The Beginner's Colloquial Orcish

I have been meaning to write various posts to do with structuralism, post-structuralism and language for quite some time, but haven't quite got round to any of them yet. They're brewing. But in that vein, a word about fantasy languages generally.

People in the Anglo-Saxon world tend not to learn other languages, and if they do, it's usually French or Spanish. This gives them a very skewed and narrow perception of the relationship between objective reality, "meaning", language and thought.

Let me give an illustration. In English, we distinguish between different circumstances in which the subject gets the object to do something. "The postman let the dog go for a walk" is different from "The postman made the dog go for a walk", which is different again from "The postman had the dog go for a walk", which is different again from "The postman got the dog to go for a walk". The distinction between "letting" and "making" is obvious. The differences between "having" and "getting" a little less so, but there are nuances of usage - if I "have you" read something, it has the connotation that I'm in charge, whereas if I "get you" to read something, it has more a connotation of persuasion.

In Japanese, there is no difference between any of these things. The sentence "The postman let the dog go for a walk" and "the postman made the dog go for a walk" (or "the postman had the dog go for a walk" or whatever) is exactly the same: 郵便配達員が犬を散歩させた. It's all in how you conjugate the verb, and the conjugation takes the same form for all those different situations set out above, in which English carefully discriminates.

Native English speakers find this odd: how do Japanese people tell the difference between "making" somebody do something and "letting" them do it? One answer would be, they get it from context. (And you can make it clear with judicious use of an adjective here or there.) But that doesn't actually capture the fact that the two languages are doing something fundamentally different. English distinguishes rigorously between the concepts of "letting" and "making"; Japanese doesn't. So, saying that Japanese speakers "get the difference from context" is a very English-speaker way of thinking about things: in Japanese there actually isn't a difference. This is not because Japanese people can't understand the difference between "letting" as in allowing and "making" as in forcing, but because the Japanese concept which is translated into English as "letting" or "making" means neither of those things. It means its own thing which is roughly approximate to both English "letting" and "making".

This is why people who are fluent in more than one language will often tell you that they actually think differently - and even have different personalities - when switching from one language to another. It's because a language is actually a structure which mediates between reality and abstract thought, and there is no direct connection or way for thought to interface with reality other than through it (I snuck a bit of post-structuralism in there after all).

Be that as it may, what would it mean to learn an orcish, elf, or dwarfish language?

An orcish language that exists as "ug" means "me", "bork" means "you", "ufufu" means "tree" has zero interest except perhaps something to pass the time. What's more interesting is reflecting on how playing around with concepts could pave the way to thinking about monsters in new and creative ways.

One simple way of doing this is merging concepts. What if, for example, in orcish, there's no distinction between "causing happiness" and "causing sorrow" - they're the same word, roughly meaning to "cause a strong reaction"? If that were the case, how would a human being communicate to an orc that being tortured causes a different experience to, say, sexual pleasure? To the orc, causing intense pain and pleasure are identical - or, to put it another way, to the orc, neither of those concepts exists as distinct from the other.

What if in dwarfish there's no distinction between avarice and prudence? What if in elven there's no distinction between nature and the self? What if for gnomes there's no distinction between gift-giving and theft?

As is often the case, these things can seem spurious at first glance but get interesting if you take the connotations seriously and extrapolate from the initial premise. What it? What then?