Creating Ancient Languages
How Anthony Burgess devised new languages for the 1981 film Quest for Fire.
In last week’s newsletter we described how Anthony Burgess invented a slang based on Russian in A Clockwork Orange. This week we hurtle back in time to discover how Burgess put words into the mouths of prehistoric people.
Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Quest for Fire, one of the most original films of the 1980s, is set 80,000 years ago. Based on a French novel by the Rosny brothers, the film dramatizes a conflict between the Ulam, a group of hunter-gatherers, and their deadly rivals the Kzamm, a tribe of cannibals. The Ulam have not yet discovered how to make fire, but a lightning strike provides them with a flame which they keep burning until it is extinguished during a raid by the Kzamm. Naoh, a young Ulam (played by Everett McGill), goes on a long journey to meet another community, the Ivaka, and he is taught how to make fire by Iva (played by Rae Dawn Chong).
The languages invented by Anthony Burgess for Quest for Fire (French title: La Guerre du Feu) are not as well known as they deserve to be. This is partly because the film contains no subtitles: the challenge for the viewer is to learn the unfamiliar languages spoken by the main characters by ear alone. Archived documents make it clear that not all of the work undertaken by Burgess survived into the final version of the film. The ‘Ulam Dictionary’ created by Burgess is considerably more extensive than viewers of the film might have imagined.
The Burgess archives in Texas and Manchester contain a range of materials which document the creation of Ulam, Kzamm and Ivaka, the three languages spoken in the movie. Burgess’s commission from Annaud was to make a speculative reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European (known as PIE), the ancient language thought to be the ancestor of modern European languages, which does not survive in a written form.
Although Burgess was originally asked to devise two languages of not less than sixty words, the final version of Ulam runs to more than 160 words. It seems that he was excited by the opportunity to develop a set of complex languages, and he delivered more material than Annaud was expecting.
It seems that the Ulam dictionary went through three major revisions, and that Burgess’s languages were constructed and revised over a period of around ten months in 1979 and 1980.
He began his research by consulting some of the books that he’d studied as a student at Manchester University in the 1930s. He relied quite heavily on the description of Indo-European languages given by Otto Jespersen in his book Growth and Structure of the English Language, published in Leipzig in 1930. Burgess also consulted his collection of ‘Teach Yourself’ language books, which are now part of the Foundation’s book collection. These volumes document his wide-ranging study of modern languages such as Dutch, Gaelic, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Persian, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish.
When it came to constructing the languages for Quest for Fire, drawing on a variety of linguistic roots, Burgess combined elements from Indian, Armenian, Hellenic, Albanian, Italic, Balto-Slavic, Celtic and Germanic languages. He paid special attention to Sanskrit, on the basis that this was ‘the oldest surviving language of the Indo-European group,’ and because T.S. Eliot had included a handful of Sanskrit words in his favourite poem, The Waste Land. Burgess drew on his knowledge of Chinese for some elements of Ivaka, a tonal language, which needed to sound distinct from Ulam.
His method was based on the traditional comparative philology he had been taught as a student. Looking at the word for ‘father’ in various modern languages, he found ‘vater’ in German and Dutch, ‘pater’ in Latin, ‘pitar’ in Sansrkit and ‘faðir’ in Old Norse. Working from these examples, he concluded that the Indo-European word for father ‘must have begun with a lip-sound, the middle consonant must have been dental or alveolar, and there must have been a terminal r-sound.’ Following these principles, Burgess decided that the Ulam word for ‘foot’ would be ‘powd’ (as in the French ‘pied’ or ‘pedes’ in Latin). Water would be ‘aga’, with the same word used for ‘river’. ‘Dondra’, derived from the Greek ‘dendron’, is the Ulam word for ‘tree’. Fire itself is ‘atra’, related to the English word ‘hearth’.
Yet words are only part of the sign-system known as Ulam. The other significant element is a series of gestures to accompany spoken words, developed in collaboration with the anthropologist Desmond Morris, author of The Naked Ape and Bodytalk: The Meaning of Human Gestures.
In the final version of the Ulam dictionary, dated 30 May 1980, physical actions are indicated alongside the words to which they refer. To communicate aggression, there are three different forms of sound and action. Mild aggression is indicated by repetition of ‘Tka, tka, tka,’ with a side-to-side swaying motion. Moderate aggression involves the word ‘Dga, dga, dga,’ with more vocalisation and resonance, and with increased body movement. The strongest and most violent form of aggression is communicated with the words ‘Arr’, ‘Ang’ and ‘Arm’, with the mouth open, the voice coming from the chest, the lips pulled back to expose the teeth, and a dominant stance.
Reading the Ulam dictionary gives us a fuller picture of how Burgess thought prehistoric people might have used language. The movie dramatizes this vocabulary and gives the words a physical meaning, combining elements from J.H. Rosny’s novel and Gerard Brach’s screenplay.
The fortieth anniversary of the film’s release in 1981 was celebrated by a new edition on DVD and Blu Ray. Now that Quest for Fire is back in circulation, there is an opportunity for a new generation to work out the meanings of words in Ulam, Kzamm and Ivaka. The pleasure of solving the film’s linguistic puzzles is, of course, exactly what Annaud and Burgess intended.
Anyone who takes an interest in Nadsat, the Russian-based slang spoken in A Clockwork Orange, will want to consider these parallel examples of fictional languages devised by Burgess.
Find out more
For Quest for Fire’s fortieth anniversary in 2021, we interviewed the actor Peter Elliott, who appeared in the film and went on to become a leading movement specialist in the industry.
Read about Burgess’s Quest for Fire production file, which is in the collections at the Burgess Foundation.
Visit the International Anthony Burgess Foundation’s bookshop, which helps support our work.
Absolutely fascinating