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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Experimental language | 2/2 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_language | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T15:41:07.058730+00:00 | kb-cron |
==== Unnamed ==== In Anthem, by Ayn Rand, the World Council attempted to enforce collectivist thinking among the populace by removing from the language all words expressing individuality. In Dune, by Frank Herbert, Lady Jessica (who has extensive linguistic training) encounters the Fremen, the native people of Dune. She is shocked by the violence of their language, as she believes their word choices and language structure reflect a culture of enormous violence. Similarly, earlier in the novel, her late husband, Duke Leto, muses on how the nature of Imperial society is betrayed by "the precise delineations for treacherous death" in its language, the use of highly specific terms to describe different methods for delivering poison. In Gulf, by Robert A. Heinlein, the characters are taught an artificial language which allows them to think logically and concisely by removing the "false to fact" linguistic constructs of existing languages. In Mud/Aurora, by D.D. Storm, society is divided in three classes speaking three different languages, designed to allow survival on a hostile, deserted world of a wrecked starship's crew and their descendants. The long-forgotten ship's linguist hid the true history of their world within the language spoken by the descendants of the commanding officers, the Sah. Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson, explores the (controversial) concept of neuro-linguistic programming and presents the Sumerian language as the firmware programming language for the brain stem which is supposedly functioning as the BIOS for the human brain. According to characters in the book, the goddess Asherah is the personification of a linguistic virus similar to a computer virus. The god Enki created a counter program which he called a nam-shub that caused all of humanity to speak different languages as a protection against Asherah, supposedly giving rise to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. In Story of Your Life, by Ted Chiang, the inspiration for the film Arrival, learning the written language used by alien visitors to the Earth allows the person who learns the language to think in a different way, in which the past and future are illusions of conventional thought. This allows people who understand the language to see their entire life as a single unchangeable action, from past to future. In Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert A. Heinlein, Valentine Michael Smith is able to do things that most other humans cannot, and is unable to explain any of this in English. However, once others learn Martian, they start to develop the ability to do these things; those concepts could be explained only in Martian. The Unnamable, by H.P. Lovecraft, explores the idea of whether or not someone can conceptualize something which cannot be described by any name. In Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, by Jorge Luis Borges, the author discovers references in books to a universe of idealistic individuals whose languages have peculiarities that shape their idealism. For example, one of the language families lacks nouns, while another primarily uses monosyllabic adjectives to describe objects. As the story progresses the books become more and better known to the world at large, their philosophy starts influencing the real world, and Earth becomes the ideal world described in the books.
==== Counterexamples ==== In The Citadel of the Autarch, by Gene Wolfe, one of the characters (an Ascian) speaks entirely in slogans, but is able to express deep and subtle meanings via context. The narrator, Severian, after hearing the Ascian speak, remarks that "The Ascian seemed to speak only in sentences he had learned by rote, though until he used each for the first time we had never heard them ... Second, I learned how difficult it is to eliminate the urge for expression. The people of Ascia were reduced to speaking only with their masters' voice; but they had made of it a new tongue, and I had no doubt, after hearing the Ascian, that by it he could express whatever thought he wished."
== Languages exploring other linguistic aspects == Several constructed languages are closer to the oligosynthetic type than any attested natural languages:
Ithkuil, by John Quijada, designed for maximum morpho-phonological conciseness. Ilaksh, by John Quijada, the phonologically simpler successor to Ithkuil. Zaum is the experimental poetic language characterized by indeterminacy in meaning intended to describe the linguistic experiments of the Russian Futurist poets.
== See also == Alien language Artistic language Engineered language Fictional language ISO, SIL, and BCP language codes for constructed languages
== Notes ==