Well, if you want a language created by one man that has come to be spoken by a people – other than Esperanto, for which a convincing argument could be made as well – you have only to look at Nynorsk, the national language of Norway. Prior to about 1850, Norwegians spoke Landsmål, a folk tongue descended from Old Norse, while reading and writing Boksmål, which was effectively Danish. A Norwegian university professor and linguist merged the two into a functional language capable of literary use as well as the colloquial role filled by Landsmål, the idea took hold of an evergrowing portion of the populace, and in 1905-07 it was adopted as Norway’s official language.
So why is Quenya “fictional” when Nynorsk, Esperanto, and “Ebonics” are considered real?
Because it appears in a work of fiction?
English appears in many works of fiction. Is it a fictional language?
OK, I’ll rephrase that for the pedants out there:
Because it first appears in a work of fiction?
Actually, it first appeared in Tolkien’s own writings on constructing the language. Contrary to the popular thought, Middle Earth was constructed to form a mythopoesis for his language, following his thesis that language and mythology were intertwined. In particular, he held that the reason Esperanto never caught on was that it had no mythology.
In short: the language came first and the fiction came after as a use for the language rather than the other way around.
And as much as I love Tolkien’s subcreation, I have to side with the people who consider the languages of Middle-Earth to be fictional. The major problem is that they are incomplete. All of them. There is no literature of Quenya or Sindarin or Adûnaic or Khuzdul or Rohirrian. There are only snippets, a few songs, some names. Yes, this is all we have of some non-fictional languages as well, but those languages WERE complete at one time, and were used by a living people in their day-to-day lives. The languages of Middle-Earth were not. They never were. Tolkien gave them enough verisimilitude to pass muster in the fragments we have, but there aren’t vast libraries of lost Sindarin works standing on dusty shelves somewhere waiting to be discovered. If Klingon counts as a fictional language, so does Quenya.
So finally someone suggests a criterion with some meat to it: that a language must be “complete” to be nonfictional. Care to flesh that out? What is completeness for a language?
I have to concede jayjay’s point: When you can ask for and receive detailed directions on the route to Jefferson City MO in a language, translate the Tridentine Mass into it, make a bad pun depending on sound similarities or double meanings in it … then you have a “complete” language.
As for “Ebonics,” the quotes you (and I) used are deprecatory, and perhaps inappropriate. Ebonics is the term coined for an urban dialect of English with unusual rules of grammar and syntax compared to “standard” English. The issue of whether people should be taught in it was of course a big issue some years ago. But in terms of descriptive grammar and language study, it’s as real as, say, Haitian Creole or Papiamento, both of which are dialectal forms considered “substandard” by the speakers of the “real” language, but which have particular syntactic and grammatic rules that can be and have been analyzed and described.
What Poly said. If you can order a Big Mac in it, or you can talk about last night’s Survivor in it, or you can actually conduct an entire impromptu conversation with it, it’s complete. Can you get me from Lancaster to NYC with directions in Klingon? Can you order a dinner for two at the Four Seasons in Quenya? Have you heard a Sindarin Mass lately?
Even better as a criterion for “non-fictional” language is something else I noted in that post.
“Used by LIVING PEOPLE in their day-to-day lives”
“Ebonics” is a brand name, used only to sell it to the public as something worth teaching public schools in. IIRC, before that whole idea came up it was referred to by a more appropriate name: Black English Vernacular.
So that’s your checklist? Come on. Give me a criterion, not a laundry list.
Those are criteria. A real language must be one which can fulfill the needs of day-to-day communication for its people. If it can’t then it isn’t truly a language, but rather a language artifact or a seed which may once have been (Latin IMO) or could in the future become a true tongue of a culture.
Is Quenya a language? Not right now. Could it become so? Sure. The bare bones could be taken and evolved into a grammar and vocabulary comprehensive enough to be used in daily communication. Was Latin once a language? Yes. Is it really today? No. I realize the Vatican tries to keep its vocabulary up to date, but I honestly feel it could not be used in daily modern communication.
Ah-HA! Here’s a great parallel. If someone were to ask about the Latin plural of “penis” or “virus” (assuming that these weren’t already in the mailbag), would they be shunted to Café Society? Why is a question about the Quenya or Sindarin singular of “Rohirrim” sent here?
What’s the critical mass? Are ancient Sumerian and Latin fictional languages now?
From News of the Weird
Because there’s a difference between a language artifact that was once a living, changing way to communicate within a culture and a language fragment that could in the future but never has been. The same difference between history and fiction.
Look, there are no hard and fast lines in linguistics because it’s a human science. When does a dialect become an independent language? When does a word or spelling go from “outside” to “inside” official canon? There are no easy borders to draw, only tests for shades of grey.
And yet bibliophage seems to have easily drawn a line in the sand. The question asked was a factual question, even if it was about a fictional topic. In fact, Qadgop and I had already factually answered it before it was moved (thus opening up the floor to a freewheeling discussion of the nature of fiction).
I can see how asking if unicorns ever get mangy isn’t factual: unicorns simply do not exist and the discussion is more about theories and literary references. Tolkien’s languages do exist – whether they were created or not – and questions about them have actual, factual answers.
What’s the Quenya for “chopped liver”?
–Poly