Ptydepe

Ptydepe is a fictional artificial language featuring in Czech playwright Václav Havel's 1966 play "The Memorandum". The play concerns the events that unfold when Ptydepe is introduced as the new official language of an unspecified organization. In Czech, the word has become widely used in the meaning of incomprehensible bureaucratic jargon, or newspeak intending to hide its true meaning.

cientific principles of Ptydepe

Ptydepe was constructed along strictly scientific lines, with none of the messiness and ambiguity of natural languages. Havel's younger brother, computer scientist Ivan M. Havel, helped in its design. In order to be able to express precisely all the subtle and easily-misunderstood nuances of natural language, Ptydepe has an extraordinary large vocabulary. Another problem of natural language that Ptydepe was intended to eliminate is the frequent similarity of unrelated words, or homonyms. To entirely avoid the possibilities for confusion that arise with homonyms and similar unrelated words, Ptydepe was created according to the postulate that all words must be formed from the least probable combinations of letters. Specifically, it makes use of the so-called "sixty percent dissimilarity" rule; which states that any Ptydepe word must differ by at least sixty percent of its letters from any other word consisting of the same number of letters. This led to the necessity of creating some very long words. The inevitable problem of pronouncability is solved by breaking very long words up into smaller clusters of letters called "subwords", which nonetheless have no meaning outside of the word they belong to and are not interchangeable.

Length of words, like everything else in Ptydepe, is determined by a scientific principle: in this case, "the more common the meaning, the shorter the word." Therefore, the shortest word in Ptydepe, "gh", corresponds to what is so far known to be the most general term in natural language, "whatever". (The longest word in Ptydepe, which contains 319 letters, is the word for "wombat".) Theoretically an even shorter word than "gh" exists in Ptydepe, namely "f", but it has no meaning assigned and is held in reserve in case a more general term than "whatever" is discovered.

Example of the language

From the memorandum discovered in the office in Scene 1:

"Ra ko hutu d dekotu ely trebomu emusohe, vdegar yd, stro reny er gryk kendy, alyv zvyde dezu, kvyndal fer teknu sely. Degto yl tre entvester kyleg gh: orka epyl y bodur depty-depe emete. Grojto af xedob yd, kyzem ner osonfterte ylem kho dent de det detrym gynfer bro enomuz fechtal agni laj kys defyj rokuroch bazuk suhelen..." [Havel, Vaclav: "The Memorandum"." Translated from the Czech by Vera Blackwell. Grove Weidenfeld, New York, 1980. ]

Translation: not available, as it was impossible to ever get the memorandum fully translated within the rules of the official Ptydepe Translation Center of the office. It was translated in part in the second-to-last scene of the play, but considering the trouble its translation caused, it would be better for all concerned if the partial translation is not reproduced here.

References