Tag: Invented Languages

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Anthony Burgess’s Sicily in the Caribbean

The third part of the series on Anthony Burgess’s invented languages is now live over at Ponying the Slovos, featuring what just might be Burgess’s most significant novel, the weird, wonderful and intensely Structuralist riddle that is M/F.

In my book on Anthony Burgess, I pay M/F a lot of attention, because I think it’s a very misunderstood novel and also one that is extremely important in Burgess’s own development as a writer. It’s a novel about riddles, based largely on Claude Levi-Strauss’s Structuralist thinking, especially as applied to early myth such as Oedipus.

M/F by Anthony Burgess

It’s also a novel about what meaning actually means, and how we look for it in vain and what it is that generates it for us.

And, as this article on PtS details, it’s a novel which, like A Clockwork Orange, features its own invented language.

Why the title M/F? Apparently an actor said to Burgess that someone should update Sophocles’s Oedipos Tyrannos with the title “Motherfucker.” Alas, that title wasn’t possible at the time of publication, but the truncated version actually facilitates other interesting dynamics from the novel, such as male/female and the protagonist’s own name, Miles Faber, the soldier-maker.

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Rewriting Shakespeare in the Sixties and other inventions

The ongoing project to map Anthony Burgess’s OTHER invented languages continues over at Ponying the Slovos.

In the latest segment, we look at Burgess’s often overlooked dystopia, The Wanting Seed, written around the same time as A Clockwork Orange, as well as his superb novel on Shakespeare’s love-life, Nothing Like The Sun, and the second volume of his perennially popular Enderby series, which features a variant of Strine, the lingo of Straya.

If any of that interests you, it can be found here.

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In addition to Nadsat

I’m the co-director of the Ponying the Slovos project which looks at invented languages in translation, predominantly focusing on Nadsat, the teen slang of Alex in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange.

But Burgess didn’t just invent one language for his fiction. In fact, like Tolkien before him, he invented quite a few. So we thought late last year it was time to take a look at the others, and try to explain how they function and what they’re made of.

It was only intend to be a quick overview, but about 10,000 words or so later, we realised we’d have to split this work up into smaller chunks so as to be more easily digestible on a blog format. As a result, the first part of a series of eight posts on Anthony Burgess’s other invented languages can now be found on Ponying the Slovos.

There will, as you might have surmised, be seven more to follow. If the languages of aliens, stone age man, Jesus Christ, William Shakespeare, the streets of 19th century Rome, Australia, Sicily or Medieval Latin blasphemers is of interest, it’s a series which may intrigue you.

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Don’t curb your lingthusiasm

“Enthusiasm is a supernatural serenity,” Henry David Thoreau once wrote. Lingthusiasm, by contrast, is neither supernatural nor serene.

It’s the state of being excited by language, how it works and how it functions.

It’s about being fascinated by phonemes, seduced by semantics and in love with lexis.

It’s why I’m interested in what invented languages do, because in their artificial creation, they reveal the obsessions of their creators in relation to the generally opaque modes through which we communicate.

Over at the Ponying the Slovos blog, we have become very lingthusiastic recently, inspired in no small measure by the achievements of Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne.

We recognise kindred spirits. Their lingthusiasm is ours. And may be yours too.

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Riddley, Max, Iain and Dave

My fourth (of three originally intended!) article on Riddley Walker and invented literary languages is now live on the Ponying the Slovos project site.

This one looks at the various legacies and tributes to the post-apocalyptic debased English invented by Russell Hoban for Riddley Walker. Unsurprisingly, they’re largely post-apocalypse narratives themselves.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome Edizione: Regno Unito Edizione: Regno Unito: Amazon.it: Tina Turner: Film e TV

We have the third Mad Max movie, an Iain M. Banks NON-Culture SF novel, and a novel by Will Self, The Book of Dave, wherein the rantings of a psychotic London cabbie form the basis of a post-apocalyptic future religion.

It’s a fun mixed bag, linked by language, and it was fun to write about them all.

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Enjoy the Sylents

Okay, I lied. There will in fact by four articles in total on Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker at the Ponying the Slovos project site.

This one’s the third of four now, and does the heavy lifting, addressing the linguistic structure of Riddleyspeak and navigating through some of the earlier critical perspectives on Hoban’s language invention.

To make up for that, the last one, out in a week or so, is all about Riddley’s legacy – Iain M. Banks’ non-Culture SF, Will Self’s post-apocalypse and Tina Turner’s wig, in other words. Don’t forget to tune in.

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Sum Poasyum

Today, scholars, academics, artists and writers will gather (except they won’t, this being plague year) in Canterbury (ie virtually but hosted there) to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the publication of Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker.

It’s an astonishing novel, an evocative work of post-apocalyptic world set millennia in the future but demonstrating how the future will be back to the past if we permit the fragile, complex thing we call technologically-enabled civilisation to collapse.

The most notable thing about Hoban’s novel is of course Riddleyspeak, the quirkily spelt, puntastic invented language in which it is written. Meant to evoke both the post-literate society in which it is set and the limited cognitive capacities (and low cunning) of its 12 year old narrator, Hoban’s invented language is a remarkable piece of literary creation.

I’ve been posting about Riddley Walker over at Ponying the Slovos in my own meagre celebration, seeking to get under the bonnet of Riddleyspeak and identify how it works and what it does. I’m hoping to experience sum of the sum poasyum too, but that will be dependent on another creature of complex idiosyncratic communication and low cunning, my infant son.

So if I fail, good luck instead to all who attend and hopefully some of the materials will end up archived and online for those unable to be there, even virtually.