This article is taken from PN Review 283, Volume 51 Number 5, May - June 2025.
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: the only words spoken in the film are in Ulam, Kzamm and Ivaka.
The languages invented by Burgess for Quest for Fire are not as well known as they deserve to be. One reason for this is because the film contains no subtitles: the challenge for the viewer is to learn the unfamiliar languages spoken by the main characters by ear alone. Another reason is that some of the work undertaken by Burgess did not survive into the final cut of the film. The ‘Ulam Dictionary’ compiled by Burgess is considerably more extensive than viewers of the film might have imagined.
A range of materials which document the creation of ‘Ulam’, the main language spoken in the film, have survived in the Burgess archives located at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, and at the Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester. The commission from Annaud was to make a speculative reconstruction of proto-Indo-European, thought to be the ancestor of modern European languages, which does not survive in a written form.
Although Burgess was originally asked to devise two languages of no fewer than sixty words, the final version of Ulam runs to more than 160 words. It seems that he was excited by the opportunity to develop a complex language, and he delivered more than he had been paid for.
The surviving papers indicate that the Ulam dictionary went through at least three major revisions, and that Burgess’s languages were constructed and revised over a period of around ten months. Burgess began his research by consulting some of the books he had studied as an undergraduate student at Manchester University in the 1930s. He relied quite heavily on the account of the evolution of Indo-European languages given by Otto Jespersen in his book Growth and Structure of the English Language, published in Leipzig in 1930.
Burgess also consulted his collection of ‘Teach Yourself’ language books which are now part of the Foundation’s book collection. The surviving volumes document his wide-ranging study of modern languages such as Dutch, Gaelic, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Persian, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish.
When it came to constructing the ‘new’ languages for Quest for Fire, Burgess, drawing on a variety of linguistic roots, combined elements from Indian, Armenian, Hellenic, Albanian, Italic, Balto-Slavic, Celtic and Germanic languages. He paid special attention to Sanskrit, on the basis that this was ‘the oldest surviving language of the Indo-European group’, and because T.S. Eliot had included a handful of Sanskrit words in The Waste Land. Burgess’s various engagements with Eliot’s poem include a long commentary essay, reprinted in The Ink Trade, a volume of his selected journalism (published by Carcanet in 2018) and a complete musical setting of the text for narrator, soprano and chamber ensemble.
His method of language construction was based on the traditional comparative philology he had been taught as a student. Looking at the word for ‘father’ in various modern languages, he found ‘vater’ in German and Dutch, ‘pater’ in Latin, ‘pitar’ in Sansrkit and ‘faðir’ in Old Norse. Working from these examples, he concluded that the Indo-European word for father ‘must have begun with a lip-sound, the middle consonant must have been dental or alveolar, and there must have been a terminal r-sound’. Following these principles, Burgess decided that the Ulam word for ‘foot’ would be ‘powd’ (as in the French ‘pied’ or ‘pedes’ in Latin). Water would be ‘aga’, with the same word used for ‘river’. ‘Dondra’, derived from the Greek ‘dendron’, is the Ulam word for ‘tree’. Fire itself is ‘atra’, related to the English word ‘hearth’.
Speaking about his constructed languages in the 1981 television documentary Quest for Fire: Behind the Scenes, Burgess said: ‘What I think language sounded like then was a perpetual babble. We have been taught to think by the Tarzan films that primitive man used grunts. It was not like that at all. Probably man developed language in order to cope with situations when visual gestures were no use.’
Words are only part of the sign-system known as ‘Ulam’. The other significant element is a series of gestures to accompany spoken words, developed in collaboration with the anthropologist Desmond Morris, author of The Naked Ape and Bodytalk: The Meaning of Human Gestures. In the final version of the Ulam dictionary, dated 30 May 1980, physical actions are indicated alongside the words to which they refer. To communicate aggression, there are three different forms of sound and action. Mild aggression is indicated by repetition of ‘Tka, tka, tka’, with a side-to-side swaying motion. Moderate aggression involves the word ‘Dga, dga, dga’, with more vocalisation and resonance, and with increased body movement. The strongest and most violent form of aggression is communicated with the words ‘Arr’, ‘Ang’ and ‘Arm’, with the mouth open, the voice coming from the chest, the lips pulled back to expose the teeth, and a dominant stance.
In ‘Firetalk’, an essay about the development of his invented languages, Burgess gives examples of how the basic linguistic units of Ulam can be combined to form utterances. Offering a sample Ulam sentence, he cites the following from the film: ‘Oyoon itjon s dondron s tsed tirdondron s dondrsitji tsedon’. This translates into modern English as ‘We will go into the forest and kill deer with our darts’. Burgess provides the following notes: ‘Dondr: tree. Tir: animal. On: plural suffix. Oyo: I. Itj: go. Tsed: kill. Sitji: diminutive suffix. S: invariable preposition conjunction.’
Annaud maintained that Ulam was very useful as a tool for communication. Throughout the long process of shooting the film in Iceland, Canada, Scotland and on the shores of Lake Magdi in Kenya, the director found that his multinational cast and crew, who did not share a common language, fell into the habit of using words from the Ulam dictionary in preference to French or English.
Reading the complete dictionary gives us a fuller picture of how Burgess thought prehistoric people might have used language. The film dramatizes his vocabulary and gives the words a shape, combining J.H. Rosny’s novel, Gerard Brach’s screenplay and Annaud’s visual imagination.
Quest for Fire wasn’t the only occasion when Burgess attempted to devise an ancient-sounding language resembling Indo-European. Asked to adapt Oedipus the King by Sophocles for the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in 1972, he added a series of invented-language chants, which were scored by the composer Stanley Silverman for voices and instruments including shawms, a bull-roarer and ‘ancient drums’.
The chorus performs the first of these chants as a prologue to the action while a human sacrifice is taking place on stage. Burgess and Silverman decided that no translation should appear in the programme, the point being that the words and music should create an atmosphere of intense strangeness. This interlude is sung or chanted by the chorus before the second act:
Given the presence of six substantial Burgess archives in Canada, the United States, France and the United Kingdom, there are plenty of opportunities for further research into the circumstances in which he devised fictional languages, as well as the origins of particular words. Burgess’s work in this area turns out to have been more prolific than most commentators have assumed. His approach to linguistics was arguably more creative than scholarly, but there is no doubt that it was motivated by genuine and well-informed curiosity about the pre-history of modern languages. On the evidence of his published and unpublished work, Burgess emerges as one of the few novelists who created a complete set of secondary worlds with internally consistent languages. Above all, he wanted them to be intelligible, memorable and useful.
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: the only words spoken in the film are in Ulam, Kzamm and Ivaka.
The languages invented by Burgess for Quest for Fire are not as well known as they deserve to be. One reason for this is because the film contains no subtitles: the challenge for the viewer is to learn the unfamiliar languages spoken by the main characters by ear alone. Another reason is that some of the work undertaken by Burgess did not survive into the final cut of the film. The ‘Ulam Dictionary’ compiled by Burgess is considerably more extensive than viewers of the film might have imagined.
A range of materials which document the creation of ‘Ulam’, the main language spoken in the film, have survived in the Burgess archives located at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, and at the Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester. The commission from Annaud was to make a speculative reconstruction of proto-Indo-European, thought to be the ancestor of modern European languages, which does not survive in a written form.
Although Burgess was originally asked to devise two languages of no fewer than sixty words, the final version of Ulam runs to more than 160 words. It seems that he was excited by the opportunity to develop a complex language, and he delivered more than he had been paid for.
The surviving papers indicate that the Ulam dictionary went through at least three major revisions, and that Burgess’s languages were constructed and revised over a period of around ten months. Burgess began his research by consulting some of the books he had studied as an undergraduate student at Manchester University in the 1930s. He relied quite heavily on the account of the evolution of Indo-European languages given by Otto Jespersen in his book Growth and Structure of the English Language, published in Leipzig in 1930.
Burgess also consulted his collection of ‘Teach Yourself’ language books which are now part of the Foundation’s book collection. The surviving volumes document his wide-ranging study of modern languages such as Dutch, Gaelic, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Persian, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish.
When it came to constructing the ‘new’ languages for Quest for Fire, Burgess, drawing on a variety of linguistic roots, combined elements from Indian, Armenian, Hellenic, Albanian, Italic, Balto-Slavic, Celtic and Germanic languages. He paid special attention to Sanskrit, on the basis that this was ‘the oldest surviving language of the Indo-European group’, and because T.S. Eliot had included a handful of Sanskrit words in The Waste Land. Burgess’s various engagements with Eliot’s poem include a long commentary essay, reprinted in The Ink Trade, a volume of his selected journalism (published by Carcanet in 2018) and a complete musical setting of the text for narrator, soprano and chamber ensemble.
His method of language construction was based on the traditional comparative philology he had been taught as a student. Looking at the word for ‘father’ in various modern languages, he found ‘vater’ in German and Dutch, ‘pater’ in Latin, ‘pitar’ in Sansrkit and ‘faðir’ in Old Norse. Working from these examples, he concluded that the Indo-European word for father ‘must have begun with a lip-sound, the middle consonant must have been dental or alveolar, and there must have been a terminal r-sound’. Following these principles, Burgess decided that the Ulam word for ‘foot’ would be ‘powd’ (as in the French ‘pied’ or ‘pedes’ in Latin). Water would be ‘aga’, with the same word used for ‘river’. ‘Dondra’, derived from the Greek ‘dendron’, is the Ulam word for ‘tree’. Fire itself is ‘atra’, related to the English word ‘hearth’.
Speaking about his constructed languages in the 1981 television documentary Quest for Fire: Behind the Scenes, Burgess said: ‘What I think language sounded like then was a perpetual babble. We have been taught to think by the Tarzan films that primitive man used grunts. It was not like that at all. Probably man developed language in order to cope with situations when visual gestures were no use.’
Words are only part of the sign-system known as ‘Ulam’. The other significant element is a series of gestures to accompany spoken words, developed in collaboration with the anthropologist Desmond Morris, author of The Naked Ape and Bodytalk: The Meaning of Human Gestures. In the final version of the Ulam dictionary, dated 30 May 1980, physical actions are indicated alongside the words to which they refer. To communicate aggression, there are three different forms of sound and action. Mild aggression is indicated by repetition of ‘Tka, tka, tka’, with a side-to-side swaying motion. Moderate aggression involves the word ‘Dga, dga, dga’, with more vocalisation and resonance, and with increased body movement. The strongest and most violent form of aggression is communicated with the words ‘Arr’, ‘Ang’ and ‘Arm’, with the mouth open, the voice coming from the chest, the lips pulled back to expose the teeth, and a dominant stance.
In ‘Firetalk’, an essay about the development of his invented languages, Burgess gives examples of how the basic linguistic units of Ulam can be combined to form utterances. Offering a sample Ulam sentence, he cites the following from the film: ‘Oyoon itjon s dondron s tsed tirdondron s dondrsitji tsedon’. This translates into modern English as ‘We will go into the forest and kill deer with our darts’. Burgess provides the following notes: ‘Dondr: tree. Tir: animal. On: plural suffix. Oyo: I. Itj: go. Tsed: kill. Sitji: diminutive suffix. S: invariable preposition conjunction.’
Annaud maintained that Ulam was very useful as a tool for communication. Throughout the long process of shooting the film in Iceland, Canada, Scotland and on the shores of Lake Magdi in Kenya, the director found that his multinational cast and crew, who did not share a common language, fell into the habit of using words from the Ulam dictionary in preference to French or English.
Reading the complete dictionary gives us a fuller picture of how Burgess thought prehistoric people might have used language. The film dramatizes his vocabulary and gives the words a shape, combining J.H. Rosny’s novel, Gerard Brach’s screenplay and Annaud’s visual imagination.
Quest for Fire wasn’t the only occasion when Burgess attempted to devise an ancient-sounding language resembling Indo-European. Asked to adapt Oedipus the King by Sophocles for the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in 1972, he added a series of invented-language chants, which were scored by the composer Stanley Silverman for voices and instruments including shawms, a bull-roarer and ‘ancient drums’.
The chorus performs the first of these chants as a prologue to the action while a human sacrifice is taking place on stage. Burgess and Silverman decided that no translation should appear in the programme, the point being that the words and music should create an atmosphere of intense strangeness. This interlude is sung or chanted by the chorus before the second act:
Regwos leikwasti / The darkness goesWhen it came to publishing the book version of Oedipus the King, Burgess insisted that his Indo-European chants should be omitted, on the grounds that ‘they only work auditorily and must not be chewed over by captious scholars’. The quotation above has been reconstructed from Silverman’s handwritten score and a copy of the rehearsal script marked up by Michael Langham, who directed the first production in Minneapolis.
Soite soite / Sing it sing it
Stere Stene leikwasti / The barren thunder has left
Soite soite / Sing it sing it
Sneudhos puitur / The cloud rots away
Pure albhowe behlo / In the bright white fire
Regwos dheuit / Darkness dies
Given the presence of six substantial Burgess archives in Canada, the United States, France and the United Kingdom, there are plenty of opportunities for further research into the circumstances in which he devised fictional languages, as well as the origins of particular words. Burgess’s work in this area turns out to have been more prolific than most commentators have assumed. His approach to linguistics was arguably more creative than scholarly, but there is no doubt that it was motivated by genuine and well-informed curiosity about the pre-history of modern languages. On the evidence of his published and unpublished work, Burgess emerges as one of the few novelists who created a complete set of secondary worlds with internally consistent languages. Above all, he wanted them to be intelligible, memorable and useful.
This article is taken from PN Review 283, Volume 51 Number 5, May - June 2025.
Further Reading: