An Experiment in Creating Language

This article reports on an experimental seminar in language given in spring 1973 in the Senior Center Seminar program at Bowdoin College. The thirteen students were from various major fields, but all had had some foreign language. The instructor had no special credentials in linguistics. De Saussure was the only required reading. Assignments drew on previous language training and imagination to explore the nature of word‐formation, grammatical structure, and idiom. The final project was creation–in groups of four or five–of an artificial language. The languages had to have a demonstrable grammatical form, some idiomatic content, and a clear orthographic and phonetic system. Results are analyzed, and excerpts are given from one highly successful project which integrates cultural myth with origin of semantic values and borrows from several languages

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