Say It In Runic

Apparently Richard Garriott held up a sign on his trip to the space station in his fictional language from Tabula Rasa.  Aside from being insanely jealous of people who can go into space, I find fictional languages fascinating.  Truly different languages actually take a long time to develop - they’re more than just a cipher used to disguise an existing language - and they’ve been employed in everything from books (think Tolkien’s incredibly elaborate elvish) to movies, games, and tv shows. 

Part of the interest is probably due to the fact that they’re such an intrinsic part of the world creation process.  But another piece is that I find it interesting how many fictional languages tend to be elaborately pictorial in nature: Garriott, Tolkien, even the alienese from Futurama (actually a cipher rather than a language) all use some sort of complex runic stand-in for either a sound (elvish) or meaning (Logos Elements).  But not that many of the world’s actual languages are like that - most are purely alphabetic and much more functional than attractive - an exception maybe being the Middle Eastern languages like Hebrew and Arabic - and the few pictorial languages like Chinese are syllabic shorthand for complete words.  (As you can see from the poor descriptions, I’m not a linguist). 

I would imagine that this is because the main function of languages in the real world is to communicate meaning, which requires simplicity and concision, whereas their function in fictional worlds is to communicate a sense of uniqueness, which just requires being different.