Study with the several resources on Docsity
Earn points by helping other students or get them with a premium plan
Prepare for your exams
Study with the several resources on Docsity
Earn points to download
Earn points by helping other students or get them with a premium plan
The importance and significance of the invented language of rabbits, Lapine, in Richard Adams' novel, Watership Down. The author argues for the academic study of invented languages, using Lapine as an example, and discusses its linguistic patterns and connections to real languages. The document also mentions the influence of Lapine on the character Kehaar and the sociolinguistic hierarchy in the Watership Down universe.
Typology: Lecture notes
1 / 24
This page cannot be seen from the preview
Don't miss anything!
Prepared for: Dr. Amy Rupiper-Taggart and Dr. Miriam Mara Department of English North Dakota State University
December 3rd, 2014
Watership Down is a post apocalyptic novel featuring talking animal characters. Unlike many other classic novels featuring anthropomorphic characters like The Wind in the Willows and Brian Jacques’ numerous novels, the animal characters in Adams’ book are much more animal than human in many senses. Rather than living in quaint little cottages and wearing period clothing, Watership ’s rabbits live, emote, and behave like wild animals. The idea and importance of survival is key, and permeates every aspect of Lapine society, including their language, their religion-like mythology, their behaviour, and their thought processes. In fact, it can be difficult to separate what is rabbit and what is human in Adams’ characters at times, as the rabbit-ness of their human traits is so inherently important. Mariah Copeland describes this phenomenon in her paper Crossover Animal Fantasy Series: Crossing Cultural and Species as well as Age Boundaries (287-88), as does James Stone in his aptly named article The ‘Rabbitness’ of Watership Down.
The goal for this paper is, at its most basic level, to fill a noticeable gap in the linguistic study of invented languages, and to defend the study and analysis of not only Adams’ languages, but all invented languages in an academic setting. An invented language, alternately called a constructed language or conlang, is a language that has been fully constructed by humans and artificial means, usually to fulfil a specific purpose or unify a group. Some conlangs are created to test linguistic theory, like the language Loglan was to test the extent of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Others, like Esperanto, are auxiliary languages that attempt to inspire uniformed global communication. However, the majority of conlangs, like Tolkien’s Middle Earth languages and the ones I am studying, are created to embellish or complete a fictional world in a film or body of literature. I have examined two main texts for these analyses, the 1974 Macmillan Edition of the novel Watership Down and the collection of short stories, Tales from Watership Down, and have thoroughly dissected each of them in the next several sections. For the actual analysis of these invented languages, I used Dr. DS Bigham’s process for analysing conlangs, making use of the following research questions:
● What is the purpose of the conlang? ● Which linguistic subfields have been addressed? Explain these. ● Are any oddities of the language explained? ● Are there any real languages influencing it? In what way?( Bigham, slides)
time examining the languages that the author has built for his rabbit characters. Language is perhaps the truest form of expression and thought available to us as human beings, and manually invented languages are no different - even if they are spoken by fictional anthropomorphic rabbits.
In the world of Adams’ Watership Down, the rabbits of each colony, though far apart in rabbit distance, can all communicate with each other in a language aptly called Lapine. Despite the name’s clear ties to its Middle French root Lapin, my analysis shows little clear influence from romance languages. Instead, Lapine seems to have a Germano-Celtic flavoring, with the occasional twinge of Arabic-esque influence (R Adams, xiv). Each of those will be elaborated on in later sections, specific to sub discipline.
Within the universe and plot of the novel, the purpose of the language is to provide a diverse culture spread across a large distance with a way to communicate with each other. However, the language’s purpose outside the novel is slightly different. To the author, the examiner, and the other members of the text’s intended audience, the purpose of Lapine as a language is to help create a universe that ceases to be imaginary in the mind of the reader - to make the world more real. At an even more basic level, the language serves a very practical purpose. For this, one must look at the makeup of the novel itself. For the sake of the plot and easy understanding, most of the rabbits’ written dialogue is actually written in english to prevent the reader from getting losing the story in a botched translation. However, as is often the case in examining the speech of an unfamiliar language and culture, sometimes an idea or the connotation of a word simply cannot be translated. How does the text deal with these dilemmas? In these situations, Adams has left the Lapine words as they are, and provided a small dictionary with the book so the curious reader can translate the words themselves. This sense of active readership instills Adams’ invented words with a sense of realism, and helps to develop some of the intricacies of Lapine language and culture. This fact alone creates even further ties to Copeland’s and Stone’s idea of the language’s inherent rabbit-ness(287-88). The rest of this language’s analysis will consist of an examination of linguistics’ various sub-fields, including morphology, semantics, grammar and syntax.
Because Lapine primarily exists as a written account of a spoken language, the ideas we can draw from its existing fragments about morphemes, meaning and word construction are perhaps the strongest of any hard data to be had from Adams’ two
texts. A thorough examination of the Lapine words present in the story, the explanatory footnotes and introduction in the Macmillan edition, and the additional content of the short story collection has revealed mappable patterns in noun and adjective construction. In both objects and names, the language seems to be an inflected language that follows a descriptors-first system, where the subject of the phrase falls behind its modifiers, except in certain cases with a few special suffixes that denote rank and power. This pattern is laid out in the chart below using names, note the ordering of morphemes and the exceptions to the pattern.
Watership Down - Lapine Name Morphology
Examples of Ascending Morphological Inflection (and exceptions)
Hyzenthlay Hyz + En + Thlay
“fur like shining dew” (shine) (dew) (fur)
Thlayli - + Thlay + Li
“tuft of fur on the head” - (fur) (head)
Hrairoo - + Hrair + -roo
“little thousand” - a lot (lit. thousand) *diminutive
Frithrah - + Frith -rah
“lord [God]” - God (lit. the sun) **respect
El-ahrairah El[il] + Hrair + -rah
“prince of a thousand foes” enemy (pl.) a lot (lit. thousand) **respect
The cases that defy the pattern are interesting in terms of real world language influence. For diminutive names like Hrairoo and Hlaoroo - the name of another small rabbit from the Watership warren - similarities can be drawn to Irish, Welsh, and other Celtic languages. In the irish language, the suffix -ín [een performs the same function with nouns and names. With -rah, the suffix of power or respect, we can draw parallels between Lapine and the Arabic language, which features not a suffix but the prefix El- that performs the same function. As with its Lapine cognate, this honor and title must
match Adams’ nature-centric theme for his language, and the descriptors-first construction that we tend to see in Lapine.
More overarching language patterns can be seen within the focus of grammar, syntax, and construction. While Adams himself does argue on page xiv of Watership’ s introduction that the language has no inherent construction and grammar, many of his linguistic inventions strongly indicate otherwise. While the hard, outline rules may not have been written down within the confines of the text, Adams’ consistency with plurals in particular prove that Lapine does have basis in core linguistic theory. For example, consider the chart below.
All of these nouns, as well as the plural constructions shown, occur naturally within both of the primary texts. From this simple chart using demonstrated examples, a strong rule for the creation of plurals in Lapine could be produced, even by an introductory student. However, one hole in this set of examples does become a point of contention, and an opportunity for exploring the idea of pluralisation more deeply. For the words above, an analyst would develop the following rules.
● If noun ends in consonant, add plural suffix -il ● if noun ends in a vowel, delete final vowel and add plural suffix -il.
How then, do we deal with the singular of [Elil] in this case? Due to the deletive properties we established for the plural morpheme -il, it is currently impossible to tell if the other segment of the word is simply [el], or if it included a vowel like the nouns Yona (hedgehog) or Lendri (badger). Not only are these facts evidence of inherent grammar structure, but the above chart and evidence would be enough to create an assessment or group activity in a real linguistics classroom, as Dr. Suzette Haden Elgin
suggests in her article titled “ Waterships all the way Down: Using Science Fiction to Teach Linguistics” (162-63).
Welsh and Irish influences were cited in the morphology section, and they can both be argued in this section as well. Aside from the construction of the greetings we have discussed before, patterns in other phrases seem to follow a pattern similar to the particle mechanics of Celtic languages, especially in terms of differentiating between ‘a’ and ‘the’; for example, ‘a badger’ is just lendri and ‘the badger’ would be differentiated by a particle, the particle is absent with ‘a [noun]’ - an occasional phenomenon that many Irish language learners will be familiar with. Contrary, however, to these languages are the few examples of verb conjugation and their relationship to pronouns we see. In Irish and in Welsh, words or suffixes are added to the base form depending on the subject of the sentence (he, we, they, etc) and then that construction is followed by the object pronoun. When we look at Lapine constructions like m’saion - “we meet them”, on the other hand, something else seems to be the case (R Adams, 475). In Irish, the closest phrase would be Feicimid iad - “we see them” or “we encounter them”; unfortunately, Adams provides no indication which inflection addresses the subject and which addresses the object. Both possibilities are illustrated below.
Construction Comparison - “we meet them”
Feicimid iad [verb, subject, object]
Feic- + [i]mid + iad
to see/encounter we them
M’saion [svo?][ovs?]
M’ + sai + on
We? Them? + to meet + We? Them?
In terms of phonetics, Adams leaves us with much less information - one of the drawbacks to examining an exclusively written language. Over all, the language is described to have a sort of “wuffy, fluffy sound” and “The sounds a rabbit might make if they did talk”(R Adams, xiv). In the introduction to the Macmillan edition of the novel, Adams provides a few snippets of information on the creation of his Lapine words, as well as examples and explanations for both. One of these is the word hrududu , the Lapine word for car or motorised vehicle; the word is onomatopoeic, and
Now that we’ve looked at how rabbit characters talk to each other, we need consider what would happen if a rabbit needed to talk to an animal of another species. Fortunately, Adams’ addresses this within the primary novel, and makes note of how this would work. Throughout the novel, the rabbits must communicate and eventually ally themselves with a mouse and a seagull, the latter more so than the former. In these situations, the rabbits use a language called Hedgerow that functions as a lingua franca of sorts. Adams describes it as a “ patois ”, literally meaning dialect (181). With the in-text purpose of this language established, one can examine its role in the overall text, as well as its presentation. While we’ve determined that Lapine is only a partial language in its current state, Hedgerow is even more fragmentary. This language exists entirely in theory, with the author rendering it in English for the sake of plot and ease for the reader. Though that makes the language incredibly difficult, if not impossible to analyse in terms of morphology and phonetics, an analyst can look at sentence structuring and grammar rules. The purpose of this theoretical conlang then is to solve a communication problem between two groups within the text, and to make collaboration or understanding between different species possible.
Because of the theoretical nature of Hedgerow, very little information can be gleaned from the text about its spelling and word construction. However, he can infer some general information on these aspects of the language in scenes where Lapine speaking rabbits and non-Lapine speakers interact. The seagull, Kehaar, is the best example of this. After the rabbits save the gull’s life, he spends a great deal of time with them during his recovery, and they communicate a lot through Hedgerow (R Adams, 180-96). Kehaar is a unique character in the novel, and is often noted by readers and characters in the novel as difficult to understand. On page 181 of Watership Down, the rabbits describe his speech as ”guttural” and “exotic”; Adams renders Kehaar’s speech in a type of vaguely European flavoured eye-dialect that differs in severity as the character becomes more versed in Hedgerow and rabbit communication, a solid example of how these characters can be subtly portrayed as acquiring new languages over time(Valdman, 44-47). It is even mentioned in the novel that during his stay with the rabbits, Kehaar picks up a bit of halting, broken lapine, but often has to switch back to Hedgerow when conversation becomes complex or multi-leveled (R Adams, 189). When Kehaar agrees to help the Watership rabbits liberate some of the population from the overcrowded, totalitarian colony of Efrafa, his long pieces of dialogue hint that his word choice - whether through
constant contact with the Lapine language, or due to the fact that Hedgerow could be a pidgin or naturally occurring hybrid language of Lapine and another animal language
’Ya, ya, ’elp you for get mudders. But now ees dis, Meester ’Azel. Alvays I vant Peeg Vater now - alvays, alvays. Ees hearing Peeg Vater, vant to fly to Peeg Vater. Now soon you go for get mudders , I ’elp you, ’ow you like. Den, ven you getting mudders , I leave you dere, fly away, no come back. But I come back anudder time, ya? Come in autumn, in vinter I come live ’ere vid you, ya?’ (189-90)
It is Kehaar’s use of the word mudders , or mothers, here that is of note. For his plan, Kehaar intends to fly over the nearby hills and spot where the small company of Watership rabbits could locate a few female rabbits to join their new civilisation, as nearly all of the Sandleford refugees had been male and without them, their new colony would eventually die out. When Kehaar talks about locating the mothers in Efrafa, he’s referring specifically to female rabbits, or does. It is of note, however, that marli , the Lapine word for female rabbit, also means mother(Adams, 476).
In fact, there have currently been more papers in the field of linguistics written on Kehaar and his use of Hedgerow than there have been written on Lapine, and these examinations provide us with a fairly useful framework for the structure and grammar of Hedgerow, as well as a look at the mechanics of language acquisition and the sociolinguistic hierarchy of the Watership Down universe(Valdman, 44-47). Two Linguists in particular, S. Corder and Charles Ferguson, are very well known for examining Kehaar’s speech and his acquisition of the Hedgerow and Lapine languages. Ferguson and Corder worked on their respective projects around the same time, and actually cite each other in their papers. Ferguson used Kehaar and Adams’ theoretical conlang in more of general and abstract sense, citing the character’s speech as an example of the phenomenon that he calls Foreigner Talk (1). This is a tendency towards simplification and language streamlining that non-native speakers exhibit when learning a new language. Ferguson describes several key components of this pattern including duplication of quantitative descriptors to convey intensity, and dramatic vocabulary reduction of pronouns, inflexions, and tenses, and a marked lack of a copula in sentence construction(1-3). At the same time, Corder further applied this idea of Foreigner Talk to the character of Kehaar, and provided the linguistics community with a very detailed analysis of all of his dialogue in the original text. In this paper, entitled The Language of Kehaar, Corder demonstrates the consistency of
of reasons noted in academic writing against studying Watership ’s conlangs, and have listed them below from most common to least.
● Unlike Tolkien, Richard Adams was not an academically trained Linguist. ● Adams’ conlangs are too fragmentary or unfinished. ● Invented Languages in works of fiction are primarily a world building device, and not grounded in Linguistic theory
As a potential linguistics student, the purposeful lack of interest in this topic both confuses and saddens me. The notion that these languages are below examination because of their fictitious existence and genre is absurd, and proving this is as simple as citing any paper or examination of any of Tolkien’s very well constructed Middle Earth conlangs. There has been room for examination of fictional languages from plenty of other novels, and my research above proves that there are plenty of topics to discuss despite these languages’ fragmentary or theoretical existence. Lapine, in particular, has even shown an amount of real world influence and adoption. In his 1985 paper, Dr. Thomas Murray details just that - the adoption of the Lapine verb silflay, meaning to go above ground and feed, in discussions about rabbits in Middle America, particularly around Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan (374-75). Murray’s data showed only a moderate level of prior knowledge of the origin of the word on use, and study participants also provided data on its usage by non-participating acquaintances (374-75). It is also of note that the same word appears in Stephen King’s Dark Tower novel, The Gunslinger, and also refers to the grazing behaviour of rabbits. To the notion that these conlangs are irrelevant because their creator lacks professional linguistic training, the data I’ve cited and provided above proves this argument to be irrelevant. Even without linguistic training, Ferguson, Corder, and, to some extent, I have proven the existence of several base level patterns and core linguistic principles at work in both Lapine and Hedgerow that show either a conscious, or perhaps unconscious grasp of basic linguistic theory. An absence of a degree does not make these facts ungrounded, and does not make these languages untouchable. In the following sections, I will describe three major applications that Lapine and other conlangs have in the realm of academia, as well as the realm of the modern world and the linguistics classroom specifically.
In a modern world, an understanding of conlanging and basic linguistic theory are essential tools in many occupations that one may not expect. While we immediately think of an editor, an academic or researcher, one must also begin to think of the technological and information sectors as well. One individual that knows this all too well, and excels in his his field because of his prowess in the application of conlanging,
is Dr. Federico Gobbo, author of Learning Linguistics by Doing: The Secret Virtues of a Language Constructed in the Classroom. In recent years, Dr. Gobbo has been invited to teach guest courses about the techniques and benefits of conlanging at many universities in Belgium and other European universities. However, like Adams himself, Dr. Gobbo is not a trained linguist, and does not possess a degree in the subject. Gobbo is a computer programmer; it makes sense, when you consider that computer programming languages are all conlangs - languages consciously invented by humans to serve a specific purpose. With this knowledge, the modern applicability of conlanging and linguistics are huge, and are vital skills for professionals inside the discipline and outside. Gobbo’s paper echoes this, and provides an excellent framework for teaching an applied linguistics course through creating a new language with students (2013). In regards to Hedgerow, the academic work that has already been done with this conlang proves its value in studying the mechanics of language acquisition, an applied field that is still incredibly relevant and still, like computer technology, rapidly evolving to better suit the needs of a global base of individuals that are attempting to learn another language.
As a student with an interest in Anthropology, another important defense for the use of these languages that’s particularly close to my heart is the idea of conlangs as linguistic artifacts. An artifact, as defined by Merriam Webster’s Online Dictionary, is something created by humans usually for a practical purpose, like a tool of some sort. The discipline of Linguistics is considered to be the science of language, and as such, scientists look at hard data and artifacts to learn about different groups, time periods, or ideas and to form and examine hypotheses. Unlike other branches of science, however, linguists don’t have very many types of tangible artifacts that they can really use. In fact, there’s only two - writing, and these conlangs. While natural languages can indeed be looked at and studied, they do not count as artifacts because they were not consciously and intentionally formed and created by humans as conlangs are. Thus, in discounting the validity of conlangs, we are in essence losing half of our available artifacts for study (Bigham, lecture). The ability to look at language as a tool for human use and manipulation can be difficult in some senses, but it’s an ability that opens the door for a wide range of potential studies, innovations, and potential new languages. When one considers the work done with auxiliary languages like Esperanto and the user base it acquired, the use of literary conlangs is really no different, and is just as applicable. The Bits’n’Bobstones Lapine extension is evidence of that(Buttery, 1).
To end my defense of these languages, particularly Lapine, I would like to discuss the value of conlanging in a linguistics or writing classroom. The biggest proponent of this
acquisition. For this reason, I believe that the languages Lapine and Hedgerow are both viable, if only partial conlangs, that are worthy of academic study in the field of linguistics.
Given their modern applicability in terms of professional careers, academic research, and as a classroom teaching tool. Languages like Lapine and Hedgerow represent a very important bridge between the disciplines of linguistics and literature studies, as well as a bridge between linguistic theory and application. If we, as academics, can make better use of these languages and other types of tools and artifacts that are available to us, we have the potential to do some groundbreaking, innovative work in the field that may, in turn, affect how real world languages are studied, understood, taught, and preserved.
I’d like to Thank Dr. Amy Rupiper-Taggart for all of the help and guidance she offered me throughout this endeavour, and Dr. Miriam Mara for being an extremely helpful Capstone mentor. Go raibh míle maith agat.
Bibliography
Adams, Michael. “Do-It-Yourself Language”. HUMANITIES 34.1 (2013). Web. 12 Oct, 2014.
In this article, Adams provides a crash course on the history of invented languages - their creators, their purposes, and their reason for being. Like Bigham’s course notes outlined below, this article discusses not only literary conlangs, but also the history of auxlangs like Esperanto and outliers like the language of Joyce’s novels. A common thread among all of these, according to the author, is a “dissatisfaction with the current state of linguistic affairs”. The essay provides an interesting take on the reasoning behind conlanging, but provides no bibliography and is a bit reliant on From Elvish to Klingon, his own book.
Michael Adams has a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Michigan and is now an associate professor at Indiana University Bloomington. While Adams has written an entire book on this subject (noted above), this article provides a thorough encapsulation of the history segments within it, and includes the part on Lapine. Another article on this list, discussing the sociolinguistic connotations of the languages in this novel, was written by another faculty member of this University.
Adams, Richard. Watership Down. New York: Macmillan, 1974. Print.
This novel is my primary text, thus the bulk of my analysis will focus on its events and the languages present within it. The novel follows a group of anthropomorphised rabbit characters as they journey to find a new homeland. Aside from the narrative itself, the author explores the mythology and social norms of Rabbit Society, as well as the language used exclusively by the species. The book includes many footnotes on this language, as well as a dictionary to translate Lapine dialogue - the corpus available to me for analysis.
Buttery, David L. " Frithaes! An Introduction to Colloquial Lapine ". Bits'n'Bob-stones, 25 Mar.
Bits’n’Bob-stones is the current home of this two year, extensive fan expansion on Adams’ Lapine Language. The language here has been fleshed out far beyond the book, made to include various courses in tenses, numbers, possessives, and superlatives. Along with the twenty unit body of coursework, the site also features expanded English to Lapine Dictionaries, several essays by curator David Buttery on the inner-workings of the language, and a variety of casual fan content for the novel as a whole.
Frithaes is, at its core, fan-made content. I’ve yet to have been able to find anything about Mr. David Buttery in terms of qualifications. While he does include several additional essays on the subject of Lapine, the absence of credentials and noted peer review processes ultimately causes me to shy away from this content in terms of academic validity. While it can’t be considered canonical when examining the language in this setting, Buttery’s website provides excellent proof of what can be done with this language, even though it wasn’t fully completed by the author, who isn’t a linguist either. While this source won’t earn more than a passing mention, it is definitely deserving of that.
Copeland, Marion. "Crossover Animal Fantasy Series: Crossing Cultural And Species As Well
As Age Boundaries." Society & Animals 11.3 (2003): 287-298. Academic Search
Premier. Web. 16 Oct. 2014.
Copeland defends the study of animal tales in this essay, and provides an overview for the history of many of these stories - including Watership Down, cited as the first crossover animal fantasy, including humans only peripherally. This article describes the level of anthropomorphism of the characters, and how their language relates strictly to their ‘rabbitness’ and rabbit behavior. The rabbits’ storytelling tradition is also discussed, and related to the tradition of telling animal stories in human culture - stories
that were historically meant more for adults than children, and taught lessons to tribes.
Copeland has a PhD in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is now teaching courses at the non-profit Human Society University, which offers courses in animal studies, human leadership, and animal advocacy. I intend to cite this article in defense of the study of the book, as most of her focus resides there, although the bit she does spend talking about language is worthy of use too, though surface level.
Corder, S. “The Language of Kehaar.” RELC Journal 8.1 (1977): 1-12. Communication &
Mass Media Complete. Web. 16 Oct. 2014.
Kehaar, a bird character from Adams’ novel that experiences linguistic difficulty in communicating with the rabbits in their own language, is the focus of this article. Kehaar’s speaking style is distinctive within the primary text, and his heavily dialected sections provide insight into how we, as fellow observers of an unfamiliar language like Lapine, might linguistically pidginize it to communicate. Corder is thorough in his analysis, first providing a complete analysis of Kehaar’s syntactic patterns, phonology, and word ordering conventions before relating them to Ferguson’s parameters for ‘foreigner talk’ as defined in his so named essay. These are applied with great detail, and the author provides a new explanation for the phenomenon in conclusion.
Corder was a professor in the department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, while employed by the British Council. Corder later went on to teach at Oxford University and become the first chair of the British Association for Applied Linguistics. This, among many of his other papers, have been influential in the field of Applied Linguistics, particularly those regarding second language acquisition.
Elgin, Suzette Haden. "Waterships All the Way Down: Using Science Fiction to Teach
Linguistics." Language Alive in the Classroom (1999): 157. Print.
