Un lenguaje inventado para una civilización inventada

Abstract

In 2004, the exhibition entitled "El mundo perdido de los Oparvorulos" (The Lost World of the Oparvorulos), born from the imagination of the Madrid artist Enrique Cavestany, was put on display at the Casa de América in Madrid. The objects exhibited in the display cabinets of this institution arose from an oneiric experience of the painter and were intended to depict a lost civilization that had its material culture but lacked its own language. At Cavestany's request, I took on the challenge of inventing a linguistic system at the phonetic-phonological, morphosyntactic and lexical-semantic levels. Such a challenge began as a playful exercise that, little by little, became a laborious task for which I had to combine elements taken from various languages based on a geographical demarcation also invented by the artist. I sought inspiration in the Austro-Asiatic linguistic stock, somewhere between the Papuan languages of New Guinea, Australian languages and Sino-Tibetan languages. The result was a cocktail of supposedly plausible linguistic elements, to the point that the system created would appear to be real, the words would display a level of coherence in terms of their invented formation procedures (through the eclectic use of existing forms in other languages) and, above all, they would transmit the necessary ingredients of irony and humour suggested by the artist. Thus was born the úpavny language, which gave voice to an entire universe of fictitious beings and objects.