Creating Languages

I’m a big podcast listener. One of my favorites, PRI’s TheWorld, is an international news program. One of the subjects they focus on from time to time is the state of languages around the world. Last week, they featured a story about languages created by fantasy authors.

Here's the whole story, if you're interested, and here is a link to the transcript. But you don't need to listen to it to follow the rest of my post.

Their main focus was Tolkien, of course. But they also presented interviews with Ursula LeGuin and China Miéville.

Here is my favorite quote from the interview, where the reporter is talking to China Miéville about a language he created for his novel Embassytown.

It’s a language that mimics language of the garden of Eden, where the word is the thing. In other words, there’s no difference between an apple, and the word for an apple.The Ariekei can’t lie.

“If they want to use figurative speech at all they have to construct a situation which they can then refer to,” says Miéville.“If you wanted say ‘oh I feel like an angry lion today’ you would have to get a lion and make it angry. Otherwise you couldn’t say it because it didn’t exist.”

Now THAT would make for some interesting arguments!

Though I’m fascinated and awed by the idea of creating my own languages, I can’t say the idea holds much appeal to me. It sounds to me like way too much work. I mean, I haven’t even grasped the nuances of pacing and character yet! I've so far failed at even coming up with good curse words or sayings unique to my fantasy worlds.

I’ve actually been thinking a lot lately about stages of writing. When I was a very beginning writer, the idea of research made me nervous. Research, to me, seemed like a hindrance to the process and the flow of the writing I was doing, something to get in the way with the task I love.

The fact that I was in graduate school at the time may have had something to do with that particular view on research.

But since then, I’ve come to think of research differently. It stopped being a hindrance and turned into a joy, a learning opportunity. I stopped regarding it as something I had to do to impress editors, and instead became something I wanted to do in order to delve deeper into these worlds boiling in the back of my mind. Now I have a long list of things I can’t wait to look up and learn about.

It gives me hope. Sometimes I chide myself for not doing everything perfectly the first time. But as I keep arguing, writing is a process, a skill. Perfection doesn’t come right away. It's a cumulative effort: the more I know, the more I want to learn.

So I’ll keep a hold of those links, just in case.

What worldbuilding or other intricate writing skill do you hope to someday achieve?