Language

Hi. I’m a bit of a language geek, and my background is in mathematics, you could say the pedantic kind. What annoys me most in artificial languages is the uninnovativeness. As if you’d play safe somehow by just taking features of natural languages and mashing them together. For that’s how most artificial languages are made.

A good artificial language evolves and develops from a set of constraints, or selective pressures in evolutionary terms. Naturally by studying natural languages of sufficiently different and remote language groups (myself I have a fluency in languages from four groups, one of them being the indo-european ones), you can find features that define and distinguish a language from another. You also notice quickly how their different environments have influenced the form they’ve taken over the course of their histories.

Now, if I’d create a language, I’d try to come up with something that “no one has come up with before”. Acknowledging it’s but an illusion, aiming for anything less would make the whole labour seem just… not worth the while; why not just pick Tolkien’s elfspeak? I hear it’s tremendous! This is closely related to my first point of annoyance; why re-invent the wheel? Natural languages definitely never did if there was any chance of absorbing it from the neighbours (and that’s why I mentioned language groups instead of single languages; knowing Italian and Spanish you only know one language really). Why try to do the same, just better? I very VERY seldom ends up being better.

And that takes me to my second irritation about synthetic languages: they’re poorly made in general. Half-assed. Brainfarts. Refutable in three seconds, non-coherent, inplausible. Bad.

Please don’t make a (new) bad language! Take a less bad instead that has been tried and tested.