From Middle Earth to Oceania: Rebuilding the Tower of Babel

Once upon a time, everyone on Earth spoke the same language. In a noble attempt to create a gateway to heaven, people of the vast plain between Tigris and Euphrates decided to build a city and a tower. With its top in the heavens, the tower would serve as a firm symbol of man’s power and domination on Earth.

Did you know that the word babel means confusion of tongues? It is a mixture of voices all talking at the same time.

However, the God had some minor concerns. Having seen man’s architectural endeavors as an act of pure vanity, the God decided to scatter people over the face of Earth and confuse their language. Ever since then, people are struggling to understand each other, at least according to the Book of Genesis.

Yet, the boundary between true communication and genuine understanding is blurred. As George Orwell nicely put it, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” There are many factors to good communication, but understanding the language of another person is crucial.

With nearly a billion people learning English, it seems that we are still making attempts to reduce the rate of misunderstanding and conflicts, and in a way rebuild Babel, a fruit of joint human efforts towards a common goal. It could be argued that the most notable authors are also pitching this idea in their work with their constructed languages of fantastic worlds.

Tolkien’s secret vice: the art of constructing languages

Tolkien’s play with words began in his childhood and kept him fully immersed throughout his life. In his fictional worlds, this poet and translator, philologist and literature professor, created a number of languages.

Of course, we do not possess enough knowledge of these languages to translate works of Shakespeare, for instance. Instead, they serve as a nice reminder of linguistic playfulness of which Tolkien was so deeply fond.

His deep interest in conlangs, or constructed languages, was a product of his creative nature and by no means had practical purposes.

His first encounter with the world of invented languages was when he learnt some basics of Animalic, a rather amusing and clumsy language crafted by his cousins. Sadly, only a fragment is preserved of this playful language: “Dog nightingale woodpecker forty.” The meaning is as silly as the original sentence goes: “You are an ass.” Surely, ass means donkey, no additional meaning is implied.

Later on, Tolkien contributed to creation of a more sophisticated language. His new vice, as he used to call his unusual hobby of language crafting, was Newbosh, or new nonsense. Newbosh was certainly more sophisticated than plain Animalic since it included some elements of Latin, English, and French. Again, only a fragment is kept in the form of a poem and a short word-list.

However, the peak of linguistic inventiveness Tolkien reached when he created the fantastic Middle Earth only to give his conlangs a chance to live. Although constructed, the languages spoken by the Elves, Qenya and Sindarin, are linguistically plausible. They are based on sound grammatical principles with an extensive vocabulary.

“Elen sila lumenn’ omentielvo,”

famously says Frodo to Gildor, encapsulating the beauty and complexity of Quenya, the language of Elves, product of Tolkien’s creative pursuits.

Newspeak vs Oldspeak

Whereas Tolkien created entire worlds just to breathe some life into his constructed languages, Orwell did the opposite. In his 1984 he tried to limit the boundaries of human thought and behavior by posing constraints to the basic means of human communication.

Newspeak is everything English, that is Oldspeak, is not. Its core purpose is to narrow the range of thought by excluding possible shades of meaning.

It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself.

Thus, for example, the opposite of good is not bad. Why would we need a new word when “ungood” serves the purpose just fine? Similarly, denoting intensity for some adjectives is completely useless. Excellent and splendid, those extraordinary words shaping and altering our experience of reality thus become unnecessary. Instead, “plusgood” seems practical enough. An important thing to note about Newspeak is that it is:

“the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year.”

In the case of Newspeak, language is not means of expression. On the contrary, it serves as means of oppression and horrible torture, mental, then, physical. The ultimate goal is controlling reality.

In Oceania, you certainly do not want to commit a crimethink, that is thoughtcrime, since “Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.” Also, ownlife, that is, individualism or eccentricity, is not viewed as a positive trait. On the other hand, blackwhite is fully regarded as a positive characteristic. This is actually a habit of constantly accepting the truth, no matter how obvious it is that what is presented as truth is actually a lie.