 1900 to the late fifties were made to Enthusiasts hold conventions here and improve Esperanto. They have such there, and when traveling identify O fat obas, kel binol in siils, paisalu- names as Perio, Ulla, Mondlingvo, themselves to one another by green domdz nem ola! Komomod Romanizat, Europeo, Nepo, Neo, monargan ola! Jenomoz vil olik, as lapel pins shaped like stars. The move- Espido, Esperantuisho, Globaqo, and a in siil, i su tal! Bodo obsik, vadeliki raft of others. The most successful of ment continues to be popular in givolos obcs adelo! E pardolos obes Europe, but in the United States it is debis obsik as id obs aipardobs dcbe- these reform efforts was —in now at a low ebb. In 1991 the Modern Ics obas. E no obis nindukolos in Esperanto it means "offspring"— tentadi; sod aidalivolos obis de bad. Language Association sponsored a invented in 1907 by the French phi- Jenosod! losopher Louis Couterat. A monthly seminar on Esperanto at its annual titled Progreso was written in Ido. convention. No one showed up. Couterat regarded all Espcrantists as Perhaps the main reason for its decline In France and Germany the depraved. In the first volume of his here is the inexorable rise of English as Volapuk cult gained a following of autobiography Bernard Russell recalls an international second language. In more than a million, with some two Couterat complaining that Ido had no The Shape of Thing to Come (Book 5, hundred Volapuk societies meeting word similar to "Esperantist." "I sug- section 7), . . Wells predicts that around the globe. After its third con- gested 'Idiot,'" Russell adds, "but he (the 850 words selected gress, in Paris in 1899, its leaders began was not quite pleased." by . . Ogden) will "spread like wild- quarreling over how to improve the fire" and that by die year 2020 "hardly language. This bickering created rival Tinkerers with Ido, like the anyone" in the world will not speak versions with such names as Balta, Esperanto tinkerers, soon splintered and understand it. Spelin, Dil, Veltpail, Dilpok, Ilingua the movement into variant languages. The philosopher Rudolf Carnap " J learned to speak Esperanto fluently. In 'More than 30,000 books, including his autobiography (in The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap) he says that Esperanto Shakespeare, Dante, the Bible, and the became for him a "living language." He Koran, have been translated into Esperanto.rt cannot take seriously "the arguments of those who assert that an international European, and others. The movement These included Dutalingue, Italico, auxiliary language might be suitable for finally evaporated to be replaced by , Etem, Unesal, Esperido, business affairs and perhaps for natural Esperanto. Cosman, Novam, Mundial, Sinestal, science, but could not possibly serve as I found the following anonymous Intal, Kosmolinguo, and more. an adequate means of communication doggerel in an old scrapbook: Here are a few other semi-artificial in personal affairs, for discussions in the languages developed from the 1880s to social sciences and the humanities, let Take a reaspoonful of English, the early decades of this century: alone for fiction and drama. I have A modicum of Dutch, Weltsprache, Spelin, Blue, Anglo- found that most of those who make Of Italian just a trifle, franca, Mundolingue, Lingua komun, And of Gaelic not too much; these assertions have no practical expe- , Reform neutral, rience with such a language." Latinesce, Nov-Latin, Monario, Some of Russian and Egyptian To his surprise and dismay Carnap Add them unto the whole, Occidental, Europan, Optez, and found that Ludwig Wittgenstein was With just enough to flavor, Roman al. violently opposed to any form of lan- Of the lingo of the Pole. Intelingua is of special interest guage that had not "grown organically." because it was the creation of the great Some Singhalese and Hottentot, The most popular semi-artificial Italian mathematician . A soupcon, too, of French, language preceding Esperanto was Of native Scandinavian It, too, gave rise to dozens of rival vari- Volapiik—the word means "world A pretty thorough drench; ants, such as Simplo, Latinulus, speech"—invented in 1879 by Johann Intcrlatino, Panlingua, and others. In Martin Schleyer, a German Catholic Hungarian and Syrian, the mid-1920s Wilfred Stevens devel- A pinch of Japanese, oped Euphony, a language that com- With just as much Ojibway "Volapuk turns up in James Joyce's Finnegans bined words from 30 natural languages. Wtkt as Vollapuck (p. 34. line 5 from bottom), And Turkish as you please. Volapuke (p.40. line 4). and Volapucky (p. 116, Klingon continued on page 55 line 6 from bottom). Now stir it gently, boil it well,

SKEPTICAL INQUIRER • JULY/AUGUST 1995 5 Klingon from page 5 coined words in the fantasies of Lord should we ignore the sign language Dunsany, James Branch Cabell, . used by the hearing impaired, the talk- For example, ok for eye, zu for blue, Frank Baum, and in books said to be ing drums of Africa, die smoke signals and fra for human combine to produce channeled by supermortals, such as of American Indians, communication frazolca, meaning a blue-eyed woman. Oahspe and The Urantia Book. by whistling in die Canary Islands, and Lancelot Hogben explained his semi- Edward Kelly, a sixteenth-century the languages used by artificial-intelli- artificial language in a Penguin book crystal-gazer, scoundrel, and friend of gence researchers for conversing with tided (1943). the British astrologer , computers. Many of these rival tongues are dis- devised a language called . He In crude science fiction, extraterres- cussed in Marina Yaguello's fascinating claimed it was spoken by angels and by trials inexplicably speak English, but in Lunatic Lovers of Language (1991) Adam before it degenerated into more sophisticated science fantasy they translated into English from die origi- Hebrew after the Fall. speak alien tongues often described nal French by Catherine Slater. For completeness I should also with detailed linguistic rules and Yaguello is a teacher of linguistics at mention artificial languages that arise words. Every conceivable way of com- the University of Dakar, in Senegal. I in subcultures, such as Shelta Thari, municating without speech has also have not seen Mary Slaughter's spoken by tinkers in England, and been exploited: telepathy (as in Wells's Universal Languages (1982). Carny, spoken by American carnival Men Like Gods), dancing, whistling, Yaguello also covers synthetic lan- workers. A peculiar language called smelling, using musical tones, and so guages in works of fiction, such as Bootling flourishes only in the small on. In James Blish's VOR an alien Newspeak in George Orwell's 1984 town of Boonville, California. We all "speaks" by altering the color of a patch and the slang language invented by know pig-latin, and there are other, less on his forehead. For information about Anthony Burgess for A Clockwork familiar ways of distorting a natural science-fiction artificial languages, see Orange. She also discusses die Martian language. There are the "unknown the entry "Linguistics" in Peter language created by the French medi- tongues" spoken by the early Nichols's Encyclopedia of Science um Helene Smith, and in Christians, and by Mormons, Fiction, and "Language" in the index of the works of Swift and Rabelais. To die Pentecostals, and other recent sects Everett Bleiler's monumental Science- latter we can add die hundreds of when the Holy Spirit seizes them. Nor Fiction: The Early Years. •

Flowers from page 35 Ironically, one of these stalwarts provid- whatsoever about their usefulness. Per- ed an anecdote that lends itself nicely to haps the time has come to wake up and not helped by the Bach Remedies might a placebo interpretation. In describing stop smelling the flowers. have felt so foolish about having taken her hero's healing powers. Weeks (1973: flower essences as a remedy for serious 120) noted that the Bach Flower References psychological problems that they would- Remedies seemed to work best for those Bach. E. 1977a. "Heal Thyself.- In The Bach n' want anyone to know. who had traveled a very long distance to Flower Remedies. New Canaan, Conn.: Keats. Originally published by C. Daniel, Essex. Any favorable results stemming from be treated by die master. It is reasonable England, 1931. the use of the Bach Flower Remedies are to think that those who traveled a long . 1977b. "The Twelve Healers." In The probably the result of nothing more way on English roads in the 1930s to see Bach Flower Remedies. New Canaan, Conn.: Keats. Originally published by C. W. Daniel, than a placebo effect. As most readers of a doctor might have been highly moti- Essex, England, 1933. the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER know, a vated to improve—so motivated that Chancellor. P. . 1971. Handbook of the Bach placebo is not a biologically active ingre- they might have been especially suscep- Flower Remedies. London: C. W. Daniel. Kaslof, L.J. 1988. The Bach Remedies: A Self-help dient, but it often "works" because the tible to the belief that this charismatic Guide. New Canaan. Conn.: Keats. person who takes it believes that it is doctor and his unusual treatment would Tyler, , E 1993. "Paraherbalism Is a Pseudo- effective. Placebo effects have been bring them relief from their troubles. science." In The Health Robbers, ed. by S. Barrett and W. T Jarvis. Buffalo. N..: demonstrated time and time again and In summary, there seems to be no Prometheus. have been found in a wide variety of sit- reliable, unambiguous evidence to sup- Weeks, N. 1973. The Medical Discoveries of uations involving a large number of psy- port any of the multitude of claims Edward Bach. Physician. New Canaan. Conn.: Keats. Originally published in 1940. chosomatic disorders. Bach was appar- made by Bach and his followers. The Weisglas, M. S. 1979. "Personal growth and con- ently an individual with excellent lan- Bach Remedies that I "inherited" when scious evolution through Bach Flower guage skills and a great deal of confi- I bought my health-food store are cur- Essences." Dissertation Abstracts Inter- national part , p. 3614 (1981). dence in his ability to heal. He was rently under the counter where they Wheeler. . J. 1977. "The Bach Remedies probably adept at convincing patients can't be seen. If people come in and ask Repertory." In The Bach Flower Remedies. that they were going to get better. He for them I will sell them, but I don't New Canaan, Conn.: Keats. Originally pub- lished by C W. Daniel. London. 1952. was certainly charismatic enough to intend to reorder; and I have instruct- Wigmore, 1993. Bach Flower Essences for the attract a loyal band of followers. ed my employees to make no claims Family. London: published by author.

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