Batty about Bats

Bats often have a bad reputation, with people fearing that they will get bitten or have them fly into their hair – neither of which will happen.

These much maligned creatures are absolutely fascinating. The old English word for a bat – flittermouse, and the German word Fledermaus – suggest that bats are mice with wings and yet they are actually more closely related to humans than they are to mice.

We humans could learn a lot from this cousin of ours. Unlike many animals, some bats have been known to be altruistic. If one of their colony has not eaten well on a feeding excursion, others will feed it by regurgitating a little of their own food into its mouth, even though they have nothing to gain from doing this.

Bats account for a quarter of all mammals in the UK and 20% of mammals worldwide. They are the only mammals which aretruly able to fly – flying squirrels only glide. They are split into two types: megabats, which eat fruit and microbats, which eat insects. There are 18 different species in the UK, all of which are micro bats.

Despite the saying “as blind as a bat”, bats are not blind – they just have limited vision. They mostly navigate by echolocation – emitting sounds and judging the position of things by the way the sound bounces back to them. Imagine bouncing a ball against a wall and catching it. The further from the wall you stand, the longer it takes for the ball to bounce back to you. This system is so sophisticated that bats can detect insects in flight, and catch them to eat. And if it can detect something as small as an insect, there is no way it’s not going to notice you, so it won’t ever get close enough to tangle itself in your hair.

Each species of bat emits their sounds at slightly different frequencies, and bat detectors can be used to pick this up and convert them into a lower frequency sounds that the human ear can hear. By taking the frequency and flight pattern into consideration it is possible to work out what sort of bat you can see.

Why not take a walk along a river, or around a lake after the sun has gone down, and take a few moments to appreciate these not-too-distant relatives of ours?

I is for Invented Languages

This post was written by my lovely husband, Ian Braisby – Blue Badge Guide. I hope everyone finds this as interesting to read as I did.

The latest figures suggest that there are 6909 languages in the world, and many more have died out in the past hundred to two hundred years.  That’s a lot of languages!  They are what we call “living languages”, which means they have developed over time and are used by people as their primary means of communication throughout their lives.  People who are born and grow up in areas where they are spoken learn them as their native language.

But there are also invented languages – entire languages deliberately created by people for specific purposes.  Essentially, these languages fall into two categories, namely those that have been developed for people with different native languages to communicate and those invented for use in fiction.

Let’s start by looking at languages developed to aid communication.  The 19th Century was when there was most interest in the concept of a global language.  This was a time of almost constant conflict between great powers in Europe, with far fewer opportunities for travel and understanding foreign cultures than we enjoy today.  Some people strongly believed that one way to ease international tension and emphasise the common experiences and humanity of people in different countries was to have a shared means of communication.  Since choosing the existing language of one particular country would in itself cause controversy, conflict and resentment, the idea emerged of creating a new language that everyone would be able to learn in addition to their native tongue.

One of the first serious attempts was Volapuk, which was proposed in 1879. Initially it proved popular, with language learning clubs springing up across the globe.  But within around 15 years its significance had faded, mainly due to arguments between leading figures in the Volapuk movement about specific elements of the language and its usage.

Volapuk’s position as the leading artificial language was taken over by Esperanto.  Initially created by Polish doctor L.L. Zamenhof, it quickly became popular and remains the most widely spoken and understood language of its type to this day.  An estimated 2 million people have some understanding of Esperanto and there are even some people (children of Esperanto-speaking parents) who claim it as a native language.  Zamenhof’s intention was for the language to improve communication and understanding between nations, and to that end he devised a language that would be easy to learn, with standard vocabulary and a logical, simple grammar with few irregularities and exceptions.  Despite its popularity, and even attempts to have it included as an official language of the League of Nations after World War 1, Esperanto never made the step to becoming a genuine international means of communication.  Ultimately, it was unable to supersede existing national languages, with their centuries of history and psychological links to national identity.  As a result, learning Esperanto became predominantly an academic exercise or an interesting hobby for language enthusiasts.

The examples of Volapuk and Esperanto show that attempts to invent languages in the real world have largely been based on a desire to bring people closer together.  But what of the many languages that have been created in fiction?  What purpose do they serve?  We can understand this best by looking at some famous examples.

Probably the most famous creator of fictional languages is J.R.R. Tolkien.  Indeed, since most of the well-known invented languages in fiction can be found within the fantasy and science fiction genres, it is not unrealistic to say that Tolkien set the trend for all the later writers.  The key fact to remember about Tolkien is that he was primarily a linguist – his academic career was in linguistics and languages were his obsession throughout his life from an early age.  So he had a profound understanding of how languages worked.  Initially, the languages he created (early forms of what became known as Elvish) were purely an intellectual exercise on his part.  But because he was a linguist he recognised something that the inventors of real-world languages like Volapuk and Esperanto had failed to consider – namely that languages do not exist in a vacuum and do not just appear fully formed and then remain the same.  They have a context.  So Tolkien began to construct a context for his languages – people to speak them, an environment that the languages describe, a history that shapes them, mythologies and stories for the languages to recount, and events that cause them to evolve.  Everything that Tolkien would write, his whole imaginary world of Middle Earth and the races who inhabit it, was originally conceived as a context for his languages.  The way Tolkien used languages, linking their appearance and feel to the culture and character of the people who speak them, was the model for invented languages in fiction since he was writing.

For all writers, Tolkien included, their invented languages serve a crucial purpose in their storytelling, namely to add realism and background.  Everyone knows that people from different places and cultures speak different languages.  When a story takes place in the real world, writers are not so concerned with emphasising this – they can write a French or Chinese person’s dialogue in English as the reader instinctively knows that the character would actually be speaking their native language.  People have an idea of where the characters come from and what their culture is like.  Fantasy and science fiction writers have a different challenge.  They are often describing invented worlds so they need to provide much more information about their characters and their origins, as well as finding ways to differentiate races and cultures.  Invented languages are one of the key ways they do this, as they add crucial authenticity to the fictional world created.  They also reflect the different cultural traits the writer wants to assign to these races – look at how many times in books (or films) a warlike race will have a guttural language, while people with a more intellectual or even magical culture speak in a much more lyrical way.  For example, contrast the Dothraki and High Valyrian languages created by George R.R. Martin for his Song of Ice and Fire Series (and the TV adaptation Game of Thrones).

Adaptation of books into films and the making of original films has brought an added dimension to the invented languages, as they have to be spoken by actors, not just written on the page.  Many fantasy and sci-fi films employ specialist language creators and consultants to ensure that the finished production is as authentic as possible (and of course to coach the actors!).  They often need to expand the small amounts of language created by the original author and, following Tolkien’s example, go far beyond what is actually needed on screen to end up with entire new languages with grammar, vocabulary and cultural context.  For some fans of films, learning some of these languages is a way to immerse themselves even more in the fictional world.  Fans of Star Trek, for example, can sign up to numerous Klingon language courses or even buy grammar books and dictionaries.

Whether Lord of the Rings, A Clockwork Orange, Star Trek, Game of Thrones, Avatar or many more, invented languages play a key role in fiction, especially the fantasy and sci-fi genres.  They add realism to imaginary worlds and peoples, as well as providing extra interest and fascination for readers and fans.  It is certainly fair to say that the use of invented languages in fiction has been far more successful than in the real world.  And the purpose they serve so effectively in fiction emphasises precisely why real world experiments have tended to fail, namely that languages are bound up with history, culture and identity.  No matter how humanitarian the principle and intent, it could be argued that inventing a single language without those influences is always doomed to be unsuccessful.

Related posts: H is for Hawai’ian    J is for Japanese