Organic intelligence, artificially presented
How did people speak at the dawn of mankind?
What was the language of Europe’s earliest people?
The study of ancient, unrecorded languages is known as paelolinguistics. The attempt to recreate them is as much an art as a science, however, and in that regard, there is no finer artist than Anthony Burgess.
Here’s the seventh part of the Ponying the Slovos series on his invented languages.
Into the Seventies and at the midway point of the series on Burgess’s invented languages over at Ponying the Slovos.
What did people speak before Indo-European languages developed?
How many invented languages can you fit into a small novella that’s mostly poems?
I’ve attempted to answer those questions there.
Bonus: if you ever wondered what 19th century Romanescu dialect sonnets sound like when translated into Mid-Ulster Hiberno-English, I got your back there too.
Into what, I hear you ask? Into the actual dialect of the North of Ireland. You may have heard tell of Ulster-Scots. It too is an invented language, created (and not the first either nor the last) for political reasons. One day I’ll tell that tale too.