We were delighted this week to discover our article on Nadsat written for the language magazine Babel has been included in their ‘Best of Babel’ edition promoting the magazine. Babel’s brief – to engage the public with research in linguistics – has brought them endorsements from figures such as Stephen Fry, as well as a wide readership.
Read moreAnthony Burgess’s other invented languages, Part 2 – The Sixties, Shakespeare and Strine
Anthony Burgess might be thought of as more of a dabbler in invented literary languages than the glossopoia demonstrated by a Tolkien or a Le Guin. This is despite that fact that his one foray into a novel written in an invented language, A Clockwork Orange, remains his most successful work almost three decades after his death, as it was throughout his life. After all, he never repeated the linguistic experiment of ACO, except in terms of its cultural proliferation, as stageplay, movie, or musical.
Read moreAnthony Burgess’s other invented languages
or, how to get from Nadsat to Nazi Newspeak via Aliens, Stone Age man, Jesus Christ, William Shakespeare, Roman sonnets, Trade Unions, Aussie rhyming slang, Medieval Latin blasphemy, and the Sicilian dialect.
Nadsat is Anthony Burgess’s best known invented language, just as Elvish is JRR Tolkien’s. But Tolkien did not just invent Elvish. Indeed, he created a whole raft of invented languages. What’s probably less well-known is that so did Anthony Burgess. In this series of articles, let’s take a look at his other encounters with invented languages. But first, some background. Or to put in another way, as is so often the case when dealing with the topic of invented languages in literature, but first, Tolkien.