Occasionally, a work of fiction is so inventive it needs more ways to express itself than possible with just the speech it’s written in, and a new language is born. Some are merely hinted at while others are fully constructed and usable. Here are ten that in one shape or another are frequently seen and heard.
Imagined Language Use Number One:
“I grok Spock”
Martian language hinted at by science fiction author Robert Anson Heinlein in his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land. The word ‘grok’ means to understand a person or thing on a deep level and the word is still thrown around whenever science fiction fans gather.
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Imagined Language Use Number Two:
Esperanto is easy – But can I use it for my major?
In his 1887 novel Unua Libro, L. L. Zamenhof writing under the name Doktoro Esperanto wanted to create an easy and flexible language that could serve as a universal second language. The result is Experanto a language so effortless to learn it has caught on with many people and can be found on Google searchable websites through an Esperanto portal. It is the language of instruction at Akademio Internacia de la Sciencoj in San Marino.
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Imagined Language Use Number Three:
Alienese – What writers do when they’re bored
Spotted frequently and usually as graffiti on the television show Futurama Alienese is a complex language that translates easily into English. Fans claim they have translated these messages and found humorous hidden messages.
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Imagined Language Use Number Four:
Just like clockwork
In his 1962 dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange Anthony Burgess created a slang type language called Nadsat. The language is a mix of modified Slavic and Russian as well as words simply invented by the author himself. Terms such as droog meaning friend or Bog for God are occasionally still used by college students who wish to annoy or mystify those around them.
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Imagined Language Use Number Five:
Simlish – lost in virtual translation
Simlish is a language improvised by the voice actors for the video game The Sims. The project director not wanting the extra cost and effort of recording dialogue and then having to translate it to other languages decided to use a partially constructed adlibbed one that allowed the actors to better portray the characters. Songs begin to appear in new Sim’s games and a written form of the language caught on outside the series. Artists have used the written form and singers have performed in this gibberish based speech.
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Imagined Language Use Number Six:
The Myst Game Series
The Myst Series of video games and books created by Rand and Robyn Miller features a fictional world with a culture known as the D’ni. They’ve created a language complete with numerical symbols for the D’ni which is used throughout the game series.
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Imagined Language Use Number Seven:
1984’s Newspeak keeps up with the times
A recent renewed interest in George Orwell’s novel 1984 has newspeak being spoken again. In his book Orwell saw language shrinking as the ideas of free thought and rebellion were outlawed. The goal of the government control speech was to remove any vagueness or capacity of creativity from it. This means nothing negative can be said as one positive sounding word is given all the language use by the utilization of prefixes or suffixes. For example, the negative word stupid becomes “unsmart”. Other words become both nouns and verbs. If you listen closely you’ll find the people using newspeak every day.
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Imagined Language Use Number Eight:
Be careful what you say
Fans of Lovecraft can tell you all about Aklo with a happy light in their eyes, but the fictional language was actually first invented by Arthur Machen for his short story “The White People” in 1899. H P Lovecraft referred to it in several works as did Alan Moore in his story The Courtyard. Aklo is only used only briefly in these works so not much is known about other than it’s being related to alien or demonic worlds.
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Imagined Language Use Number Nine:
The Languages of Arda
Created by J R R Tolkien for his fantasy novels The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Simarillion this language is fully constructed developed to give a linguistic depth to the series. The Tolklang, Lambengolmor and the Elfling are mailing lists for those interested in Tolkien linguistics.
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Imagined Language Use Number Ten:
Not the language of love – Klingon
Dedicated Star Trek fans can tell you that Klingonese the language of a type of gruff, often violent alien species is first mentioned during the original series’s episode The Trouble with Tribbles. In the Star Trek III, The Search for Spock director and actor Leonard Nimoy thought the Klingons should speak a language that sounded realistic. A linguist named Mark Okrand was commissioned to develop a complete language. Books and CD’s teaching Klingonese are still available and entire marriage ceremonies have been conducted in the language by fans of the show.
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10 Weird Ways Of Communicating
In your next conversation if you watch closely you’ll realize that communication or the entire habit of transferring the thoughts, ideas, and emotions from one person to another is in itself weird. Some methods of communication are just a bit wilder and weirder than others.
1. Pucker up
Just because the only use whistling currently has is to exasperate the person working in the next cubicle doesn’t mean it was always a source of annoyance. Long ago in places where the terrain makes walking difficult whistled languages closed the communication gap. Much like spoken speech this type of communication had expressions and a “vocabulary” based on the language commonly used in the area, and could easily convey a complex message over a long distance. You can find out more about whistled language here.
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2. Smoke Signals
This is one of the oldest forms of communications. In old western movies the typical picture we have is the Native American using this unique form of getting a message across, but the truth is ancient people from all over the world have used this method. Soldiers guarding the great wall in ancient China used smoke signals to alert one another to the approach of an enemy. Greeks devised a very complicated system involving an entire alphabet of smoke signals used around 150 BC. The Greeks used torches while the Native Americans used dried grasses tied together in a bundle. While most people in recent times think of smoke signals as being bound to a specific location where a large fire has been built these methods of carrying small combustible, but long burning materials meant the signals could be sent at anytime from anywhere. In fact, some tribes of Native Americans used this mobility as part of the signal itself. For example, signals from midway up a hill could indicate safety, while signals from the top meant danger.
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3. Sing it!
Yodeling seems like a silly past time to many in the west, but its initial purpose was communicating over long distances and across deep expanses. In yodeling the voice register is switched sharply and can be easily heard over long distances. This made communication possible between mountain peaks or across wide expanses. It is believed the practice of yodeling was developed in the Swiss Alps, but it is also found in such places as Central Africa. Now if you wanna learn to yodel, do it here!
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4. Just beat it
It was a staple of many old radio shows and movies like Tarzan. Explorers fearfully making their way through a jungle would hear the drums pick up tempo and volume, and they knew they were in deep trouble. Far from being a source of terror the drums in the jungles of Africa or Asia were really more the equivalent of the local news. In fact, drums were a simply method of communications across distances since tempo and volume could be used much the same way as Morse code.
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5. Just draw me a picture
It was not as immediate a form of communication as whistling or yodeling, but the earliest of this type of writings were believed to have been used since pre-historic times to tell stories, warn of danger, claim territories, and even to mark mass grave sites. The pictures were usually crude and created to look like a physical object. These symbols were employed at first to represent physical items, but later developed into ideograms, which could represent ideas. From early cave drawings to the detailed artistry of Chinese calligraphy this type of writing has developed into a complex and beautiful art form still practiced in some cultures.
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6. I know what you’re thinking
People have always watched each other closely looking to see if they could detect a lie. Gamblers search each other’s movements or ticks for a ‘tell’ or a habit that indicates when someone is bluffing or holding high cards. Something as small as a raised eyebrow or a lip twitch could mean that someone might be trying to lie or it could mean they simple have an itch.
Body language involves the common indicators we give subconsciously whether we are happy, sad, worried, guilty, trying to hide something or any of a thousand emotions in between. Studying these indicators has only been a science since the 1950’s, and what scientists have discovered is now used by law enforcement and the military to spot terrorists. This language is slowly being demystified, which may make you worry how you’ll keep that full house to yourself when everyone knows what you’re thinking.
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7. When dot, dot, dot means HELP!
Just after midnight on the 14th of April 1912 the RMS Titanic hit an iceberg. The ship was designed by the most experienced engineers of that time to be unsinkable nevertheless the captain was told there was no hope. The ship would sink into the icy water carrying its 2,223 passengers and crew to their deaths, unless quick action was taken. Captain Edward J. Smith was on his retirement cruise. He’d be with White Star Line, which owned the Titanic a long time, and he knew there were not enough lifeboats for even half the passengers much less the crew. Drowning was not the worst fate possible since in the icy water no one could last more than 15 or 30 minutes. Among those passengers were the rich and famous of the time including millionaire John Jacob Astor IV and his pregnant wife Madeleine, Benjamin Guggenheim, the journalist William Thomas Stead, the Countess of Rothes, and silent film actress Dorothy Gibson among many other notable names, and some of them the Captain knew had attended their last party. After commanding as many passengers placed in the lifeboats as possible Captain Smith made his way to the wireless operator Jack Phillips and Harold Bride in ship’s wireless station. He ordered them to send out the emergency distress call. The distress call used up to this point was known as CQD an international distress signal that reads as “ -.-. –.- -..” which is a rather long signal to send out quickly. In desperation the wireless operators began sending out the new signal S O S which at just three characters “. . .” was much shorter. As weird as it sounds the lives of the passengers of that ship that night depended as much on the wireless operators and the language of dots and dashes as they did what space was available in the lifeboats.
The code was invented by Guglielmo Marconi in 1897. CQ in this language was meant to indentify messages of interest to all stations and D was to indicate distress. That night Jack Phillips was the first to use the shorter S O S, but it was all for little good. Only the crew of the Carpathia 58 miles out answered the call and was so slowed by icebergs in their path they couldn’t reach the Titanic for almost two hours. By that time the loss of life was considerable. Still, the new signal caught on to the point that even now when the use of the wireless is minimal ships in distress still call out an SOS when they are in trouble. Learn morse code and phonetic alphabets here.
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8. Sky talking
Skywriting started almost as soon as airplanes became popular. The trick is to use a pressurized container containing low viscosity oil, which is then injected into the hot exhaust manifold. This vaporizes into a white plumy trail behind the plane. While new techniques can make the smoke last a little longer the trail evaporates quickly so if you decide to use this method to ask for your love’s hand in marriage you better make sure your intended is looking skyward at the proper time, or she will be wondering what ‘arr e’ means.
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9. If u r reading this… hagd
Texting is a weird phenomena when you consider all the technology that progressed into people having small cell phones to carry around and how odd it is that instead of talking into them many chose to write messages. These messages are short, almost incomprehensible to anyone not familiar with the code, but they are becoming a favored mode of communication in part because of privacy, they afford the user. So popular is texting on cell phones that entire novels have been written using this method.
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10. Talking to the Stars
The question of how mankind can find other life in the Universe is almost as quickly followed by the question of how to communicate across the fantastic distances in space. Yodeling just won’t cut it this time. The length of time radio signals travels means that any signal detected would come from the distant past. There are some projects being conducted looking for radio signals, but another suggestion is using laser signals to draw attention to Earth’s status as a hot spot of intelligent life. As the plots of many science fiction movies have advanced there is no promise of how friendly any other life forms might be once they get our message.
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If you look up at the stars you might wonder if anyone is really out there. You might also wonder if they have found as many strange ways to communicate with each other as we have.
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