FRIENDS often laugh when I meet foreigners and try to speak three languages at once. It's not my fault, gobbledegook is my favourite mode of exchange.
My favourite bands are The Cocteau Twins and Sigur Ros, who both invented their own nonsense words. That the former came from Grangemouth and the latter Iceland and that their gobbledegook is similar, is testament to the border-crossing appeal of inv
ented language. In fact it's a kind of internationalist utopian gesture, a bit like Esperanto itself.
Born in the 1880s, Esperanto was a dream of cultural unity, a hybrid of all spoken European languages. The fact that Hitler saw it as part of the Zionist global conspiracy only lends it more credibility in my book. It managed to survive two world wars and over the last hundred years it's claimed that two million learned how to speak it, a big enough population to form a state. As the great utopian movements of the 20th century fell so too Esperanto found itself whispering its way into oblivion.
It's questionable what use it might have had, with its hybrid of Germanic and Latin languages. It was entirely possible that the Esperanto expression for 'I love you' – 'Mi amas vin' could have been misconstrued as a request for a glass of wine. And as for ordering a beer, 'Unu bieron, mi petas', could have been seen as request for pity from one who could not afford to pay for his own.
Nonetheless, on my European travels I've often found myself speaking a kind of 'Desperanto' in both ordering drinks and declaring love. It never fails on both counts, and both requests get favourably confused.
Which brings me back to Sigur Ros. The first track on their new album is called 'Gobbledigook'. Their album () (sometimes named Parenthesis) was entirely in a made-up language called 'Hopelandic' – a childspeak version of Icelandic. Lead singer Jónsi Birgisson declared, in Icelando-English, that the new words were about "breath" and "hope'"
Most vocals sounded like this:
Ee sigh lon,
Eee sigh lon fah.
This may all sound gobbledegook to you, but I can attest to the overwhelming emotional power of nonexistent words as represented in a gig by Sigur Ros I was lucky enough to attend four years back, in New York.
The strangest thing was that the thousand people there, including me, were all singing along, each with our own secret versions of what the sounds meant to us. My good American friend explained to me that 'Ee sigh lon' meant 'we sigh long', and for him it was about the dormant left wing in the US having to survive another Bush administration. For me it had sounded closer to 'He sign on' which was soon to be my fate.
And then there was that great hit of theirs, 'svefn-g-englar', with the chorus that all of us in the audience howled along to through devoted tears – singing 'It's You-oooh'. Web research has proved us all wrong, it being the word tjú.
I care not for what the words really were. There was nothing more beautiful than a thousand people all singing along together in their different languages with differing words to the one song they had each made their own.
The full article contains 560 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
