especially since that was
the official grandfather
of the fantasy conlangs.
"Conlang" is short for
"constructed language."
They're more than codes like Pig Latin,
and they're not just collections
of fabricated slang like the Nadsat lingo
that the teen hoodlums
in "A Clockwork Orange" speak,
where "droog" from Russian
happens to mean "friend."
What makes conlangs real languages
isn't the number of words they have.
It helps, of course,
to have a lot of words.
Dothraki has thousands of words.
Na'vi started with 1,500 words.
Fans on websites
have steadily created more.
But we can see the difference
between vocabulary alone
and what makes a real language
from a look at how Tolkien
put together grand old Elvish,
a conlang with several thousands words.
After all, you could memorize
5,000 words of Russian
and still be barely able
to construct a sentence.
A four-year-old would talk
rings around you.
That's because you have to know
how to put the words together.
That is, a real language has grammar.