Of Jabberwocks and Nazgul
For today's post I thought we would discuss the topic of word formation and the way different languages structure their words. But we are going to be looking at something rather different linguistically and that is gibberish words. That’s right we are going to talk about words that don’t exist and have absolutely no definition. The thing is, that even though they are gibberish words they can still carry meaning in our minds. This ties together very well with our theme of constructed languages as you shall soon see.  

To start things off I would first like to look at one of my favorite poems, Jabberwocky, by Lewis Carroll. Now as you can obviously tell there are quite a few words in the poem that are in fact gibberish, 27 to be exact. But despite the fact that the poem relies only mostly made up words to describe itself, you get a wonderfully vivid idea of the world Lewis Carroll has created. I'm sure for everyone it's slightly different, but can't you just picture something in your mind when you read about the slithy toves or hear the noise of the burbling Jabberwocky. 

This is because Lewis Carroll does a fantastic job of using the English phonetic system to his advantage. He creates words using only sound pairings and phonetic combinations that naturally occur in the English language. This allows us to feel that these made up words are real and imprint meaning to them. And the method by which we do this is also fascinating.  

For our next example we use the Ringwraiths from lord of the rings. Now while wraith is not a made up word, before it was brought to popularity by Tolkien in the early 50s, it was not a commonly found word, so many were unaware of its meaning. Now the word wraith is fascinating because it brings a slew of images to mind. It represents evil, death, twisted haunting spirits, and generally not good things. But why is this? 

If we look at the word phonetically it share similarities with quite a few other English words. One being "wrath" a severe burning hatred, and the second being, "wreath" a ring of twisted gnarled branches. Both of these word bring very clear images to mind as well. So when combined with "wraith" the word Ringwraith, while totally made up, brings about a very clear idea of what one of these foul creatures might look and feel like if you were to meet one.  

Going back to the Jabberwocky, all of the made up words Lewis Carol uses bring to mind very clear images because not only do they follow our phonetic rules, but though phonetic similarities they can bring to mind strikingly vivid images of things that have no actual connection to. This to me is truly fascinating.