A fast read, but interesting ( )

Such a fun read, and fascinating as well, which makes this the best kind of good read. Bonus: it talked about other interesting books, which I now want to read. ( )

Arika Okrent does an excellent job of explaining why language invention is an interesting subject apart from 14or if one can get over 14any prejudices one might have against such projects. While critics have always had mild objections to earnest attempts to construct artificial languages, the appearance on the scene of out-and-out charlatans like Webster Edgerly, a.k.a., Edmund Shaftesbury, a.k.a., Dr. Ralston, have positively poisoned many people's opinion on the subject. (Edgerly 19s Adam-Man Tongue, introduced in 1903, 1Cis nothing more than a bizarre-looking English. 1D)

But among the earnest contingent of language inventors, there is as much to be admired as there is to critique. Yes, these inventors are often laboring under illusions that lofty goals such as world peace can be reached through their efforts, and yes, they often have illusions about how language works that get in the way of their construction process, but some of them are both admirably sincere and admirably willing to sacrifice a great deal of comfort and success to pursue their dream (or 1Csecret vice 1D as JRR Tolkien 14himself an inveterate language inventor 14called it). Creating a language is hard work. After studying so many invented languages, Okrent inevitably asks herself whether she has any interest in trying to invent one. 1CI guess I don 19t have it in me, 1D she concludes (page 290); she is 1Cnot a language creation artist 1D but 1Ca language creation appreciator, which in itself takes a certain amount of work and background knowledge. The more you know about language and linguistics in general, the better you can enjoy the truly elegant or complex idea, and the better you can tell the good stuff from the lazy stuff, the mature solutions from the beginners 19 mistakes. 1D Note well the use of the word "artist" because Okrent thinks that many of the best language inventors are really exhibiting artistry whether this is incidental to their avowed purpose, as in the case of Esperanto, or deliberate, as in the case of Dritok, a language that mimics chipmunk noises invented by Dan Boozer, a librarian from Cleveland, who apparently has no agenda/ambition for his language other than to impress/entertain language creation appreciators like Okrent.

There are a variety of motives for inventing a language, and these motives say something very intriguing about humankind 19s ingenuity, imagination, strivings, longings, and also about the sociology of movements around novel ideas and their often charismatic and even difficult innovators. And, yes, artificial languages even have something to teach us about natural languages.

As to the various motives we can point these out in typical exemplars: John Wilkins (17th century) created his Philosophical Language and James Brown (20th century) created Loglan in order to give the world hyper-logical languages; Ludwik Zamenhof (19th century) created Esperanto as an easy-to-learn lingua franca that he hoped would promote world peace (and nothing more ambitious than that); Marc Okrand (twentieth century) created Klingon for entertainment purposes.

There can be mixtures of purpose. For example, Brown originally offered Loglan as part of a proposal to launch experiments with language learning to see how it affects the learner 19s ability to be logical; but in his last published work on Loglan, he betrayed his heretofore hidden grandiose ambition for his constructed language as a consciousness transformer, 1Ca treatment of a disease we didn 19t know we had 26 18logical language limitation 19 26or 26 18unnecessarily narrowed minds 19 26. Loglan would be seen as ideal in the role of that international auxiliary language, the first language to be taught to the world 19s school children, the one slated to be everybody 19s second tongue 26. The mind-expander, 26 and perhaps also the medium of intercultural mediation, a culture-spanning bridge to a more tolerant and peaceful world. 1D (quoted by Okrent, pages 228-229) Mind you, the remarkable thing about this gushiness is that up until this 1989 passage, Brown, who first revealed Loglan in 1960, had kept these idealistic hopes to himself.

Zamenhof introduced some features that were supposed to make Esperanto more logical, but, as Okrent points out, 1CThe best hope a language inventor has for the survival of his or her project is to find a group of people who will use it, and then hand it over and let them ruin its perfection. 1D Indeed, this appears to be happening to Esperanto as the million or so people who speak it 14including those who actually have learned it as their first language 14are already changing it in ways that have introduced potential irregularities. (See pages 258-259, which are probably based on the reference on page 328: B.K. Bergen, 1CNativization Processes in L1 Esperanto, 1D Journal of Child Language 28 [2001], pp. 575-595.)

I love languages and linguistics although I am a rank amateur. (I speak only one language and that one not as well as I'd like. I only know smatterings of other languages that I have begun to study but not followed through on.) If you are fascinated by language, this book might be for you. If you are fascinated by people, this book might also be for you because Okrent takes a very human approach to her subject, often interviewing the people involved if they are still alive, or if invented languages have communities of speakers who still get together. She explores the motives of people and looks at the messiness of personal relationships that inevitably affected the development and use of each artificial language. She also looks at these languages subjectively, evaluating both her personal reactions to them and her professional evaluation. (She has a Ph.D. in linguistics.)

The book contains appendices that include samples of the same texts written in different artificial languages and a list of 500 artificial languages dating back to the twelfth century; there are actually more artificial languages than that, but Okrent decided to cut it off at 500! ( )

Very interesting study on invented languages, such as Esperanto, Tolkien's languages in his books, Klingon, etc. Fun and compelling. Makes you want to learn some to get the mind-expanding experience that some people have. ( )

I did not have high expectations. Inventing a language seems a bit nutty and childish, perhaps a way to put off writing a science-fiction/fantasy novel. But this was surprisingly interesting! Yes, there is a certain nuttiness factor, especially with modern conlangs. But there is also science, ideals, a huge diversity of approaches, and some art. Okrent's selection of topics, and depth, was just right for me.

> There was excitement, praise, and plans for translating the work into Latin. The king expressed an interest in learning the language. Robert Hooke suggested it should be the language of all scientific findings and published a description of the mechanics of pocket watches in it. The mathematician John Wallis wrote letters to Wilkins in the language and claimed that they “perfectly understood one another as if written in our own language.” Newton, Locke, and Leibniz read Wilkins's book with interest.

> Traveling missionaries of the previous century had noted that people who spoke mutually incomprehensible languages—Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Vietnamese—could understand each other in writing. They got the impression that Chinese characters by-passed language entirely, and went right to the heart of the matter.

> In 1881, when Ben-Yehuda and his wife, Devora, immigrated to Palestine from Europe, Hebrew also served as a sort of lingua franca of the marketplace for Jews from various language backgrounds, but it was nobody's mother tongue. In 1882, when Ben-Yehuda's first child was born, he declared that his household would be Hebrew speaking only, and thus raised the first native Hebrew speaker in over a thousand years.

> a young Hungarian named George Soros. His father, Tivadar, was an active Esperantist and had changed the family name from Schwartz to Soros, an Esperanto verb meaning “will soar.”

> “Word Magic,” the illusion that a thing exists “out there,” just because we have a word for it. When we are under the spell of Word Magic, we fail to see that “sin” is a moral fiction, “ideas” are “psychological fictions,” “rights” are “legal fictions,” and “cause” is “a physical fiction.” (He also feels compelled to pick on “swing” by pointing out that it is a “saxophonic fiction.”) Word Magic makes us lazy; we don't question the assumptions that are hidden in words, and so we allow ourselves to be manipulated by “press, politics, and pulpit.” Ogden thought Basic English could work as an antidote to Word Magic by forcing people to express themselves in simple terms, thus forcing them to really think about what they are saying.

> Winston Churchill, himself a tireless advocate of plain language, was a fan of Basic English and made efforts to promote it. He thought it could help create a different kind of empire, one based not on “taking away other people's provinces or land or grinding them down in exploitation” but on a shared language. He encouraged the BBC to take it to the airwaves and teach it far and wide.

> Roosevelt promised to look into the matter, but he couldn't resist teasing that Churchill's inspiring speech about offering his “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” to his country may have been less effective if he “had been able to offer the British people only blood, work, eye water and face water, which I understand is the best that Basic English can do with five famous words.”

> In 1959, two years after Ogden's death, the Voice of America began broadcasting news stories in something they called Special English, and these programs are still popular today in non-English-speaking countries all over the world. Special English is simplified, but not according to any particular theory or rules. It doesn't have anything against verbs, and while it has a core vocabulary of fifteen hundred words, other terms are introduced when they are needed, along with brief explanations. The few rules it does claim—no passive voice, one idea per sentence—are violated when they interfere with sensible judgment. It is what Basic English probably would have become if Ogden wasn't so hung up on grand philosophical justifications for his system

> The Chinese writing system is based on Mandarin Chinese. Other languages spoken in China, like Cantonese, are different but historically related—about as similar as French and Italian are. So what happens when a Cantonese speaker picks up a Mandarin newspaper? Does he just read it off into his own language? No. Essentially, he reads it in Mandarin. In order to become literate, he has had to learn the Mandarin way of marking grammatical distinctions and the Mandarin way of putting sentences together. He may not have learned the Mandarin way of pronouncing every word, but many of the Cantonese pronunciations are similar (as are the French jour and the Italian giorno), so the sound clues in the characters are sometimes helpful. However, they are much less helpful, so he has had to do a lot more brute memorization. This is why it has taken him a couple of years longer than a Mandarin speaker to become literate.

> sign languages differ considerably from country to country, so much so that in the 1950s, the newly formed World Federation of the Deaf assigned a committee to look into the matter of developing an auxiliary sign standard that could be used at the federation's world congress and other international deaf events. The result, finally published in 1975, was Gestuno, the Esperanto of sign language.

> Gestuno was only a lexicon, not a grammar, so there were no explicit guidelines for putting sentences together. At the 1979 World Deaf Congress in Bulgaria, the first congress to provide Gestuno interpretation of the presentations, the interpreters simply stuck Gestuno signs into (spoken) Bulgarian sentence structures (sign languages do not follow the same word order or grammar as their surrounding spoken languages). No one understood what was going on, and Gestuno never recovered from the fiasco. Something else took its place—a spontaneous sort of pidgin signing now called International Sign.

> In 1982, the OCCC got an exclusive, noncancelable, and perpetual license to use Blissymbolics, and he got $160,000. Easter Seals, the charitable foundation under whose auspices the program was now working, paid the settlement. That's right. There's no other way to put it: Bliss, self-proclaimed savior of humanity, stole $160,000 from crippled children.

> Interlingua positioned itself as a way for scientists of different language backgrounds to keep up with their fields. They wouldn't even necessarily have to speak the language. As long as they understood it, it would fulfill its businesslike function. By attaching itself to science, and refraining from grand claims, Interlingua spread a little further than it otherwise might have. Some major medical congresses and journals published abstracts in Interlingua throughout the 1950s and 1960s. But it failed to sustain interest.

> It might even be seen as a treatment of a disease we didn't know we had! LLL, the disease of “logical language limitation,” or UNM of “unnecessarily narrowed minds” … And wouldn't Loglan itself then be seen as the gentle new cure for that ancient human malady? … An antidote for the bigotry with which even “civilized people” tend to view their neighbors in the global village? … This is what is very likely to happen given what the journalists will call a “positive” outcome of our Whorfian experiment … Backed up by such a result, Loglan would probably be seen as ideal in the role of that international auxiliary, for example: the first language to be taught to the world's school children, the one slated to become everybody's second tongue … our engineered new second-language would be seen as the mind-expander, the instrument of thought, reason, invention, and exposition … and perhaps also the medium of intercultural mediation, a culture-spanning bridge to a more tolerant and peaceful world.

> “John and Alice (considered jointly) are friends.” If you used joi here, you would have said John and Alice massed together form some kind of friend entity. If you used e, you would have said that John is a friend (of someone) and Alice is a friend (of someone), and maybe they don't even know each other. There are at least twenty ways to say “and” in Lojban. But that's nothing compared with what happens when you get into “or” and “if.”

> “How many Lojbanists does it take to change a broken light-bulb?” goes the old Lojban joke. “Two: one to decide what to change it into and one to decide what kind of bulb emits broken light.”

> Until Loglan, invented languages had never been very explicit about how sentences should be put together. In philosophical languages like Wilkins's, or symbol languages like Blissymbolics, once you had done the hard work of finding the appropriate concept words, you just arranged them in an English-Latin-type hybrid grammar. There was never a well-defined “correct” syntax for these languages. Esperanto developed a better-defined standard of proper sentence structure, but it came naturally through usage, and not because the inventor laid down the rules from the beginning. You don't learn the rules of Esperanto; you intuit them from examples.

> One must clearly specify the structure of the sentence as a whole, using various markers that serve, in effect, as spoken parentheses. There can be no confusion, for example, between an “ancient (history teacher)” and an “(ancient history) teacher” in Lojban … Composing a sentence in Lojban is like writing a line of computer code. Choose the wrong function, drop a variable, forget to close a parenthesis, and it doesn't work. … Fortunately, you can visit jboski, the online Lojban-to-English translator, and at least see if your Lojban sentence parses. If you've made any major errors, or left out a crucial structural element, you'll get an error message.

> It would likewise be inappropriate to use dizlo (low) to say you're feeling low, because dizlo only means low “as compared with baseline/standard height z.” The metaphorical extension of lowness to emotions doesn't hold in Lojban. There is a Lojban word for these kinds of mistakes— malglico (damned English!). Malglico is what happens when you let the assumptions of English creep into your Lojban. And this must be avoided in Lojban, because to remain valid in a test of the Whorfian hypothesis, it must remain culturally neutral. In terms of vocabulary, this means that definitions should be unclouded by connotations and metaphorical extensions that may not be shared from culture to culture. In terms of grammar, this means that it should have the resources to express the range of distinctions that languages express, including distinctions that English might not have.

> In the Austronesian language Mekeo, you express possession one way if the possessed thing could potentially be transferred to someone else (e?u ngaanga : “my canoe”) and a different way if it cannot (aki-u : literally “brother-my,” so “my brother”). If it is true that the difference in the grammatical treatment of possession between English and Mekeo gives rise to some difference in worldview between the two cultures, Lojban doesn't want to force Mekeo speakers to blur the distinction, thereby forcing them to take on the English view of possession. In Lojban you can make the distinction, but you are not required to (because that would be forcing the Mekeo worldview on English speakers).

> she created the “pejorative” marker ih (it helps turn bini , “gift,” into rabinilh , “a gift with strings attached”) after a similar marker in Navajo

> Along with ui ([happiness] Yay!), u'u ([repentance] I feel guilty), it ([fear] Eek!), and .o'u ([relaxation] Phew!), there are compound indicators ranging from .uecu'i ([surprise][neutral] ho hum), to .o'unairo'a ([relaxation][opposite][social] I feel social discomfort), to .uiro'obe'unai ([happiness][physical][lack/need][opposite] Yay![physical] Enough!), something you might say after enjoying a big meal. As the Lojban grammar states, “We have tried to err on the side of overkill. There are distinctions possible in this system that no one may care to make in any culture.” Strictly speaking, these indicators fall outside the realm of formal logic: their validity cannot be evaluated; there are no truth tables that can account for them. But the Lojbanists love them, and they have a lot of fun playing with them. So much fun that one of them proposed a new language called Cinban (from cinmo bangu , “emotion language”), which would just be English with the attitudinal indicators thrown in … He set up a new Web forum in which “to practice .o'o [patience] using Cinban until I'm fully fluent .a'o [hopefully] in it. Anyone's welcome .e'uro'a [suggestion, social] to join me, of course uenaidai [expectation, empathy].”

> the language was supposed to be tough sounding, befitting a warrior race—which he achieved through the preponderance of back-of-the-throat sounds and the intentional absence of small-talk greetings such as “Hello.” (The closest translation in Klingon is nuqneH —“What do you want?”) Okrand did not just make up a list of words. Knowing that fans would be watching closely, he worked out a full grammar with great attention to detail. Klingon both flouts and follows known linguistic principles, and its real sophistication lies in the balance between the two tendencies. It gets its alien quality from the aspects that set it apart from natural languages: its phonological inventory of sounds that don't normally occur together, its extremely rare basic word order of OVS (object-verb-subject).

> By the time the books were published in the mid-1950s, he [Tolkien] had been working on his languages for over forty years. The creation of these languages consumed him almost against his will. At twenty-four years old he wrote of his obsession, “I often long to work at it and don't let myself 'cause though I love it so it does seem such a mad hobby!” He later claimed that he wrote The Lord of the Rings to legitimize his madness: “Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real. But it is true.” ( )