If by now it wasn’t already apparent, I dislike the word “conlang” and its derivatives. For a while now, I have been edging away from using the term to describe our craft in favour of the older and far more beautiful coinage of glossopoeia. “Conlang” was a disappointment for me when I first came across it, but for lack of a better term, I decided to wear the badge of “conlanger” reluctantly. Not only that, but due to its popularity and widespread use in English, I’ve had no real option on occasions to use the word to describe what I do.
But what’s my problem, eh? Does it actually matter what we call ourselves? Aren’t “conlanging” and glossopoeia just different words for the same thing? Why am I bringing up such pointless criticism for the sake of being contrarian? These are the objections which rage around my own head while writing, let alone the head of any reader reading. And my response is a resounding: yes, of course it matters! If language, words, their shape and sound, their symbolism are exactly what makes a glossopoeist so in tune with their self-expression, then we should be very concerned with how we are described. As a community which prides itself on creating nouns and verbs which fit concept and context, it has always seemed strange to me that we have adopted a term so clumsy as “conlanger”. I think it ironic we as a group of talented linguists, authors and screenwriters with the whole world’s vocabulary at their fingertips could only devise that term. If it was used sarcastically and even whimsically, I would maybe be more sympathetic. Yet the fact that we use it seriously is why I am making such a fuss.
There’s a lamentable trend in Late Modern English which has become more prevalent, mainly due to the rise of social media and the digital age. We now have a distasteful propensity to create cheesy blends and unnecessary portmanteaus. In the first place, the act of creating blends is a violation of the words themselves! The crude knife doesn’t even bother to sever at the stem but plunges into the root and slices it apart. Examples of this horrific, lexical massacre include “hangry”, “bigorexia” and the illegal (phonologically in English) “vlog”. One of the more irritating ones has been “Brexit” for describing the UK’s decision to leave the European Union, best described by Main On Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens as the name for a “laxative breakfast cereal”1. Not only have these words achieved widespread usage, but they have also wormed their way into our dictionaries; truly descriptivism has gone mad! These words are unimaginative and not reflective of English’s best examples of wordsmithery. Not because they are blends, but because they pay no attention to aesthetics. Our disinterest in aesthetics has led to “conlang” being in the dictionary and glossopoeia not. These words sound and feel Orwellian. “artlang” and “sketchlang” for instance, carry a distinctive resemblance to words one might hear in Newspeak. How long until we start saying “doubleplussketchlang”?
But my indignation is not just meant to be comical, but to address a point. The advantages of the word glossopoeia are quite clear. It is, like most Greek, soft and elegant with a literal whisper of mystery about it (owing to the alveolar fricative and the lightness of the voiceless stop). It is a compound of two elements: the first being one of the most pleasing words for "language" of any, γλώσσα, combined with ποίησης “poetry, creation” or “making” – a meaning much less industrial than “constructed”. Despite claims of Tolkien having invented the word, he never actually used it. It was instead originally coined by Steve Deyo who was the editor of Glossopoeic Quarterly.
The reason why the term is superior, in my view, to any other when it comes to labelling what we do is that, besides being aesthetically pleasing, it accurately captures the marriage between artistic beauty and scientific complexity, which is the essence of language making. It allows also for the wonderful derivatives such as glossopoeist, glossopoeic and glossopoetics. These words are both magnificent and breath-taking.
They give us far more dignity than “conlanger” ever will. It also disallows us the devaluation of our own languages as something lesser, as we cannot refer to our languages as “conlangs” anymore. We must give them the proper respect they deserve by calling them, unashamedly, languages. Who would ever dare now call as successful a language as Esperanto a “conlang”? I believe that we are more in tune and linguistically more competent than to be so unimaginative and inattentive to aesthetics. If I could achieve anything in this community, it would our abandonment of “conlanging” for glossopoeia.
But what’s my problem, eh? Does it actually matter what we call ourselves? Aren’t “conlanging” and glossopoeia just different words for the same thing? Why am I bringing up such pointless criticism for the sake of being contrarian? These are the objections which rage around my own head while writing, let alone the head of any reader reading. And my response is a resounding: yes, of course it matters! If language, words, their shape and sound, their symbolism are exactly what makes a glossopoeist so in tune with their self-expression, then we should be very concerned with how we are described. As a community which prides itself on creating nouns and verbs which fit concept and context, it has always seemed strange to me that we have adopted a term so clumsy as “conlanger”. I think it ironic we as a group of talented linguists, authors and screenwriters with the whole world’s vocabulary at their fingertips could only devise that term. If it was used sarcastically and even whimsically, I would maybe be more sympathetic. Yet the fact that we use it seriously is why I am making such a fuss.
There’s a lamentable trend in Late Modern English which has become more prevalent, mainly due to the rise of social media and the digital age. We now have a distasteful propensity to create cheesy blends and unnecessary portmanteaus. In the first place, the act of creating blends is a violation of the words themselves! The crude knife doesn’t even bother to sever at the stem but plunges into the root and slices it apart. Examples of this horrific, lexical massacre include “hangry”, “bigorexia” and the illegal (phonologically in English) “vlog”. One of the more irritating ones has been “Brexit” for describing the UK’s decision to leave the European Union, best described by Main On Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens as the name for a “laxative breakfast cereal”1. Not only have these words achieved widespread usage, but they have also wormed their way into our dictionaries; truly descriptivism has gone mad! These words are unimaginative and not reflective of English’s best examples of wordsmithery. Not because they are blends, but because they pay no attention to aesthetics. Our disinterest in aesthetics has led to “conlang” being in the dictionary and glossopoeia not. These words sound and feel Orwellian. “artlang” and “sketchlang” for instance, carry a distinctive resemblance to words one might hear in Newspeak. How long until we start saying “doubleplussketchlang”?
But my indignation is not just meant to be comical, but to address a point. The advantages of the word glossopoeia are quite clear. It is, like most Greek, soft and elegant with a literal whisper of mystery about it (owing to the alveolar fricative and the lightness of the voiceless stop). It is a compound of two elements: the first being one of the most pleasing words for "language" of any, γλώσσα, combined with ποίησης “poetry, creation” or “making” – a meaning much less industrial than “constructed”. Despite claims of Tolkien having invented the word, he never actually used it. It was instead originally coined by Steve Deyo who was the editor of Glossopoeic Quarterly.
The reason why the term is superior, in my view, to any other when it comes to labelling what we do is that, besides being aesthetically pleasing, it accurately captures the marriage between artistic beauty and scientific complexity, which is the essence of language making. It allows also for the wonderful derivatives such as glossopoeist, glossopoeic and glossopoetics. These words are both magnificent and breath-taking.
They give us far more dignity than “conlanger” ever will. It also disallows us the devaluation of our own languages as something lesser, as we cannot refer to our languages as “conlangs” anymore. We must give them the proper respect they deserve by calling them, unashamedly, languages. Who would ever dare now call as successful a language as Esperanto a “conlang”? I believe that we are more in tune and linguistically more competent than to be so unimaginative and inattentive to aesthetics. If I could achieve anything in this community, it would our abandonment of “conlanging” for glossopoeia.