GreenBowtie wrote: ↑Sun May 24, 2020 9:44 am
several years ago ...
I'm actually an expert on comparative belief studies or comparative religions, and I specialize in "Pagan Beliefs", beliefs that are not Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc. I don't write about it much, though, because I prefer to just focus on the languages and writing systems involved. Also, there's not a lot of interest and it gets heated quick. ( Pagan is the generally prefered scientific as well as Pagan believer term. Some people are surprised by this when I use it. I do use it even thought it is a blanket for what are really myriad different beliefs from vast stretches of time. The neglect and stigma under which they fall, however, is part of the reality of the term. People say they take all such things seriously yet are quite uninterested in funding or even countenancing serious scholarship regarding the same. )
This is interesting and reminds me of modern and c 1600s stuff. I'm actually more into the really old stuff more but have some familiarity with all of this sort of thing.
Dante notably made at least a psuedo-conlang, maybe a conlang, for a language of Hell, for his Divine Comedy. Otherwise there's been other things like that like in Western Occultism but they're all pseudo-conlangs so far as I remember and there's no real conlangs to be found.
I forget what different Christian believers think. There is a verse in the New Testament about "the tongues of angels" which is probably thought by many to refer to languages spoken by the angels. But then I remember also a large stream of thought that they have no need for languages themselves and communicate all through telepathy or such.
A conceptual comparison could be found in The Lord of the Rings' languages' Orc language(s). I have read that the major one is based on Hurrian, probably because Tolkein had read about it and thought it a good match. Though I don't think that's so fair for the Hurrians and Urartians, not at all. There is a trend in famous invented languages and pseudo invented languages to make evil or devilish languages sound gutteral like Arabic or Russian. Perhaps like German. There is some sort of ideal in all this to be found in c 1700s Operatic Italian, perhaps.
I actually study fairy tales, folklore, and myths A LOT, also, and there's probably some sense to this. On some level.
I also think it's unfortunate because in real life, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and there's a lot of good to be found in gutteral languages, the world over. This approach to foreign languages seems to draw on popular American and Western monolingualism and tendency to only study European languages. There is also some reflection of the history of Europe and the crusades in The Lord of the Rings.
The idea of a language of the gods or language of the fairies does occur in a number of places in history and prehistory. My own ideas of the Voynich Manuscript are that it's a fictional "Book of Fairies" depicting Fairyland from the Late Middle Ages or so. There was a hoax from also about then, maybe the 1700s, in Japan where examples of The Script of the Gods from which Japanese truly descended, not from Chinese, "were found" (hoaxed).
And then from all around the world and time, especially from more modern ethnology, I have read of and found examples of dialects, jargon, and languages particular to priests, shamans, and such, and having as part of their use "the best" interaction with the gods and ancestors and spirits and such. But these, "ritual languages" so called, are usually not very complex things, things not very far from the usual languages used by their people. But maybe I remember incorrectly. Very interesting and quite old, though not impossibly old, things can be found in such jargons or dialects.
It is also the nature of anthropological inquiry that the anthropologist has a limited amount of time to do a survey of a people and then also to attend to some special interest they'd like to investigate. And since we get the most details out of the living, there is then necessarily a sense of mystery, sadly often lost to modern scholars and scientists, regarding historic or ancient texts and their best interpretation.
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Sigh. It is all a sadly under-studied field of inquiry which suffers from many misconceptions, ignorances, and insensitivities. There is too little of comparative language science or comparative anthropology about its paltry scholarship. People hold their beliefs quite close to them and yet seem very uninterested in funding scholarly and scientific investigation into any beliefs but their own. Which further obscures all beliefs and anthropology and human relations by extension.
People say they take all such things seriously yet are quite uninterested in funding or even countenancing serious scholarship regarding the same.
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Anyway, good job and thanks for sharing. It's interesting to see other people interested in such things on this message board. Some time ago, I found a member who was posting extensive mythological texts which were quite interesting to me.
Of course, I find my own works the most interesting but since very few specialize in what I do, I am at pains to explain my own work and the excellence of it. Yet for decades now I have been at pains to learn from others and extend myself to be interested in what interests them and encourage them in their studies. And that with proportion to my own striving after excellence and not in keeping with their deserving the same. And often find myself not treated with sensitivity despite my very real degree and various evidences given of great and extensive study, research, and world travel. Yet hopefully with time, and me blocking certain intolerant or even lazy or grumpy people, I will achieve some reasonable approach to posting and making replies to "threads" on this "internet message board". ( I'm far more used, by now, to facebook groups. )
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And, after all, though I have a great specialty in my studies of studying comparative beliefs (many today object to the word religion, though it is easily stretched to fit whatever is needed to be studied such as these), I'm more into the study of language science and especially the same applied to all 50 known logographic writing systems. That said, I have rarely met my equal for wide and careful comparative study of beliefs. Academia is at some odds with my own approach to various topics. Though I rely on the writings they put out quite a bit. Source texts and discussion of concepts, though, are the places to go first for such things.
