Are Elvish, Klingon, Dothraki and Na'vi real languages? - John McWhorter

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What do Game of Thrones' Dothraki, Avatar's Na'vi, Star Trek's Klingon and LOTR's Elvish have in common? They are all fantasy constructed languages, or conlangs. Conlangs have all the delicious complexities of real languages: a high volume of words, grammar rules, and room for messiness and evolution. John McWhorter explains why these invented languages captivate fans long past the rolling credits.

Lesson by John McWhorter, animation by Enjoyanimation.

To many, one of the coolest things

about Game of Thrones

is that the inhabitants of the Dothraki sea

have their own real language.

And Dothraki came hot on the heels

of the real language that the Na'vi speak in Avatar,

which, surely, the Na'vi needed

when the Klingons in Star Trek

have had their own whole language

since 1979.

And let's not forget the Elvish languages

in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy,

especially since that was the official grandfather

of the Fantasy Conlangs.

Conlang is short for constructed language.

They're more than codes like Pig Latin,

and they're not just collections

of fabricated slang like the Nadsat lingo

that the teen hoodlums

in A Clockwork Orange speak,

where droog from Russian

happens to mean friend.

What makes Conlangs real languages

isn't the number of words they have.

It helps, of course, to have a lot of words.

Dothraki has thousands of words.

Na'vi started with 1500 words.

Fans on websites have steadily created more.

But we can see the difference

between vocabulary alone

and what makes a real language

from a look at how Tolkien

put together grand ol' Elvish,

a Conlang with several thousands words.

Afterall, you could memorize 5,000 words of Russian

and still be barely able to construct a sentence.

A four-year-old would talk rings around you.

That's because you have to know

how to put the words together.

That is, a real language has grammar.

Elvish does.

In English, to make a verb past,

you add an "-ed".

Wash, washed.

In Elvish, wash is allu

and washed is allune.

Real languages also change over time.

There's no such thing

as a language that is the same today

as it was a thousand years ago.

As people speak, they drift into new habits,

shed old ones,

make mistakes,

and get creative.

Today, one says,

"Give us today our daily bread."

In Old English, they said,

"Urne gedaeghwamlican hlaf syle us todaeg."

Things change in Conlangs too.

Tolkien charted out ancient

and newer versions of Elvish.

When the first Elves awoke at Cuivienen,

in their new language,

the word for people was kwendi,

but in the language of one of the groups

that moved away, Teleri,

over time, kwendi became pendi,

with the k turning into a p.

And just like real languages,

Conlangs like Elvish split off into many.

When the Romans transplanted Latin across Europe,

French, Spanish, and Italian were born.

When groups move to different places,

over time their ways of speaking grow apart,

just like everything else about them.

Thus, Latin's word for hand was manus,

but in French, it became main,

while in Spain it became mano.

Tolkien made sure Elvish did the same kind of thing.

While that original word kwendi became pendi

among the Teleri,

among the Avari, who spread throughout Middle Earth,

it became kindi

when the w dropped out.

The Elvish varieties Tolkien flushed out the most

are Quenya and Sindarin,

and their words are different

in the same way French and Spanish are.

Quenya has suc for drink,

Sindarin has sog.

And as you know, real languages are messy.

That's because they change,

and change has a way of working against order,

just like in a living room

or on a bookshelf.

Real languages are never perfectly logical.

That's why Tolkien made sure

that Elvish had plenty of exceptions.

Lots of verbs are conjugated in ways

you just have to know.

Take even the word know.

In the past, it's knew,

which isn't explained by any of the rules in English.

Oh, well.

In Elvish, know is ista,

but knew is sinte.

Oh, well.

The truth is, though,

that Elvish is more a sketch for a real language

than a whole one.

For Tolkien, Elvish was a hobby

rather than an attempt to create something

people could actually speak.

Much of the Elvish the characters

in the Lord of the Rings movies speak

has been made up since Tolkien

by dedicated fans of Elvish

based on guesses as to what Tolkien

would have constructed.

That's the best we can do for Elvish

because there are no actual Elves around

to speak it for us.

But the modern Conlangs go further.

Dothraki, Na'vi, and Klingon are developed enough

that you can actually speak them.

Here's a translation of Hamlet into Klingon,

although performing it would mean getting used

to pronouncing "k" with your uvula,

that weird, cartoony thing hanging

in the back of your throat.

Believe it or not,

you actually do that in plenty

of languages around the world,

like Eskimo ones.

Pronouncing Elvish is much easier, though.

So, let's take our leave for now

from this introduction of Conlangs in Elvish

and the other three Conglangs discussed

with a heartfelt quad-Conlangual valedictory:

"A na marie!"

"Hajas!"

Na'vi's "Kiyevame!"

"Qapla!"

and "Goodbye!"