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By now you are probably familiar with the world of constructed languages. There’s the
Elvish languages from the Lord of the Rings and High Valyrian and Dothraki from Game of Thrones. These and more we find daily in pop culture, appear like a real spoken language.
But what if a new software powered by artificial intelligence could help make ‘made-up’ languages real and keep forgotten languages alive?
It’s something Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Miami Morris Alper has attempted to do.
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In his new office at the university, he shares that he has been interested in inventing languages since he was young.
More recently, he was curious how technology, or artificial intelligence like Chat GPT could help create new ones.
“I saw sparks of it being able to do this but not completely,” Professor Alper said.
So instead, he created his own framework called Conlang Crafter that works in tandem with AI systems to create languages. Alper says the hardest part was trying to understand what it takes to create a language. He broke it up into a roughly three-step process.
First, he took a look at sounds, grammar and the words.
“Like there languages in Southern Africa that use click sounds, which we don’t have in English,” explained the professor. “What order do you put the words in? So, in English you would say, ‘I eat cake.’ In Japanese you would basically say ‘I cake eat’, where you put the verb at the end of the sentence.”
These three steps would help to create a new language with its own system of rules to be able to learn and speak it.
But the Conlang Crafter software could also help to preserve languages at risk of being lost.
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“There are a lot of endangered languages where we want to preserve them or help people to learn them, but there aren’t a lot of resources online, and people are trying to study how to use things like LMS with an actual description of the language that maybe a linguist wrote, so it can follow rules to translate into it, rather than just learning from a lot of data.”
According to Enthologue, a research center for language intelligence, there are more than 3,000 endangered languages in the world today. Many of the languages have no written rules, dictionary or framework for how to speak the language. This is why Morris says this software could be a solution. In his office, he shares how the software operates, illustrating that there is no limit to what it can create.
It outputs what Morris calls an ‘impossible’ language: a language with no consonants, only able to communicate with words and sounds comprised of vowels.
Another ‘impossible’ language the software created, one for octopuses to communicate with each other. It does not use sound but instead it uses color and movement to communicate.
Both of these constructed languages have a system of rules to follow that can hypothetically be taught and used whether it be in society or a TV show.
So, whether it’s a new fantasy language or learning how to speak the languages spoken in remote parts of the world, Morris is hoping this software can help make communication more equitable no matter the language.
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