One of my hobbies is inventing languages. I've been doing it on and off since my senior year in high school, but I didn't really get serious about it until I went to graduate school to study linguistics. Working on an invented language is an enjoyable way to spend an evening, though I don't do it as much now as I used to. J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion, also invented languages as a hobby. In a famous essay called "A Secret Vice" (originally a lecture given at Oxford to the Samuel Johnson Society on 29 November 1931), he talked about the reasons he invented languages, chief among them the pleasure he derived from creating words and thinking about the new relationship between the sounds of the word and the meaning that the word was intended to convey. As he put it: "it is the contemplation of the relation between sound and notion which is a main source of pleasure." (A Secret Vice", p 206)
I think for many of us who invent languages this is a strong motivation. There's definitely a little thrill when you come up with a word that is just Right for its intended meaning. For me, this sense of Rightness can also extend to phonological and grammatical systems themselves. There are many examples of grammatical and phonological phenomena from natural languages that I find enjoyable to think about: Frisian breaking, the Luiseño absolutive, and the auxiliary system of English, to name a few.
My current constructed language project is called Æppl (sounds like "apple"). It's a silly name and I don't remember how I came up with it, but it's too firmly embedded in my imagination to change now. I imagine Æppl being spoken by about 55,000 people who live on an (imaginary) island about 350 miles east of Newfoundland.
I've been taking my time in constructing Æppl. I started thinking about it while taking the bus to and from work in the late 90s, and I'm still thinking about it. I have some things about the language firm in my mind now, but the bulk of the language is still not worked out. In fact, very little of it is even written down. The process of writing something down makes it permanent in a way that I'm not always ready to commit to for Æppl, though there are a few things that have settled in and feel Right. Here are two of them.
1. Æppl has 24 vowels altogether. There are 12 simple vowels /iː ɪ eː ɛ æ ə ɐ ɑ ɔ oː ʊ uː/, 8 falling diphthongs /iə̯ eə̯ uə̯ oə̯ ai̯ au̯ ɔi̯ eʋ/, and 4 rising diphthongs /i̯ɛ i̯æ u̯ɔ u̯ɑ/. This is the largest set of vowels I've ever worked with in a constructed language. I generally prefer smaller, lopsided vowel sets (/i a o/, /i e a o/, /i ɨ u o a/, etc), so ending up with a set this large is rather out of character for me. The vowels of Æppl have accumulated over the years, but the composition of the set as it is now feels good and I have no plans to change it.
I like playing around with different kinds of vowel charts. I've recently become enamoured of Geoff Lindsey's triangular mapping of the acoustic vowel space; he explains it here. (Go ahead and take a look; it's worth the time, and I'll still be here when you're done. In fact, you can even watch the video he made on the subject.) In fact, I liked it so much that I made a Lindseyan Triangle template in Adobe Illustrator for my own use and filled a copy with the simple vowels of Æppl.
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| The simple vowels of Æppl |
I was engaged in blissful contemplation of the pseudo-analytical object I had just created, when I noticed that a particular set of vowels (/ɪ ə ɐ ʊ/) formed a Y-shape in the center of the chart, with /ǝ/ at the hub. I then realized that these 4 vowels were the only vowels that appeared in unstressed suffixes in Æppl.
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| Vowels in unstressed suffixes (in red) |
The symmetry of this 4 vowel set in the chart coupled with the fact that the same vowels shared a unique (morpho-)phonological property struck me as being profoundly Right in a way that may be difficult for non-linguists to appreciate. I did not plan for those 4 vowels to share that property; that arose spontaneously. Perhaps you say, "Spontaneously? Really? Didn't you choose the vowels for the particular suffixes at hand?" Well, yes; you're right. Certainly I had made decisions about vowels in suffixes, some of them years ago, but I had made those decisions independently of each other and certainly not with an eye to creating larger, deeper connections such as the one I had found on that chart. But now that I've found this connection, I can't imagine Æppl being any other way. The Rightness has become Inevitability.
2. The main reason that it's taking me so long to get anything done with Æppl is that I want decisions I make about it to have that feeling of Rightness (even Inevitability, if I can manage it). For that to happen, I need to sit with decisions for a while and just let them be. One of the decisions (or set of decisions) that I made early on was the structure of the auxiliary system. Auxiliaries in Æppl are small words that provide information about the sentence's subject, tense, and mood. The auxiliary always follows the first word of the sentence. There are 3 sets of auxiliaries:
| PRESENT | Singular | Plural |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | en | et |
| 2 | em | ep |
| 3 | es | |
| PAST | Singular | Plural |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | ant | att |
| 2 | amt | apt |
| 3 | ast | |
| FUTURE | Singular | Plural |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | eln | elt |
| 2 | elm | elp |
| 3 | els | |
It's an orderly system, with several parallelisms built in:
- First person markers are alveolar /n t/, and second person person markers are labial /m p/.
- Singular number markers are nasals /n m/, and plural number markers are voiceless stops /t p/.
- The third person marker doesn't distinguish number and is a fricative /s/ instead of a stop or nasal. (I suppose I should have used a velar fricative /x/ to distinguish it in place of articulation from first and second persons, but I'm happy with alveolar /s/.)
- Each person and number (PN) combination is phonotactically parallel with all of the others in the same tense — that is, it shows up in the same position in the auxiliary word. So present tense auxiliaries are |e-PN|, past tense auxiliaries are |a-PN-t|, and future tense auxiliaries are |e-l-PN|.
This used to bother me a bit, since it seemed too orderly — unnaturally orderly, even.
In Fall Semester 2021, I taught a field methods course in which the language under investigation was Bahasa Indonesia. While doing some background reading to prepare, I came across a table that showed common tense and mood distinctions in Austronesian languages as being the result of the intersection of more basic distinctions: whether an action or activity was started or not started, and whether an activity was finished or not finished. Here is a table that presents the features and their combinations, together with the labels for the "resultant" tense ~ mood categories:
| Finished | Not Finished | |
|---|---|---|
| Started | Completive | Continuous |
| Not Started | (not defined) | Contemplative |
The derived categories in this table are similar to the distinctions I had been making with the auxiliary system of Æppl, provided that one makes the following correspondences (not really much of a stretch):
I then realized that these same basic distinctions (Started ~ Not Started; Finished ~ Not Finished) were already baked into my set of auxliaries:
The second person singular from each set of auxiliaries can be broken down as follows (this analysis assumes that the PN subject marker — in this case /m/ '2sg' — is the root of the construction):
The other person and number combinations are parallel to the second person singular in formation.
For me, one of the most attractive features of the system is that there are three tenses, but only two basic categories. The intersection of the two categories produces the three-fold tense categorization I had settled on years ago, but as "resultant categories" rather than primitive categories of the system. I didn't plan it that way. But I'm glad now that I left the sets of auxiliaries alone for all those years, even though they seemed too tidy. They are tidy, but in a way that I never realized, and in a way that I now find very appealing — even Right. Maybe in another 20 years they'll feel Inevitable, too. For now I'll settle for Right.
