Day 8, ALS conference. Jane Simpson spoke about linguistic creativity in fantasy novels and it was the best thing ever.

I’m calling it. Jane Simpson’s plenary this afternoon - “Alternate world languages: Constrained creativity and folk linguistics” - is the best thing that has happened or will happen at the Australian Linguistics Society 2016 conference. Judging by the number of questions (in which a fair few conference-goers revealed their own ‘secret vice’) and the tweets about this plenary afterwards, I’m guessing I’m not alone in this. (Although I may be alone in why I loved it so much.)

Simpson took it upon herself to explore what linguistic creativity in 50 fantasy English-language novels tells us about folk linguistics, folk attitudes towards language, and folk knowledge of language ecologies. (And oh to be an established academic who gets to dabble in their own interests like that.)

I think one of the reasons I enjoyed this lecture so much is that I hate linguistic creativity in fantasy novels.

Hate is a strong word. I stand by it. And you know when you hate something so much you just want to wallow in the theory of it for an hour?

When it comes to linguistic creativity in novels, I’m a Prescriptivist. I want to see the author’s qualifications for why they think they can just Make Stuff Up, and if the author’s qualifications aren’t that they’re J.R.R. Tolkien then I’m not buying it.

Actually I need to clarify that because I’ve just remembered that I quite like JK Rowling’s names for things, like Slytherin, and Hufflepuff. (Did you know that ‘Hufflepuff’ in Welsh is Wfftipwff? (Pronounced ‘oof-ti-poof’)? Brilliant!) But then those are new names for new things and they're cute and I like them, sue me. For everything else, I agree with the critique of this fan here:

“Everyone has a seven syllable name and there are even - argh - random apostrophes. The made-up words are so complicated that it takes a separate appendix to instruct the reader how to say them: a clear victory of world-building over common sense. There’s a vast amount of info-dumping about magic and history and casual references to drinks-that-aren’t-quite-like-our-drink-because-it-has-a-made-up-name and food-that-isn’t-quite-like-our-food-because-it-has-a-made-up name and animals-that-oh-you-get-it.”

Like what’s the point? Yes, you’re very clever, well done, what an ‘exotic’ sounding name. It doesn’t make your story any more believable, go fix your plot holes.

Simpson talked about some really interesting processes by which authors create new words but as a Prescriptivist I’m going to ignore those processes and say that most fantasy names sound to me like they were created with a Random Name Generator.

This is problematic because Random Name Generators seem to be built on the phonotactics of Tolkien’s Elvish languages, which are essentially based on Finnish and Old Norse and Old English and stuff, and it doesn’t take a genius to see that these names are kinda racist, right? Like an Elvish Name Generator will give you names like Haerelwen and Flalhallalor, and an Orc Name Generator will give you names like Ghoragdush and Kzhtuqth. But good people can have pharyngeals in their names too! (I mean I love Tolkien but come on.)

(I love this excerpt on like seven different levels.)

Also can we talk about why when an English-language author wants to portray a character as being ‘simple’ or ‘rustic’, they make them sound like they’re from Yorkshire?

Linguistic creativity in English-language fantasy novels tells us a lot about folk knowledge of how language works; it also tells us a lot about how English-speakers consciously or subconsciously associate different social groups and characteristics with different linguistic patterns, which is kind of huge.

(But mostly I just hate linguistic-creativity in fantasy-novels because I’m curmudgeonly.)

It was a great lecture.