Creating Ancient Languages

Anthony Burgess’s enthusiasm for making an artificial language is well known to readers of A Clockwork Orange (1962), in which the first-person narrator, Alex, speaks an invented teenage idiolect with elements of Russian, Romany and Cockney rhyming slang. For a later novel, M/F (1971), Burgess devised a Romance language to be spoken and sung by the inhabitants of a fictional island named Castita. Another slang, built according to similar principles, is devised by members of the underground university in his novella 1985 (published in 1978), this time based on elements of Hindi. All of these linguistic games have their roots in the pan-Eurish language of Finnegans Wake, often acknowledged by Burgess as one of his favourite novels, and chosen by him, when he appeared on Desert Island Discs, as the book with which he wanted to be stranded.

Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Quest for Fire (French title: La Guerre du feu), one of the most original films of the 1980s, is set 80,000 years ago. Based on a French novel by the Rosny brothers, the film dramatizes a conflict between the Ulam, a group of hunter-gatherers, and their deadly rivals the Kzamm, a tribe of cannibals. The Ulam have not yet discovered how to make fire, but a lightning strike provides them with a flame which they keep burning until it is extinguished during a raid by the Kzamm. Naoh, a young Ulam (played by Everett McGill), goes on a long journey to meet another community, the Ivaka, and he is taught how to make fire by Iva (played by Rae Dawn Chong). There is no dialogue in French or English: ...