1. Author’s note

“For one who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men but to God; for no one understands, but in his spirit he speaks mysteries.”

(1 Corinthians 14:2)

The first artificial language in modern understanding of this term, that we have reliable knowledge of, was named Lingua Ignota (“Unknown language”). It was constructed by Hildegard von Bingen, a German nun & mystic. All that survived from her language - a short piece of text and a dictionary of 1012 words, listed in hierarchical order, from the most important - Aigonz (God) to the less important one - Cauiz (cricket).

After Lingua Ignota more than 900 languages have been constructed. There were well-known projects of philosophical languages by Roger Bacon, Rene Descartes and Gottfried Leibniz. John Wilkins, an erudite bishop of XVII century, created in his 1668 “Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language” a vast “classification tree” (systematic catalogue), where each idea, action and thing in the Universe was well-ordered. Each branch of the tree corresponded to the letter or syllable, and one could build up a word simply following the bifurcating branches to the distant twig or leaf, meaning the thought that one wanted to express. For example, in Wilkins’ system “de” means an element, “deb” - fire and “deba” - flame.

In 1908 E.P. Foster, an American priest, constructed the taxonomical language of Ro. For instance, bofoc is red, bofod is orange, bofof is yellow and bofo is colour. The language’s vocabulary includes around 16000 words. The core disadvantage of the system is that it’s really hard to distinguish one word from another aurally.

In 1950 Vienna born W. John Weilgart creates the philosophical language of aUI, in which every letter reproduces the certain meaning. For ex., kU - the God (the supreme spirit), yrkU - the Satan (the non-positive supreme spirit), waubos - a dog (influence space human together living object). Oligosynthetic conlangs such as Sonna, Ygyde, Kali-sise, Puna, Vuyamu which are based on the principles which are different from those of Esperanto-like languages could be attributed to other interesting projects.

Nowadays the demand for construction of exotic linguistic projects, which could be spoken by the inhabitants of made-up worlds, is dictated by cinematography. Specially for the 2011 series of Game of Thrones David J. Peterson of Language Creation Society constructed the Dothraki language. In 2009 American linguist Paul Frommer constructed the language of Na’vi for the Avatar movie. Elvish language of Quenya and the “Language of Evil” - the Black Speech - sounded in the famous cinema trilogy of “The Lord of the Rings”. While the very first project when the construction of a language turned into a project that could bring the money was the series of “Star Trek” (1979). Specially for it Klingon, the most commercially successful conlang ever, was constructed by Marc Okrand.

All these lingvo projects unlike the artificial languages of XIX century (Esperanto, Volapük etc.) were constructed not on the Indo-European basis. Klingon imitated the languages of Native Americans (Amerind languages), Quenya - Finnish, Na’vi - Austric languages.

These tendencies in ethnology were observed by Claude Lévi-Strauss in his work “Three Types of Humanism”. The first one appeared in the Renaissance, with the rediscovery of the cultures of the ancient world. The second, dating from the nineteenth century, arose with the discovery of oriental cultures. The third, implicit in twentieth-century social anthropology, addresses for the first time peoples with neither Scriptures nor script.

Arahau language is following this trend. As we see, its structure goes back to the most archaic (primeval) models - active system & polysynthetism as well as the counting system based on the parts of the body. In this meaning, the Arahau project is the experience of constructing a language model nearest to the primordial one, when all existing now meanings were just about to emerge from some protoelements.

Philosopher Konstantin Aksakov once noted that if a man understood the mystery of connection between the thought and the sound in a word “all languages even those that are unknown for the man would become clear for him and through the sounds of the word there would be a way of understanding its meaning”

The archaism of language models should not be seen as underdevelopment. Lévi-Strauss emphasized that “the progress of Mankind must not be liken to one-way climbing the stairs - it goes in various directions incommensurable with the technological growth only”.

The second, more important stimulus for constructing Arahau is the Speedtalk hypothesis advanced by American science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein in his 1949 work “Gulf”. Indeed, if there are methods of speed writing and speed reading, why not developing the principles of speed talking and speed thinking?

The Heinlein’s character finds himself in some secret organisation, where they discovered how to hasten their thinking in order of magnitude. It is done using the artificial language of Speedtalk, in which even the longest sentence goes in a single word. People who learned how to speak this language considered themselves to be at the next step of human evolution - “homo novus”.

Examples of Speedtalk are given in the story but not explained. As time goes by constructing of such a model of super-language can be liken to the alchemist search of philosopher’s stone or designing the perpetual motion by some types of inventors.

One of the models of Speedtalk was advanced by American linguist John Quijada in 2004. In the conlang of Ithkuil (Iţkuîl) that he created the compactness of the thought is reached through the enormous number of exotic sounds (from 40 to 80 in different versions) and the plenty of grammar rules (96 cases, 259 derivative verb forms etc.)

An example of a construction in Ithkuil: “At the time of his death the clowns were gaining the power” - Auta’ïnssiuq ugžžu’yel y̌eŗŗ́ oïlêz

TRM-life-ma/GEN-PRL AGG-ASO-clown-IND PRL-CPT-Deriv8-RSL (PST)-ICP-COA-to rule

Here we see: tan - life, to be alive ; kšûl - a clown; lêz - to manage, to rule

[TRM - Terminative extension; GEN - Genitive case; PRL - Prolimitive case, AGG - Aggregative configuration; ASO - Associative affiliation; IND - Inducive case; CPT - Completive version of verb; Deriv8 - 8th derivation; RSL - Resultative format of verb; PST - Positive version of verb; ICP - Inceptive extension; COA - Coalescent affiliation].

The task of “maximum reduction of the flow of speech” is solved in Arahau not through excessive growth in number of base consonants, as it’s done in Ithkuil, but through singleness of the phoneme in the word’s stem. The Arahau alphabet consists of 27 letters and doesn’t include letters for exotic sounds, which can be hard to pronounce for Europeans. The centre of semantic load in Arahau is shifted to vowels (they can be either labial and abruptive), besides diphthongs and triphthongs are in operation. Arahau Grammar can be expressed in a dozen of simple rules.

Let’s take the example that has been shown earlier. The phrase “At the time of his death the clowns were gaining the power” will sound as Bokëzaahoílsordcusborogafs in Arahau.

BO-k.ë.z.aa-h-oíls-ord-C-us-bor.o-g-af-s

k.ë.z.a - a clown (literally “that who cheers up”). The word is built out of the formant “k-” - “that who”, apocopic verb ë(s) “to cheer up”, “to amuse”, -z- indicator of logical word-building, a - category of human being. Këzaa - clowns;

oils - to take, oíls - the verb “to take” in the Irreal Tense (“í” is pronounced with guttural stop). The tense expresses vagueness and uncertainty (the event might start in the past and not come to an end in the future);

ord - the power. The word is built out of the formant “rd” - “the right hand”;

us-bor.o-g-af-s - to be-time.Morphemic joint-The formant of affiliation-death-yours;

The disjunctive conjunction “BO” (“when”), according to the rules of Arahau, is shifted to the very beginning but the position where it should stand in the sentence is occupied with the conjunction of “C” (“with”) that is linked with it.

It must be mentioned that Ithkuil is a super-logical language. As well as Loglan constructed in 1955 by James Cooke Brown, a sociologist and science fiction writer. In Loglan emotions (joy, disappointment etc.) and punctuation are expressed through special formants. For ex., in Ithkuil the intention of the speaker can be specified with 1800 suffixes with clearly expressed meanings helping to eliminate any possible ambiguity.

The conception of super-logical language realized in Ithkuil and Loglan is not supported by all researches nowadays. So, J. Lakoff and M. Johnson presented a book "Metaphors We Live By" in 1980, where they claimed that our thinking is structured in conceptual systems which are basically metaphorical in their nature: life is journey, time is money, dispute is war. Lakoff emphasized that metaphor is not only a matter of words, but a matter of thought and it can’t be omitted by force of will with help of grammar.

This view can be illustrated with the language of Toki Pona, that has become one of the most successful conlang projects of recent times. Toki Pona was constructed on the basis of Taoist principles in order to discover how simple a language can be. There are only 123 words and 14 basic sounds. Euphony, simplicity, metaphoric approach and philosophical ambiguity remind us of the principles of Japanese haiku.

Almost every word in Toki Pona has a variety of meanings: pona is good, kind, simple, to mend. Due to this fact a sentence jan li pona can be translated few ways: “a person is good”, “a person is kind” or “a person is mending”. It’s quite often to use such constructions as “to instruct”, “to teach” that is pana e sona (literally “to give the knowledge”). “A table”, depending on the context, can be translated as supa sitelen (furniture for writing), supa moku (furniture for eating) or even supa kiwen ike (tough and bad furniture).

…The process of construction of Arahau started in 1995, when the basic principles of the new artificial language had been defined to be agglutination, morphological monophonemeness, polysynthetism, active-stative morphosyntactic alignment, phoneme-significant and etymologically transparent nature of grammar, ultra compactness of the flow of speech. It’s notable that since then the basic principles haven’t experienced any significant change. But the grammar itself has been developing gradually and by 2007 it has been augmented and reworked. In that very year the 600 word Arahau-Russian dictionary was released; at the moment it consists of 1200-1500 words.

Here it should be mentioned that Arahau is an oligosynthetic language, i.e. around 100 roots form all the diversity of vocabulary. Holdings are possible but mainly in specific texts (news, manuals, proper names).

For the first time Arahau grammar appeared on the Internet on 26 August, 2006 on the site specially created for this purpose. This date is considered to be the Arahau birthday. In 2011 Arahau was mentioned by media for the first time in the futurology article “After two hares” in a local newspaper “Novaya Gazeta Kubani”. In that very year a well-known musician and esperantist Gleb Maltsev (aka “Piĉismo”) performed a 10-minute-long Arahau composition “Yr” (The Evil) on the «Ont GRIND'ų» festival in Labardžiai, Lithuania.

In 2013 Arahau became official (as well as Russian, Ukrainian, English, Latin, German and French) in the Independent Non-profit International Commonwealth of Writers “INTENTIA” under the aegis of Youth Department of Krasnodar City Hall. At the same time the first reports about Arahau were broadcast on TV, news announcers started to speak the conlang.

But the most important that since 2009 under the editorship of Igor Vasilyev, a candidate of History, there has been a regular magazine “Asa” (The Knowledge) publishing Arahau translated works of poets and writers of Krasnodar region.

The author appreciates every contribution that’s been made to the project by I. Krotov and O. Bakharev (they mentioned Arahau in their works), K. Belchansky, A. Peredereyev (the late first editor of “Asa”), I. Vasilyev, A. Mamayenko, A. Martusenko, A. Nasonov, O. Vesnina, A. Gusev, M. Yepatko, V. Malchevsky, G. Maltsev, S. Dudko, L. Reshetnyak, E. Bratchikova, V. Trubnikova, P. Korotenko and O. Bondarenko.

Many thanks to the president of the Krasnodar office of The Union of Writers of Russia S. Makarova and the chief librarian of the Leisure and Cultural Department of the Central Krasnodar N.A. Nekrasov’s City Library N. Lobodyryova for hosting Arahau community meetings.

Deep appreciation to the constructor of the Eliundi language A. Kolegov, to the chief of the “Tsumada” news agency G. Khalillulayev, to S. Ager (from the “Omniglot” portal), M. Olteanu (from the “Christus Rex”), C. Rinaldi (Le Almanac de Interlingua) and also to the team of Wikipedia, Wikiznaniye, Lingvoforum and Esperanto-novosti.

Feedback is at rbardalzo@yandex.ru

I. Karasev

(Translated by A. Gusev).