Mr. Worf, Meet Mr. Whorf.

One thing you need to know about me before we go any further: I invented a language.

Yes, it’s true. Actually, "constructed a language" is a more appropriate phrase. There’s a whole world out there on the web (and off of the web, I suppose) full of people who get their kicks constructing, deconstructing, discussing and otherwise fiddling around with “conlangs,” as they are known. And I’m one of them, although I’ve kept the whole thing to myself up until now.

When I talk about constructed language, I need you to understand that it’s a bit more complicated than sitting down and compiling a list of odd-sounding words to substitute for English ones. That’s a perfectly acceptable pastime, don’t get me wrong. In fact, my little sister (about whom you will hear more later) invented a language called “Cha-Cha” back when she was about 8 or 9. Sadly, the promise of Cha-Cha was never fully realized, as the only vocabulary she ever developed, to my knowledge, was “dog dog dog” -- which means “ha ha ha.”

As it turns out, language creators do indeed spend a lot of time making lists of odd-sounding words, because a rich vocabulary is the nuts and bolts of any successful conlang. But the heart of the language, the real inner workings, is its grammar -- the rules that dictate how words fit together to form meaningful phrases, clauses and sentences – and it is on this that any reputable conlanger will expend the vast majority of his or her time and effort. It’s hard work, but I’ll save my grammar discussion for some future post.

My conlang is called Batai. (I've added a link to the grammar of Batai on the left sidebar of my blog.) For those of you familiar with Star Trek: The Next Generation, this name might sound familiar, as I hijacked it from a character in episode 124, “The Inner Light” (maybe my favorite episode). If you haven’t seen it, go to Netflix and watch it. Now.

I’ll wait.

Good.

That name (Batai) was the first kernel of what was to become my conlang, and it is almost the only connection it has with the episode, aside from one two-word phrase I also pilfered.* I just simply liked the sound of the word “Batai.” (Of course, I was then forced to create a “back-story” for this word, and it became part of the vocabulary. Fun stuff!)

There’s another connection between Star Trek and Batai, although this one was as unintentional as it was painful for me to discover. You see, for some terrible reason early on in the creative process, I had decided that Batai needed to be an OVS language. I think I just wanted to challenge myself for some reason. (For non-language-geeks out there, OVS refers to the word order of a language, in this case Object-Verb-Subject. OVS languages are pretty much the reverse of SVO languages, such as English.) OVS languages are the rarest type of language (and probably least described, linguistically) on the planet, which may have added to my desire for Batai use this sequence. After all, I thought, if so few examples of OVS exist, then there were fewer linguistic rules to break. Plus, I assumed that fewer invented languages would use this word order, as it can be extremely challenging to work with. This freed me up to take risks with the grammar, and in a way it made things easier for me.

So it was a few years later when I realized to my dismay that one of the most successful and famous of all conlangs – Klingon – also uses the OVS sequence. This irritates me to this day on several levels. First, I felt I should have known that Klingon was OVS. I don’t know, it just seems like something I would be aware of. And second, I didn’t want anyone to ever think that I had copied that idea, should I ever want to publish Batai. “ghuy’cha’!” as a particularly angry and foul-mouthed Klingon might say.

But back to the actual story.

As I got well into the work of creating Batai, a question started to nag at me: “Who are the people who speak this language? What is their story?” Or, as the question soon became, “What are their stories?”

I had, for one reason or another, always thought of them as what we might call a primitive society, maybe human, maybe not, living a rather isolated existence in a tropical environment. It just seemed to simplify things. But I started to wonder as I sweated over grammar and vocabulary, just how much I needed to know about them, about their culture, before I could go any further. To what extent is their vocabulary predicated on what they know, or their culture, or how they see the world? And conversely, how does their language inform their way of thinking, and their ways of doing what they do? I found these questions intriguing, and not a little inspiring, but they were too much for me. After all, I was having fits just trying to figure out how a Batai speaker would form a dependent clause; I was not prepared to invent an entire ethnography!

But then I recalled a linguistics class I had in college, and I remembered that these questions had been asked before by numerous linguists, perhaps the most famous of whom was a man named Benjamin Lee Whorf. Here he is.

In the late 1930s, Whorf advanced a principle he called “linguistic relativity,” which proposed that differences in language reflect, and are reflected by, differences in people’s conceptions of the world around them. Also known as the “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis,” this idea was greatly influenced by his work with the Hopi language. You can read more about it here.

Now, I know that Whorf’s ideas have been widely criticized by high-profile universalists such as Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker, and many of his observations (most notably those of Hopi conceptions of time) have been refuted by later linguistic work. However, I find the notion that a people’s language and their culture/worldview could be intertwined to be an appealing, if not irresistible, one. And so I have let it influence my work on Batai, at least in the direction of culture influencing the language.

One brief example is the way Batai speakers talk about the weather: in Batai, one does not say, “It is raining,” or “It rains,” using an impersonal construction like we do in English; rather one says, wiši nokowa -- literally “she sends rain” (the “she” referred to being Kaila, the divinity associated with the sky and weather). It is the animistic religion of the people (Lalindu) who speak Batai that influences the way they relate to weather phenomena.

As I continued to add vocabulary and idiomatic expressions into Batai, I found that it was impossible for me to separate this process from my expanding ideas about the culture and worldview of the Lalindu. So the culture continued (or I should say, continues) to grow alongside the language. They are intertwined. For me, inseparable. And although, even after all this time (I first began work on Batai in 2007) my grasp on the culture of the Lalindu is often tenuous at best, I still cannot work on those dependent clause rules without thinking of the people who will be using them. Even if those people, and their beliefs, and everything about them, exist solely and entirely within my imagination.

*In “The Inner Light,” the common expression of farewell used by the people of Kataan is “go carefully.” The Batai expression is identical: nakwim tilam.