MarkShea_AppliedLing

Category: Constructed Languages

These posts are reflections on a course on Constructed Languages I teach in my English Department.

  • Precision and Play

    Once I had set the course goals for my ConLangs course, I needed to identify topics and themes for the class to explore. As I pulled together potential materials, I could feel a gravitational pull towards a discussion of linguistic determinism (also known as linguistic relativism or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis).

    When I design courses like this one, a course that has a poppier topic, I return to this guiding question: Do my students need a college course in order to interact deeply with this topic? And so that’s why, for instance, I don’t spend a lot of time on Klingon or Elvish in this course. There’s plenty out there on those topics. And while a lot of the information may not be academic per se, you can find a wealth of discussion out there without a college course guiding (and obligating) you to do so.

    Linguistic determinism rang that bell for me. It feels like the first thing people get to when they start talking about language in a SFF context. I do think it’s a rich, appropriate topic for academic exploration, and I have a lot to say about it, perhaps in a future post, but I wanted to expose students to some other topics in linguistics that might be harder to encounter without a syllabus guiding you.

    In the third iteration of this course, I feel like I’m finally really laying some of these themes out clearly for myself and my students. The question of precision vs play has been particularly productive in the first half of this semester.

    I included this scene from Babel-17 in a previous post. We see Rydra Wong solving a complex physics puzzle by considering it in Babel-17, a language engineered to be both brainwash the secret saboteurs and serve as their main weapon.

    She looked down at the…not “webbing,” but rather a three-particle vowel differential, each particle of which defined one stress of the three-way tie, so that the weakest points in the mesh were identified when the total sound of the differential reached its lowest point. By breaking the threads at these points, she realized, the whole web would unravel. Had she flailed at it, and not named it in this new language, it would have been more than secure enough to hold her.

    Reading this scene through the conceptual lens of linguistic determinism works very well. But it can generate really interesting lines of analysis if the focus shifts to questioning the value of precision in language.

    In Arika Okrent’s excellent book, In the Land of Invented Language, she has a couple chapters which focus on attempts to create perfectly precise languages, with no room for ambiguity or error. I love “A Calculus of Thought,” on 17th-century attempts to apply innovations in mathematical notation to all language. But when I assigned it in the past, it was hard for us to connect it to our other texts. Reading it against Delany’s version of a perfectly precise language has been great for class discussions.

    The theme of precision and language provides opportunities to engage with a range of thinking about language. This semester, I assigned “The Grammar of Play and the Play of Grammar,” a chapter from Joel Sherzer’s Speech Play and Verbal Art. As a bonus, Sherzer provides a number of examples of language features that served as the basis for some of our language creation activities. But what I’m really interested in is his discussion of ambiguity in language:

    Every grammar provides a set of rules within which, instead of rigorous, tight consistency, there is considerable freedom—that is, considerable play. . . .

    These inconsistencies and irregularities in form-meaning relationships are actually instances of linguistic competition and play, and they are often sources of humor for children as they learn them and resources for verbal artists as they exploit them.

    In Sherzer’s account, perhaps more closely associated with linguistic anthropology than formal linguistics, ambiguity and irregularity are not design flaws but rather essential characteristics of human language, resources to create art. Rydra Wong is a galactic poet, in a struggle with a precisely engineered linguistic weapon.

    What a fun conversation! By introducing the question of whether language should be considered a system for precise communication, I can introduce areas of linguistic thinking that an interested student researching on their own might not encounter.

  • Setting Goals

    Reading what others have shared about their constructed language courses in higher ed, I noticed that a learning goal for many of the courses was tied to linguistic terminology and practices; courses provide students opportunities to learn and apply morphosyntax terminology, or to develop effective language documentation practices. These goals map intuitively onto a course in conlangs.

    I knew I wanted to teach a course on constructed languages, but, I needed to think a little more carefully about identifying the course goals. There isn’t a linguistics program at my institution, so there isn’t a clear benefit to asking students to learn a bunch of technical terminology or disciplinary practices when there aren’t clear pathways to upper-level courses where they will use them. Nor is there an intro-level course that provides a baseline of shared knowledge for incoming students.

    Obviously, there is going to be some focus on language features and metalinguistic description–that’s part of the fun of the whole thing, but I determined that the most productive focus of this course would be a critical discussion of the role language plays in the construction of social and individual identity.

    Here’s the resulting syllabus language for my course learning goals and objectives:

    Constructing a language is an act of creativity, but conlangs can never be as complex as natural languages. Which aspects of language do conlangs illuminate, and which do they flatten? How do they critique or reinforce ideologies of oppression? We will approach these questions from linguistic, literary, cognitive, and sociological perspectives.

    Course Objectives (what we are going to do)

    • Develop academic writing skills through two extended writing assignments (5-7 page papers) and a revised portfolio
    • Situate questions raised by fictional conlangs within academic and popular discourse while developing appropriate critical and linguistic vocabulary
    • Critique commonly encountered positions and arguments about language and identify the assumptions and biases at play
    • Evaluate our own knowledge and research practices as we explore an interdisciplinary topic that spans popular and academic sources

  • Using Ria Cheyne’s “Created Languages” to incorporate literature

    This semester I’m teaching a course on constructed languages. I developed the course for the Fall ’21 semester, and this is the third time I’ve run it.

    I teach in an English department, and the course engages with literary analysis as well as with linguistics and materials on constructed languages in history and contemporary culture.

    In all three iterations of the course, we’ve read Babel-17 , by Samuel Delany, as our primary literary text. In the previous two iterations, I struggled to integrate our discussions of constructed languages with the way they showed up in literary texts. Basically, very few authors bother building out very much of a conlang, and when and if they do, it’s not the best generator for class discussion.

    One place this disconnect became very apparent was when I asked students to incorporate other class readings as secondary sources in their literary analysis papers. It was hard for them to tie a connection between the formal language structures and sociolinguistic phenomena we discussed and the way Delany presents the conlang Babel-17.

    This semester, I’ve had much more success by incorporating Ria Cheyne’s “Created Languages in Science Fiction” into our secondary readings. I pair it with the extended definition of conlang terms at the end of Nathan Sanders’ chapter “A Primer on Constructed Languages.”

    Sanders’ taxonomy is excellent, but in my course it is really helpful to have the following articulation by Cheyne:

    Even when created languages are discussed, an approach through the larger category of constructed languages will tend to slight them, for the chief focus is necessarily not on the functioning of the created language within the text so much as as on the grammar, vocabulary, ideology, and other features of the language per se–even though very few of sf’s created languages are presented in terms of extensive lexicons or systematic grammar rules. Highly developed languages as Elgin’s Laadan and Klingon are much in the minority.

    This framing gives students the space to adjust the focus of their literary analysis to thematic elements in the novel within a discussion of conlangs. As an example, in previous iterations of the course, students tended to reject the following excerpt from Babel-17 as an instance of language construction:

    She looked down at the…not “webbing,” but rather a three-particle vowel differential, each particle of which defined one stress of the three-way tie, so that the weakest points in the mesh were identified when the total sound of the differential reached its lowest point. By breaking the threads at these points, she realized, the whole web would unravel. Had she flailed at it, and not named it in this new language, it would have been more than secure enough to hold her.

    In this scene, Rydra Wong thinks in Babel-17 while examining a system of physical restraints and gains an analytic perspective otherwise unavailable to her. Class discussions on the scene were interesting, and I do think it’s valuable to discuss different definitions of key concepts. But we would get bogged down because I wasn’t successful in convincing my students to expand their definition of constructed language and then explore what that expansion made possible for their analyses.

    Cheyne provides a list of created language features that may appear in sff texts. Some of the items relevant for the above passage are the provision of “phonemic information,” “information about grammatical structure,” and “descriptions of other notable features of the language.” Cheyne’s list gives students a schema to fit different texts’ created languages into. As a bonus, students can situate Cheyne’s discussion of created languages within Sanders’ broader taxonomy of conlangs; this provides the opportunity to practice synthesizing multiple scholarly sources.

    edited 3/18 /25 for clarity and typos