The play's two
fictional artificial languages, Ptydepe and Chorukor, are at the heart of the play's satire.
Ptydepe According to the characters of the play, Ptydepe was constructed along strictly scientific lines, with none of the messiness and ambiguity of
natural languages. In order to be able to express precisely all the subtle and easily misunderstood nuances of natural language, Ptydepe has a large, non-expandable 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 pronounceability 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 scientifically. The vocabulary of Ptydepe uses
entropy encoding: shorter words have more common meanings. Therefore, the shortest word in Ptydepe, , 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" in an English translation. However in the Czech original it is a name for a nonexistent member of the
genus Apus, .) Theoretically an even shorter word than exists in Ptydepe, namely , but it has no meaning assigned and is held in reserve in case a more general term than "whatever" is discovered. Havel's younger brother, computer scientist
Ivan M. Havel, helped in its formulation. In Czech, the word has been used to mean incomprehensible
bureaucratic
jargon, or
newspeak intending to hide its true meaning.
Example From the memorandum discovered in the office in Scene 1:
Chorukor Chorukor serves as the tentative replacement for Ptydepe at the end of
The Memorandum.
Example From Scene 11:
PERINA: Of course. In Chorukor, Monday is , Tuesday , Wednesday , Thursday , Friday , Saturday . How do you think Sunday is in Chorukor? Hmm? (Only Kalous moves)So Kalous! KALOUS: (standing up) . (he sits down) ''PERINA: Correct, Kalous! Good point! Isn't it easy?'' ==References==