The "Creative Aspect" of Constructed Languages
When my friend Jeremy first told me he was learning Esperanto, I wasn't exactly accepting…and I probably obnoxiously let him know that. “Especially Esperanto of all languages, how useless!” I thought and “how dare someone have the audacity to create a language that the world should speak, it’s not even a real language!” By “real” I meant organically formed and naturally endowed as most human languages are.
I’d heard about the history of Dr. Zamenhof. Of course, there are problems with it, such as inadvertently defining “language” by European standards as placing the importance on those as what the world should speak could seem no less imperial than forcing any European language upon the world (but, hey, then again he was simply being a man of his time). Speakers of languages that are historically and structurally closer to Esperanto have the same potential to be wrapped up in dynamics of power and inequality since some groups might turn out to be better speakers leading to disproportionate social and economic opportunities for those groups. And of course the fact that a common language throughout history has never lead to peace. Groups that speak the same language or nearly the same language go to war with each other all the time. Putting all that aside, I was irritated by something else that I didn't fully understand yet.
LL Zamenhof
The first Esperanto book
Ironically, when talking to Jeremy and many of my other language nerd and medieval studies friends, I took a bow a reverence to the great J. R. R. Tolkien. Not only was he an incredible linguist (one discovery that impressed me the most was his demonstration of Celtic elements in English, something that many in the field of linguistics have yet to accept) and an admirable hyper-polyglot (he knew more than 20 languages), he also created many languages of which Quenya and Sindarin are the most thoroughly crafted. Not only was I impressed by the similitude of his languages to Medieval Germanic tongues (a language group that I absolutely love studying and that got me into linguistics in the first place), but also, and much more so, the extensiveness and complexity of his languages.
For some reason, I felt perfectly fine about Tolkien's work, but I seemed to despise that of Zamenhof. If you were to ask my rationale then, I would have offered the simple (rather irrational) answer that I didn’t like the seemingly arrogant air behind the idea of creating a language that everyone should speak, followed by the idea that his language wasn't “natural” and would never work. Those ideas express ‘how’ I felt, but don't get at exactly 'why' I felt the way I did. "SHOULD speak" is the important part of that last sentence and I think that seemed to be the reason why I objected strongly to the idea of Esperanto.
On another occasion when I’d called Jeremy out on Esperanto while among other friends, he told me to stop "showing out." The retort was just. I was being an idiot. But that’s kind of how I felt about Zamenhof. I felt that anyone who believed they could prescribe the world a language to cure all social ills was pompous in his attempts.
“Prescription.”
This word is poison to anyone one has ever studied linguistics. Linguistics moves from the prescriptive grammar world—language as someone from on high specifies that one should speak—toward the descriptive grammar world—language as a fully logical system as spoken naturally in all its variety. Zamenhof’s work seemed to echo too closely to the stiff, dusty ‘grade school grammar books’ approach to language. Tolkien’s languages on the other hand were built around stories and mythologies giving a more ‘people use might use this language in daily life somewhere’ feel to it. Tolkien would have agreed with me on this point as he wrote “Esperanto… [is] far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends.” The humanities and arts aspect seemed to be missing from Esperanto which sucked the life out of it and gave it an authoritative, dictatorial mien.
JRR Tolkien
What I failed to realize though was how remarkably “useful” each of those language creators’ masterpieces was as an expression (even if metaphorically so) of one of the key principles that makes language so unique, one of the key principles that makes humans unique. It is one of the abilities we exercise through language that separates language from every other form of communication in the animal kingdom.
It’s the “creative aspect” of language.
The “creative aspect” of language is why my response was irrational. Within our languages, we have this capacity to take finite parts (phonemes, morphemes, words, idiomatic phrases) and re-organize them in ways that allow us to create infinite meanings. Because of this, it is possible to enunciate phrases that have never been said before in 200,000 years of modern human history. Even grammatically acceptable “nonsense” phrases like the well-known colorless green ideas sleep furiously (a phrase that happens to have been very popular among phrases in human history) are possible due to this special creative gift we have. In a metaphorical sense, we not only have a creative aspect within language, but also a creative aspect among languages.
We can take the finite materials of our languages and create endless amounts of new languages, systems of expression begetting systems of expression. In a more organic way, we see this with the rise of creoles from the dust of various linguistic helter-skelter hodgepodges that form pidgins. In my research in Indonesia, I’ve seen this through the rise of the mixed language Osob Kiwalan Ngalam (or Bahasa Walikan Malang) where speakers during the revolution against Dutch colonials mixed Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) and Javanese (Bạsạ Jạwạ) while flipping the pronunciation of individual words with a few regional words thrown in in order to form a secret code language.
Whether it happens “by nature” or by intentional human design for any reason really, this “creative aspect of languages” appears to be part of our nature, perhaps even an instinct. This unique ability, these collective, social works of art like creoles and mixed languages, and these personal masterpieces by those like Tolkien, but also like Zamenhof deserve to be celebrated. These languages are useful as inspiring exercises in human potential. And an added bonus is that they may even help you learn other “more organic” languages as Benny Lewis points out. “Just 2 weeks learning Esperanto can get you months ahead in your target language” he says.
Today I support Esperanto and even dabble in it from time to time (I like to bounce around languages for better or for worse). I’ve even experimented a bit in language construction. I would thank Jeremy and Dr. Zamenhof for “showing off” in a good way this every special ability we have that I’m sure no other creature on earth possesses. This is a celebration of the creative aspect of languages, a celebration of stuff of humanity.