Burgess’s most substantial foray into invented languages was, curiously enough, not conducted for a novel. Ulam is a simplistic language with a slender grammar and limited lexis of terms. Nevertheless, unlike Nadsat or Easy Walker’s slang, it functions independently of English. As well it ought to, since it was intended to be a recreation of proto-Indo-European, the ur-language from which most of the tongues spoken from India and Iran to Ireland ultimately originated. In this sense it can be considered as a more fully realised development of the chanting which he had appended to his version of Oedipus.
