By Tim T
Right now, there are videos up on YouTube of contemporary pop songs translated into Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon). There’s a video of the contemporary hit Wake Me Up in the language once spoken all over the British Isles. In another, the inflected language – one of the descendants of the long-lost Proto-Germanic language – is used for a version of the Disney song Let it Go. And in my personal favourite, comedian Eddy Izzard goes to Friesland and uses Old English to purchase a brown cow from a speaker of contemporary Frisian. His speech is completely stilted and crazy and probably shot through with mistakes, but I suppose he technically does speak Old English.
Just because a language is dead, it seems, doesn’t prevent it from still being spoken. Still, it does raise inevitable questions: you might very well be able to order a brown cow using Anglo-Saxon, but what about ordering a chocolate mudcake on your credit card? There is no Anglo-Saxon for chocolate mudcake or credit card, and once you have worked out a convenient Old English version of those terms, you will still have to work out what gender ‘chocolate mudcake’ and ‘credit card’ is.
For the more committed, you can also find a version of Let it Go in Latin, stories in Proto-Germanic and Etruscan, and more. There are even songs written in Proto-Indo-European, the daddy of English and Latin and Greek and Celtic and many many other languages around the world.
These languages are zombies. They lived, they died, and yet they are undead. They shamble across the linguistic landscape looking for teachers to terrify and for student brains to feed on. But just because they are dead doesn’t mean they don’t have their uses. It was precisely Latin’s ancient, remote, unchanging qualities that attracted composer Stravinsky in the mid-20th century, when he wrote his opera Oedipus rex in Latin, a language, he said, “not dead, but set in stone.”
For this, the Russian composer had the ancient Greek text set in French, and then translated into Latin, in a 20th century version of that 21st century game of broken telephone. A principle advantage of speaking in a zombie language, of course, is nobody will understand you anyway, so you can sound especially clever though you might be speaking utter gobbledygook. I occasionally put snippets such as an ‘Anglo-Saxon Doge’ up on my blog. Of course, I have no idea if I get things right while doing this: I can hardly speak a word of Old English. For all I know, I could be murdering the language a second time. But who expects good grammar out of a Doge meme, for heavens’ sake?
As if that wasn’t bad enough, there are also Golem tongues running around: languages which no-one ever spoke anywhere or even at any time in the past or present. But they not only have a vocabulary and a lexicon and a grammar and a word order, they also have a history.
A completely made up history, but a history nonetheless. For the truly dedicated, the YouTube viewer can find songs in Klingon, the language devised by linguist Mark Okrand, who binge watched a few old episodes of Star Trek in order to do so. There are a number of songs in Esperanto. And there are songs in languages devised by Tolkien – Quenya, and all the rest of it.
Speaking of which, these Elvish tongues are in a particularly parlous state. From Wikipedia we learn that
Tolkien never created enough vocabulary to make it possible to converse in Quenya…
…while the Tolkien Estate website counsels that
… the languages are the invention of a single person and …these languages cannot exist beyond what the man has created: you cannot ‘invent’ new vocabulary without betraying the genius of the author, no more than you can continue the stories he wrote…Though his most ‘advanced’ languages show a fair amount of grammatical and lexical development, and though their pronunciation is reasonably well-documented, these languages do not constitute a system, and have evolved and matured over the course of Tolkien’s lifetime—so much so that the information we possess about them is often found to be contradictory.
Wow! So not only do we not have enough words to speak Elvish in the first place, but we are also counselled against making up new words at all! And, when you take the words away from a language, but leave the structure and history in place – what exactly are you left with?
On the other hand, why not join the Klingon Language Institute, where you can not only take part in Klingon conversations (online as well as offline), but also send Klingon greeting cards to your loved ones. Oh, and there’s also a Klingon conversational class here: (https://www.klubschule.ch/Kurse).
Take that, Tolkien!
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