IBLang&Lit

"nal auxiliary languages". Because their aim was to ease communication, their construction was intentionally simplified. François Sudré, a French violinist, invented Solresol. With seven syllables based on the seven notes of the musical scale, it can be written in musical notation, sung and understood by illiterates. Ludwig Zamenhof, a Polish doctor, created Esperanto to be a politically neutral language that would be easy to pick up. Its conjugation patterns are regular and its vocabulary mirrors existing European words. Languages specifically engineered out of some political or theoretical conviction, on the other hand, can be onerous to speak. Kēlen has no verbs. E-Prime, a version of English which excludes the verb "to be", separates opinion from fact. Láadan is designed to express women's feelings better (widazhad, for example, means "to be pregnant late in term and eager for the end"). Ithkuil packs as much meaning as possible into as short a space as possible; its fifty-eight distinct sounds make it almost impossible to pronounce. These days most invented languages are created for artistic or aesthetic purposes, and often borrow features from existing tongues. Although Dothraki, Valyrian, Navi (spoken in "Avatar") and Klingon (growled in "Star Trek") are designed to sound alien, they are also meant to seem natural, and imitate the features of real languages. Inventors focus, in turn, on developing the phonology (the sound system), the morphology (rules for creating words), the syntax (the system for creating sentences) and the vocabulary. Some borrow features from natural languages: J.R.R. Tolkien's Elvish languages, Quenya and Sindarin, were influenced by Finnish and Welsh, two languages that Tolkien loved. Navi includes popping-like sounds found in Georgian and Amharic, but few English ones, to enhance its foreignness. Estonian's negative verb system inspired Dothraki's. Inventors also insert systematic irregularities into the language by