I got an email today which slipped through my Gmail spam filter. The title of which is:

מידע בנושא מפגשי חברה, טיולים, מסיבות ועוד

Since that’s Hebrew, I’m guessing you read it right-to-left. Taking it into Google Translate, the end result in English is:

“Information about the company meetings, trips, parties, etc.”

That seems to me to be an unusually clear cut translation. If you’ve ever messed with online autotranslate tools, you’ll have a good idea of how choppy they usually are. What I would guess with this one was that they (the spammers) came up with an English phrase, and then translated it into Hebrew. Because if it were originated as a Hebrew phrase, translated into English, it would probably be all crapped out in translation.

In any event, I’m growing more and more interested in this kind of data analysis, especially around the subject of international communication and universal language. So I’m hoping to start incorporating more tricks like this into my writing.

Last night, during my usual Wikipedia trolling sessions, I found two great references in the realm of what’s called “artlangs” or artistic languages: mezangelle and Codework.

mezangelle is primarily based on hybrid words. Like the portmanteau words invented by Lewis Carroll and used in James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake, it dissects and recombines language and stacks multiple layers of meanings into single phrases. Beyond that, it is an Internet-cultural poetic language deriving much of its tension from incorporating formal code and informal speech at once[2]. Its base construction qualifies it as hypertext on a morphological and grammatical level. It is not syntactically fixed and is in continuous artistic development.

mezangelle mixes English, ASCII art, fragments from programming language source code, markup languages, regular expressions and wildcard patterns, protocol code, IRC shorthands, emoticons, phonetic spelling and slang. It is a polysemic multi-layered language that remixes the basic structure of English and computer code through the manipulation of syllables and morphemes.

Codework, from their example, seems pretty similar. The Russian artlang, Zaum, also seems really interesting:

As Kruchenykh has it, zaum is a transrational language, “wild, flaming, explosive (wild paradise, fiery languages, blazing coal),” which awakens creative imagination from the manacles of everyday speech. Zaum “can provide a universal poetic language, born organically, and not artificially like Esperanto.”

More about Zaum and transrational languages here. Also closely associated, sound symbolism:

Sound symbolism or phonosemantics is a branch of linguistics and refers to the idea that vocal sounds have meaning. In particular, sound symbolism is the idea that phonemes (the written representations of sounds, transcribed between slashes like this: /b/) carry meaning in and of themselves.

Definitely interested in compiling more types of examples like this, if anyone knows of them. Semaphore is really interesting as well, a flag-based system of communication originated for the maritime world. From what I gather, it’s used to assist in coordinating movements of boats, and is able to be seen at a distance. Sort of like Morse Code with flags, except there’s a great deal more positional and navigational signals built right into the language. Any other good ones I’m missing?

Oh, one other thing from an older spambot-era post:

Microsoft is under legal attack in an unconventional intellectual property spat. The Redmond giant is being dragged through the courts by a Chilean tribe known as the Mapuche Indians, who allege that Microsoft has stolen their language.

One of the newest language packs for Windows XP is the Chilean language of Mapuzugun, the native tongue spoken by about 400,000 members, or two-thirds, of the Mapuche tribe. …

Although some Mapuches presumably aided Microsoft in the creation of the pack, the Mapuches claim that these people did not act in the best interest of the tribe. It is alleged that the leaders have been overlooked and that they should have control over their language.

More to follow, gotta go get started on my day!