WTF • Fun • Fact ( /dʌb(ə)lˌju/ /ti/ /ef/ • /fʌn/ • /fækt/ )

1. noun A random, interesting, and overall fun fact that makes you scratch your head and think what the...

WTF Fun Fact 12957 – The Man Who Couldn’t Stop Rhyming

September 20, 2022September 19, 2022

A recent publication reports that a neuroscientist who suffered a series of strokes and seizures couldn’t stop rhyming and rapping after his recovery.

The rhyming neuroscientist

Of course, the neuroscientist’s name has been withheld to preserve his privacy, but a Feb 2022 piece in the journal Neurocase titled “The neurologist who could not stop rhyming and rapping” (cited below) says he is 55 years old.

In the abstract, author Mario Mendez states that “His strokes included right posterior cerebellar and right thalamic infarctions, and his subsequent focal-onset seizures emanated from the left frontotemporal region.

The urge to rap

The abstract goes on to describe the aftermath of his strokes:

“On recovery, he described the emergence of an irresistible urge to rhyme, even in thought and daily speech. His pronounced focus on rhyming led him to actively participate in freestyle rap and improvisation. This patient’s rhyming and rapping may have been initially facilitated by epileptiform activation of word sound associations but perpetuated as compensation for impaired cerebellar effects on timed anticipation.”

We still don’t know the underlying mechanisms that cause a person’s brain to develop linguistic dysfunctions after an injury such as a stroke. Some strokes affect the ability to speak or understand language, while others cause brain injuries with more unique symptoms. The irrepressible urge to rhyme is certainly a unique one!

WTF Fun Fact 12956 – Witzelsucht, a Joke Addiction

September 18, 2022September 18, 2022

Have you ever met anyone who couldn’t stop telling jokes, even if no one else found them funny? Maybe they had Witzelsucht.

What’s a joke addict?

In 2016, neuroscientists Elias Granadillo and Mario Mendez published a paper titled “Pathological Joking or Witzelsucht Revisited” in The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences that described two patients with damage to their brains suffering from joke addiction.

They explained that “impaired humor integration from right lateral frontal injury and disinhibition from orbitofrontal damage results in disinhibited humor.” Two men were used as an example.

Compulsive jokesters

According to Discover Magazine:

“Patient #1 was a 69-year-old right-handed man presented for a neuropsychiatric evaluation because of a 5-year history of compulsive joking… On interview, the patient reported feeling generally joyful, but his compulsive need to make jokes and create humor had become an issue of contention with his wife. He would wake her up in the middle of the night bursting out in laughter, just to tell her about the jokes he had come up with. At the request of his wife, he started writing down these jokes as a way to avoid waking her. As a result, he brought to our office approximately 50 pages filled with his jokes.“

“Patient #2 was a 57-year old man, who had become “a jokester”, a transformation that had occurred gradually, over a three period. At the same time, the man became excessively forward and disinhibited, making inappropriate actions and remarks. He eventually lost his job after asking “Who the hell chose this God-awful place?” The patient constantly told jokes and couldn’t stop laughing at them. However, he did not seem to find other people’s jokes funny at all.”

Diagnosis: Witzelsucht

Apparently, both men displayed signs of something called Witzelsucht, “a German term literally meaning ‘joke addiction.'”

“Several cases have been reported in the neurological literature, often associated with damage to the right hemisphere of the brain. Witzelsucht should be distinguished from ‘pathological laughter‘, in which patients start laughing ‘out of the blue’ and the laughter is incongruent with their “mood and emotional experience.” In Witzelsucht, the laughter is genuine: patients really do find their own jokes funny, although they often fail to appreciate those of others.” — WTF fun facts

Source: “‘Joke Addiction’ As A Neurological Symptom” — Discover Magazine

WTF Fun Fact 12955 – The Iron Maiden Myth

September 18, 2022September 18, 2022

You may have heard of Iron Maiden the band, but they named themselves after what many have long considered a popular-yet-gruesome medieval torture device. But the iron maiden is part myth.

The Myths of the Middle Ages

People tend to think of the Middles Ages as a dark time in history (which is why they’re sometimes called The Dark Ages). In reality, people of the Renaissance era and the writers who came after them needed to distinguish it from a less glorious time, so they ended up casting the medieval period as one of stagnation and backwardness.

Now, that’s not to say things like medieval torture didn’t happen. It was just nowhere near as common as people think. And many of the devices that we find from that period weren’t used all that often.

So what is the iron maiden? It’s a coffin-like box with spikes on the inside. The idea is that you’d put a person in there, close the door, and they would be stabbed. The real cruelty supposedly came in the form of relatively short spikes. These short spikes would stab but not immediately kill, leaving the tortured person to slowly bleed to death in agony.

That does indeed sound like torture!

The Iron Maiden Myth

If you’re already predisposed to think of the Middle Ages as a time of cruelty, you might think the iron maiden device sounds like something the Church, or courts, or someone else in power might have used. But there’s just no evidence of that.

Despite its popular portrayal as a torture device of choice, according to Live Science (cited below): “The first historical reference to the iron maiden came long after the Middle Ages, in the late 1700s. German philosopher Johann Philipp Siebenkees wrote about the alleged execution of a coin-forger in 1515 by an iron maiden in the city of Nuremberg. Around that time, iron maidens started popping up in museums around Europe and the United States. These included the Iron Maiden of Nuremberg, probably the most famous, which was built in the early 1800s and destroyed in an Allied bombing in 1944.”

It’s hard to believe there would be no earlier direct reference to the iron maiden if it really existed.

Anything but an iron-clad history

To be fair, there are earlier references to devices that sound like the iron maiden. For example, a 5th-century book called The City of God which “tells a tale of torture of the Roman general Marcus Atilius Regulus, who was locked in a nail-studded box. Marcus didn’t die of being impaled, though; he was forced to stay awake lest the nails pierce his skin, and eventually died of sleep deprivation.”

The Greek historian Polybius, writing around 100 B.C., told a similar story of “the Spartan tyrant Nabis constructed a mechanical likeness of his wife Apega. When a citizen refused to pay his taxes, Nabis would have the faux wife wheeled out.” The device was covered in nails.

If these devices did exist (and we haven’t found any physical remnants), they predate the Middle Ages. In fact, a lot of so-called medieval torture devices (or at least descriptions of them) do.

It’s unlikely that torture was truly that elaborate on a widespread scale, but trying to extract information or punish people through pain has existed for millennia. So why is this how we remember the Middle Ages?

“…myths about over-engineered pain and punishment still resonate. In 2013, for example, local journalism site Patch reported that a history of torture exhibit at the San Diego Museum of Man had sent attendance at the museum up 60 percent over the previous year, helping pull the institution out of a financial hole.” — WTF fun facts

Source: “Are Iron Maidens Really Torture Devices?” — LiveScience

WTF Fun Fact 12954 – Is the Soul Weighing 21 Grams a Lie?

September 18, 2022September 17, 2022

There’s no reliable way to weigh the human “soul,” though one person has tried. Still, the myth that the soul weighs 21 grams and that scientists have confirmed it still persists. And that’s because of a movie.

The weight of the soul

“21 Grams” is a 2003 film starring Sean Penn in which he plays a mathematician who experiments to find the weight of the human soul. It’s based on a story about a scientist, to some small extent, but the movie is pure fiction.

The man who attempted to weigh the human soul was a physician named Duncan MacDougall from Dorchester, MA. He assumed that if humans had souls in their bodies, those souls must weigh something. Therefore, upon death, the soul leaves the body and a person’s corpse should therefore be lighter.

In 1907, he wrote about his effort: “Since … the substance considered in our hypothesis is linked organically with the body until death takes place, it appears to me more reasonable to think that it must be some form of gravitative matter, and therefore capable of being detected at death by weighing a human being in the act of death.”

A flawed experiment

According to LiveScience, “MacDougall teamed up with Dorchester’s Consumptives’ Home, a charitable hospital for late-stage tuberculosis, which at that time was incurable. MacDougall built a large scale, capable of holding a cot and a dying tuberculosis patient. Tuberculosis was a convenient disease for this experiment, MacDougall explained in his paper, because patients died in ‘great exhaustion’ and without any movement that would jiggle his scale.”

We’re already on shaky ground here, but it gets worse.

“MacDougall’s first patient, a man, died on April 10, 1901, with a sudden drop in the scale of 0.75 ounce (21.2 grams). And in that moment, the legend was born. It didn’t matter much that MacDougall’s next patient lost 0.5 ounce (14 grams) 15 minutes after he stopped breathing, or that his third case showed an inexplicable two-step loss of 0.5 ounce and then 1 ounce (28.3 g) a minute later. MacDougall threw out Case 4, a woman dying of diabetes, because the scale wasn’t well calibrated, in part due to a ‘good deal of interference by people opposed to our work,’ which raises a few questions that MacDougall did not seem eager to answer in his write-up. Case 5 lost 0.375 ounce (10.6 grams), but the scale malfunctioned afterward, raising questions about those numbers, too. Case 6 got thrown out because the patient died while MacDougall was still adjusting his scale. MacDougall then repeated the experiments on 15 dogs and found no loss of weight — indicating, to his mind, that all dogs definitely do not go to heaven.”

Despite being a poor experiment with few samples in which his own first result was undermined by everything that came after it, he sent in his write-up to the journals American Medicine and the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, and his results were also reported in the New York Times.

No one except a sheep rancher in Oregon has ever tried to replicate the experiment, for ethical reasons.

So science has neither determined the existence of a soul nor its weight. — WTF fun facts

Source: “How much does the soul weigh?” — LiveScience

WTF Fun Fact 12953 – Abraham Lincoln, Licensed Bartender and Wrestling Champ

September 18, 2022September 17, 2022

While U.S. President Abraham Lincoln was known for being a wrestling champ, it’s less well-known that he was also a licensed bartender. In fact, he co-owned a bar with a friend. Unfortunately, that story had a rather sad ending.

Abraham Lincoln is in the Wrestling Hall of Fame

While he grew up in a log cabin in the Kentucky wilderness and then moved to Illinois as a boy, much of Lincoln’s early life isn’t household knowledge. Take, for example, his wrestling “career.” According to the National Wrestling Hall of Fame:

“In the rough and ready style of the frontier, “catch as catch can” wrestling was more hand-to-hand combat than sport. Lincoln, an awesome physical specimen at 6-feet-4, was widely known for his wrestling skills and had only one recorded defeat in a dozen years.

At age 19, he defended his stepbrother’s river barge from Natchez thugs by throwing the hijackers overboard. Ten years later, Lincoln was a storekeeper at New Salem when his boss backed him to out-wrestle Jack Armstrong, local tough and county champion. From the start, Lincoln handed out a thrashing. When Armstrong began fouling, Lincoln picked up his opponent, dashed him to the ground and knocked him out.”

Lincoln’s bartending career

Lincoln went on to become a lawyer and, eventually, president of the United States. But before his law career took off, he was a shopkeeper and bartender. In fact, he’s the only president to have ever been a licensed bartender.

According to Chicagoist (cited below):

“In January 1833, he partnered with his friend from his militia days, William F. Berry, to purchase a small store, which they named Berry and Lincoln. Stores could sell alcohol in quantities greater than a pint for off-premises consumption, but it was illegal to sell single drinks to consume at the store without a license. In March 1833, Berry and Lincoln were issued a tavern, or liquor, license, which cost them $7 and was taken out in Berry’s name. Stores that sold liquor to consume on the premises were called groceries.”

Unfortunately, the store didn’t work out because of Berry’s alcoholism. He drank the store’s liquor, and the pair’s business fell into debt. “It wasn’t until 1848, when Lincoln was a congressman, that he was able to pay off the whole debt.”

Once Lincoln entered politics, he denied selling alcohol “by the drink,” but people knew. His opponents even poked fun at him over it during debates.

Alas, he’s remembered for other things now. — WTF fun facts

Source: “Bartender-In-Chief: Abraham Lincoln Owned A Tavern” — Chicagoist

WTF Fun Fact 12952 – Yeats and Crowley Fought Over Magic

September 16, 2022

Aleister Crowley was an English magician. He founded a religion called Thelema and practiced what he called “Magick.” William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet who also dabbled in the occult. The two were bitter rivals – in fact, Yeats and Crowley fought over magic to the point of violence.

White magic vs black magic

In the late 19th/early 20th century, the British duo were equally interested in the mystical world, albeit from very different angles. According to Open Culture (cited below) Yeats “once passionately wrote that the study of magic was ‘the most important pursuit of my life….. The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.'” And while “Crowley would surely say the same, but his magic was of a much darker, more obsessive variety, and his success as a poet insignificant next to Yeats.”

The pair was at the center of the fight between practitioners of white and black magic.

Crowley vs Yeats

Yeats was also outside of the mainstream of occult studies and was dismissed from the Theosophical Society for his experiments. After that, he joined Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which later included writers like Bram Stoker. But Crowley was also part of the Order and the two butted heads because Yeats felt Crowley used his magic for evil.

As a result, Yeats made sure Crowley was never initiated into the Order’s inner circle. He later ensured Crowley was expelled altogether.

This happened in 1900 and Crowley reduced to accept the decision. According to Yeats biographer Richard Ellmann, Crowley launched “astral attacks” on Yeats and things finally deteriorated into physical violence:

.… in Highlander’s tartan, with a black Crusader’s cross on his breast… Crowley arrived at the Golden Dawn temple in London. Making the sign of the pentacle inverted and shouting menaces at the adepts, Crowley climbed the stairs. But Yeats and two other white magicians came resolutely forward to meet him, ready to protect the holy place at any cost. When Crowley came within range the forces of good struck out with their feet and kicked him downstairs.“

The Battle of Blythe Road

This moment became known as “the Battle of Blythe Road.”

Open Culture reports that after his ouster, “Crowley went looking for converts—or victims—in London, while Yeats attempted to stop him with ‘the requisite spells and exorcisms.’ One such spell supposedly sent a vampire that ‘bit and tore at his flesh’ as it lay beside Crowley all night.”

That’s certainly one way to deal with your enemies! — WTF fun facts

Source: “Aleister Crowley & William Butler Yeats Get into an Occult Battle, Pitting White Magic Against Black Magic (1900)” — Open Culture

WTF Fun Fact 12951 – The Witwatersrand Gold Rush

September 16, 2022

Around half of the gold in the world today comes from South Africa. And it wasn’t even discovered until the 1850s. The Witwatersrand gold field still produces gold to this day.

What and where is Witwatersrand?

The majority of the Witwatersrand Basin is underground, yet it holds the world’s largest gold reserves. It has produced around 88 million pounds of gold since it was discovered.

Located in South Africa, most of the basin is hidden away deep inside the earth. But there are outcrops that are more reachable, such as the one in Gauteng that forms the Witwatersrand ridge. The southern part of the ridge, which is roughly 3 miles west of modern Johannesburg, South Africa was discovered on a farm. Later, people realized that the Centra Rand Gold Field actually continued for 31 miles.

What is Witwatersrand’s history with gold?

In 1852, a Welch mineralogist named John Henry Davis discovered a gold deposit and brought his finding to President Andries Pretorius (who came from a Dutch settler family, was the leader of the Boers, and played a role in later forming the South African Republic). With the fear of what would happen if news got out, Davis was told to sell the gold he found to the Transvaal Treasury for £600 and leave the country.

Of course, news of a gold mine doesn’t stay quiet for long. Other foreigners went through the same thing. George Harrison and Pieter Jacob Marais also found gold and sold out their stakes.

But in September 1886 President Paul Kruger (a Boer who had successfully defended the territory the Dutch took over from the British) declared nine farms in the area open for digging to the public. This sparked the Witwatersrand Gold Rush.

The Witwatersrand Gold Rush

There were already small Dutch gold mines in the area before the late 1880s. But the gold rush meant signaled open season for wealthy men from around the world to start dynamiting the landscape.

Then, mining magnate Cecil Rhodes (founder of DeBeers) got involved. He had already wreaked havoc by displacing people and destroying land in modern Zambia and Zimbabwe. Then, he moved on to the south African cape to find diamonds before hearing about the gold.

The gold found in the region gave the British motivation to take the land the Dutch had claimed for themselves. Gold magnates sought to overthrow governments. They led bloody uprisings, staged raids, and built enormous sites for their workers to live on the land being plundered.

Modern-day effects of the gold rush

The gold rush is credited with the foundation of the modern city of Johannesburg. However, the city still suffers from tremors and other surface instabilities (like sinkholes) after being hollowed out by gold-seekers.

According to Atlas Obscura (cited below): “The mines in the Witwatersrand Basin are some of the deepest in the world, tunneling miles below the surface. The deepest mine, Mponeng, tunnels 2.5 miles below the surface, and houses the world’s tallest elevator, which can go down more than 7,000 feet in three minutes, traveling up to 40 miles per hour. As the gold is extracted, the mines had to be dug deeper to keep the supply up. In certain places, it can take miners two hours to get from the surface to the depths of the mine, where they face extraordinarily dangerous conditions. Gold mining has been on the decline since the 1980s, which has had a huge impact on the economic health of the region that has long glittered with gold. Today, there are just 120,000 remaining workers in the once immensely profitable gold industry in South Africa.” — WTF fun facts

Source: “Witwatersrand Basin: Hartbeespoort, South Africa” — Atlas Obscura

WTF Fun Fact 12950 – Anatidaephobia

September 15, 2022

Anatidaephobia is the fear of being watched by ducks. And despite this existing as a fun fact for decades, it may not actually be a real thing. If it is, it originated in an awfully strange place for a real phobia.

Who’s afraid of a duck?

Ducks are probably only watching you if you get too close to them or their nests. But we don’t want to downplay phobias, because they’re very real and produce real physical symptoms. So, could someone fear that a duck is watching them? Sure.

The question is whether this fear rises to the level of anatidaephobia. That’s less likely since the word was coined by Gary Larson in his comic The Far Side. The idea of this particular phobia is a hoax.

Phobias and anatidaephobia

Phobias spawn feelings of intense fear and worry about object or situations. While there’s no formal duck phobia, the idea of anatidaephobia comes from the Greek word “anatidae,” meaning “swan, ducks, or geese,” and “phobos,” meaning “fear.”

According to PsychCentral (cited below, and which does eventually get around to the point of mentioning it’s a hoax): “People who experience this phobia may not necessarily be worried that a duck might attack them. Instead, their fear centers around the idea that somewhere, a duck could be watching them — constantly.”

However, while “Anatidaephobia may seem like it could be a credible phobia, the fear of being constantly watched by a duck is actually a fictional phobia created for entertainment.”

In other words, you won’t find a fear of ducks in the Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition (DSM-5), though you will find diagnostic criteria for “Specific Phobia: Animal type.”

That doesn’t mean a fear of birds, in general, is fake though. “Ornithophobia, or the fear of birds, is an animal type of specific phobia. Some people with this type of phobia may fear all birds or just a specific type of bird, such as a duck. Although anatidaephobia may not be real, the fear of ducks is a very real phobia.”

In the end, PsychCentral explains that: “Anatidaephobia can be traced back to Gary Larson, creator of the ‘The Far Side’ comic. Larson’s cartoon comic depicted a paranoid office worker with the caption, ‘Anatidaephobia: The fear that somewhere, somehow, a duck is watching you.’ The comic showed a duck looking out a window from another building behind the office. The point of Larson’s cartoon was to illustrate that any object can be a source of fear. Since the fictional phobia debuted in 1988, anatidaephobia has gained popularity. This has led to the internet questioning the phobia’s veracity. While anatidaephobia is indeed a hoax and not a real phobia, fears and phobias are no laughing matter. Phobias can have serious affects on a person’s daily life.” — WTF fun facts

Source: “Fear of Ducks Watching You: Is Anatidaephobia a Real Condition?” — PsychCentral

WTF Fun Fact 12949 – 200 Invented Languages

February 3, 2023September 15, 2022

Writers and linguists have created over 200 entirely new languages over the millennia for use in literature, films, games, comic books, television shows, etc.

According to TranslationDirectory.com (cited below), here is a list:

Literature

Adunaic from J. R. R. Tolkien’s works
Aklo, Tsath-yo, and R’lyehian are ancient and obscure languages in the works of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and others. Aklo is considered by some writers to be the written language of the Serpent People
Amtorian, spoken in some cultures on the planet Venus in Pirates of Venus by Edgar Rice Burroughs and several sequels. Judged by critic Fredrik Ekman to have “a highly inventive morphology but a far less interesting syntax.”
Ancient Language in the Inheritance Trilogy by Christopher Paolini (although this is considered to be a cipher of English by many)
Angley, Unglish and Ingliss – three languages spoken respectively at Western Europe, North America and the Pacific in the 29th Century world of Poul Anderson’s “Orion Shall Rise”. All derived from present-day English, the three are mutually unintelligible, following 800 years of separate development after a 21st century nuclear war and the extensive absorption of words and grammatical forms from French in the first case, Russian, Chinese and Mongolian in the second, and Polynesian in the third.
Anglic, the dominant languague of the declining Galactic empire depicted in Poul Anderson’s Dominic Flandry series, is descended from present-day English but so changed that only professional historians or linguists can understand English texts.
Anglo-French, in the alternate history world of the Lord Darcy stories by Randall Garrett – where England and France were permanently united into a single kingdom by Richard the Lionheart and their languages consequently merged.
asa’pili (“world language”), in bolo’bolo, by Swiss author P.M..
Atreides battle, in Dune by Frank Herbert
Babel-17, in Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany
Baronh, language of Abh in Seikai no Monsho (Crest of the Stars) and others, by Morioka Hiroyuki
Black Speech – language of Mordor in The Lord of the Rings
Bokonon – language of the Bokononism religion in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle”
Chakobsa, a language used in the Dune novels by Frank Herbert
Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Serafini appears to be written in a constructed language which is presumably the language of the alien civilization the book describes
Common The language spoken in a wide variety of fantasy fiction, particularly Dungeons and Dragons.
D’Haran The ancient, dead language of pre-Great War New World (D’Hara, Midlands, and Westland) in Terry Goodkind’s “Sword of Truth” series.
Drac, language of the alien species in Barry B. Longyear’s Enemy Mine and The Enemy Papers
Kad’k, the language of the Dwarfs in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld
Earthsea books (by Ursula K. Le Guin)
Language of the Making – the basis of all magic, spoken by Dragons as their native tongue and learned with considerable effort by human mages
Hardic – linguistically descended from the above
Osskilian, and Kargish – a different family of languages, distantly related
Elemeno, language of two sisters in Caucasia by Danzy Senna.
Fremen, language of the native people of Arrakis, in Dune and other novels by Frank Herbert
Galactic Standard Speech in Asimov’ “Foundation series”. Inhabitants of the planet Fomalhaut speak “an extreme dialect” of it.
Galacticspeak from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Gobbledygook, the language of goblins, in the Harry Potter series. Noted speakers include Albus Dumbledore and Barty Crouch.
Glide, created by Diana Reed Slattery, used by the Death Dancers of The Maze Game
Groilish, spoken by giants in Giants and the Joneses by Julia Donaldson.
High Speech of Gilead from Stephen King’s The Dark Tower (series)
Ilythiiri, the language of drow elves in Forgotten Realms setting. [2]
Kesh, in Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel Always Coming Home
Krakish, in Guardians of Ga’Hoole by Kathryn Lasky
Láadan (ldn), in Suzette Haden Elgin’s science fiction novel Native Tongue and sequels
Lapine, in Watership Down by Richard Adams
Lilliputian from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Further samples of the language are provided in T. H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose. In Gulliver’s Travels, other fictional languages, spoken in other places Gulliver visits, are also presented, e.g. Brobdingnagian, Laputan, Balbinarbian and Houyhnhnm languages.
Mando’a, created by Karen Traviss, used by the Mandalorians in the Star Wars Republic Commando novels Hard Contact and Triple Zero
Mangani in the Tarzan novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs
Marain, in The Culture novels of Iain M. Banks
The languages of Middle-earth (most notably Sindarin (sjn), Quenya (qya) and Khuzdul) by J. R. R. Tolkien, partly published in The Lord of the Rings, and posthumously discussed in The History of Middle-earth and other publications.
Molvanian from Molvania, A Land Untouched By Modern Dentistry
Nadsat slang, in A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Newspeak, in Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (fictional constructed language)
The “Nautilus Language”, spoken on board Jules Verne’s famous fictional submarine, in token of crew members having completely renounced their former homelands and backgrounds. Every morning, after scanning the horizon with his binoculars, Nemo’s second-in-command says: “Nautron respoc lorni virch”. The meaning of these words is never clarified, but their construction seems to indicate that the “Nautilus Language” (its actual name is not given) is based on European languages.
Old Solar, in Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis
The Old Tongue from Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series
Paluldonian in a Tarzan novel, Tarzan the Terrible, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Used by the inhabitants of the realm of Pal-ul-don in Africa, separated from the outside world by impenetrable marshes.
Parseltongue, the language of snakes, in the Harry Potter series. The ability of humans to speak it is considered a magic ability.
Pennsylvanisch, from Michael Flynn’s The Forest of Time
Pravic and Iotic, in The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
Ptydepe, from Václav Havel’s play The Memorandum
Quintaglio from Robert J. Sawyer’s Quintaglio Ascension Trilogy
Quenya from J. R. R. Tolkien’s works.
Qwghlmian from Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle
Rihannsu, spoken by the Rihannsu (Romulans) in the Star Trek novels of Diane Duane
Spocanian, in Rolandt Tweehuysen’s fictional country Spocania
Stark (short for Star Common), a common interstellar English-based language from Orson Scott Card’s Ender series
Starsza Mowa from Andrzej Sapkowski’s Hexer saga
Troll language from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld
Utopian language, appearing in a poem by Petrus Gilles accompanying Thomas More’s Utopia
Whitmanite, spoken by members of a radical Anarchist-Pacifist cult of the same name in Robert Heinlein’ The Puppet Masters. “Allucquere” is a female given name in Whitmanite.
Zaum, poetic tongue elaborated by Velimir Khlebnikov, Aleksei Kruchonykh, and other Russian Futurists as a “transrational” and “most universal” language “of songs, incantations, and curses”.

Comic books

Bordurian in some of Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin, mostly in The Calculus Affair
Interlac, the universal language spoken in the 30th century in the Legion of Super Heroes comics
Kryptonese, or Kryptonian, the language of Superman’s home planet of Krypton
Syldavian, in some of Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin, mostly in King Ottokar’s Sceptre
Movies and television
Two kinds of alien language, termed “Alienese” and “Beta Crypt 3” appear quite frequently in background sight gags in Futurama.
Ancient in the Stargate universe (i.e. Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis) is the language of the Ancients, the builders of the Stargates; it is similar in pronunciation to Medieval Latin. The Athosians say prayers in Ancient.
Atlantean created by Marc Okrand for the film Atlantis: The Lost Empire
Cityspeak, a “mishmash of Japanese, Spanish, German,” plus Hungarian and French, spoken on the street of overcrowded and multi-lingual Los Angeles of 2019 in Blade Runner. Similarly, used in many cyberpunk genre role playing games.
The Divine Language is a language invented by director Luc Besson and actress Milla Jovovich for the 1997 movie The Fifth Element.
Enchanta, in the Encantadia and Etheria television series in the Philippines, created by the head writer Suzette Doctolero
Gelfling, spoken in Jim Henson’s fantasy epic The Dark Crystal
Goa’uld, the galactic lingua franca from Stargate SG-1, supposedly influenced Ancient Egyptian
Huttese, language of both alien species and people in some of George Lucas’s Star Wars films
Irken, in Invader Zim, by Jhonen Vasquez, et al.
Klingon (tlh), in the Star Trek movie and television series, created by Marc Okrand
Krakozhian from The Terminal
Ku, a fictional African language in the movie The Interpreter (2005)
Linguacode, a universal language code sometimes used by the United Federation of Planets in the Star Trek television series.
Marklar, spoken by the people of Marklar in a South Park episode.
Minbari from Babylon 5, three related languages used together, corresponding to the areas of expertise of the three societal castes.
Nadsat, the fictional language spoken by Alex and his friends in Clockwork Orange
Nellish, a personal language from the main character of Nell
Paku from Land of the Lost
PortuGreek, the trade language featured in Waterworld
The pseudo-Spanish/Greek/Arabic language of Republica, as used in the fictional Chanel 9 program within the British comedy sketch show the The Fast Show
Quenya (qya) and Sindarin (sjn), the two Elven languages, spoken in the Lord of the Rings movies.
Slovetzian, the fictional Slavic language of Slovetzia in the movie The Beautician and the Beast
The Star Wars series features several fictional languages.
Tenctonese from the Alien Nation movie and television series, created by Van Ling and Kenneth Johnson
Unas in Stargate SG-1, supposedly the first hosts of the Goa’uld
Ulam, language spoken by the prehistoric humans in Anthony Burgess’ movie Quest for Fire, created by melting roots of European languages.
Vampire language used in the movie Blade.
Vulcan language from Star Trek
Unnamed languages
In the Janissaries series of science-fiction novels by Jerry Pournelle, the human natives of the planet Tran speak a language apparently derived from Mycenaean. A form of Latin is also spoken in an empire resembling ancient Rome’s, but only by scholars.
Riddley Walker, a 1980 novel by Russell Hoban, set in a post-apocalyptic future, is written entirely in a “devolved” form of English.
Writer/director Luc Besson invented a Divine Language for Milla Jovovich’s character “Leeloo” to speak in the film The Fifth Element.
Music
Gulevache: fictional Romance Language of the kingdom of Gulevandia on the bilingual opera Cardoso en Gulevandia by the comedy group Les Luthiers
Kobaian, the language used by 70’s French rock group Magma.
Vonlenska, sometimes known as “Hopelandic”, the language sung by Jón Þór Birgisson of the Icelandic band “Sigur Rós” on many of their songs.
Loxian, featured on the Enya album Amarantine.
Unnamed language by Yves Barbieux, used in his song “Sanomi” and performed by the Belgian group Urban Trad in the Eurovision Song contest in 2003.
Mohelmot, a forbidden language used by The Residents on the album The Big Bubble: Part Four of the Mole Trilogy.
Unnamed language by Emmanuelle Orange, used in her song Pialoushka and performed by Montreal band Eden106.
Unnamed language featured in the chorus of 2NU’s 1991 track This is Ponderous.
Unnamed language featured in the soundtrack to the film 1492: Conquest of Paradise by Vangelis.

— WTF fun facts

Source: “List of constructed languages” — TranslationDirectory.com

WTF • Fun • Fact ( /dʌb(ə)lˌju/ /ti/ /ef/ • /fʌn/ • /fækt/ ) 1. noun A random, interesting, and overall fun fact that makes you scratch your head and think what the...