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.