It was, he claimed, a lost Indo-European tongue, a forgotten cousin of Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. And for a time, the community was captivated. Here was a language with a coherent grammar, a plausible vocabulary, and an air of ancient mystery. The only problem? It was entirely fake.
The Birth of a Linguistic Ghost
The architect of the Sadesan hoax was a Canadian student and language aficionado named J. “Brian” Ross. His creation wasn’t a malicious prank born of a desire to deceive, but rather a sophisticated intellectual experiment. He wanted to see if he could reverse-engineer a language so convincingly that it could pass for the real thing among people who knew what to look for. Could he build a linguistic Trojan horse?
The Usenet of the 90s was the perfect testing ground. It lacked the instant fact-checking mechanisms of today. Verification relied on the collective knowledge of the community, making it both a vulnerable target and a formidable opponent. Ross, posting under a pseudonym, began to slowly introduce Sadesan, presenting it as a language from a remote, un-Hellenized part of ancient Anatolia or the Balkans—a plausible, yet conveniently unverifiable, origin.
How to Fake an Ancient Language
Sadesan’s success wasn’t accidental. It was a masterclass in linguistic world-building. Ross didn’t just invent random sounds and words; he constructed Sadesan on a solid foundation of historical linguistics, specifically Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the reconstructed ancestor of most European and many South Asian languages.
This was his masterstroke. By deriving Sadesan from PIE, he gave it an immediate and deep-seated credibility. Its words and grammar felt familiar yet alien, echoing patterns seen in real languages.
A Familiar Grammar
Ross endowed Sadesan with a robust and internally consistent grammar that mirrored what linguists would expect from an ancient Indo-European language. It had:
- A Case System: Nouns declined through multiple cases, including the nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative, which govern a noun’s function in a sentence (subject, possession, indirect object, direct object).
- Verb Conjugations: Verbs changed their endings based on person, number, and tense, a hallmark of languages like Latin and Ancient Greek.
- Systematic Sound Laws: Ross invented predictable sound changes from PIE to Sadesan, mimicking real historical developments like Grimm’s Law, which explains the consonant shifts between PIE and Germanic languages. This meant Sadesan wasn’t just a grab-bag of PIE roots; it was a system that had “evolved” according to its own rules.
A Plausible Vocabulary
The Sadesan lexicon was its most convincing feature. Anyone with a background in historical linguistics could spot the clear cognates—words that share a common origin. Ross carefully crafted his vocabulary to be recognizable.
Consider these examples:
- pader (father) < PIE *ph₂tḗr (compare Latin pater, Sanskrit pitṛ́)
- gwa (cow) < PIE *gʷṓws (compare English cow, Latin bōs)
- ekwos (horse) < PIE *h₁éḱwos (compare Latin equus, Old Irish ech)
These weren’t just copied. They were transformed according to Sadesan’s own unique (but invented) sound laws. This level of detail made the language feel authentic and ancient, as if it were a real, long-lost piece of the Indo-European puzzle.
The Unraveling of the Hoax
For a while, the sci.lang community was intrigued. They debated Sadesan’s place in the Indo-European family tree. Was it an Anatolian language like Hittite? Or perhaps related to the Italic or Celtic branches? The initial data was tantalizing.
But the very expertise Ross sought to test eventually became his undoing. As linguists delved deeper, they began to notice that Sadesan was, in a sense, too perfect. Real languages are messy. They are shaped by centuries of unpredictable human interaction, borrowing from neighbors, and developing strange irregularities. Sadesan, by contrast, was astonishingly regular. Its evolution from PIE was clean, its grammar almost mathematically precise.
The questions grew more pointed. Users asked for the messy details—the irregular verbs, the exceptions to the rules, the evidence of language contact. They asked for textual evidence, for inscriptions, for anything that could be independently verified. Of course, Ross could provide none. The web of invention, while brilliant, couldn’t withstand the pressure of rigorous academic scrutiny. Eventually, confronted with the mounting skepticism, Ross came clean and admitted that Sadesan was his own creation—a conlang (constructed language) designed as an experiment.
The Legacy of a Language That Never Was
The reaction was not one of anger, but largely of admiration. Ross hadn’t just fooled people; he had created a work of art. The Sadesan hoax became an internet legend, a story passed down among language lovers not as a cautionary tale about a fraudster, but as an anecdote about creativity and the nature of belief.
The story of Sadesan reveals something profound about us. It worked because people wanted it to be real. The idea of discovering a lost language is romantic—it’s like finding a hidden door to the past, a new perspective on our own history. Sadesan tapped directly into that deep-seated desire for discovery, the same impulse that fuels archaeology and the search for lost worlds.
Today, the Sadesan hoax stands as a monument to a different era of the internet. More importantly, it remains a fascinating case study in what makes a language feel “real.” It demonstrated that a language is more than just words; it’s a system, a history, and a culture, even if that history and culture are brilliantly imagined. Sadesan may never have been spoken by an ancient tribe, but its story tells us a great deal about the communities that study them and the enduring power of a well-told lie.