Fabulous. This book briefly acquaints the reader with a few of the over 900 recorded invented languages, and the personalities-- often very colorful-- behind them.
Okrent does a great job of contextualizing the languages, discussing the reasons that Philosophical Language vs. Esperanto vs. Loglan, for example, were invented in their particular time periods and cultural environments. She also talks about the inventors' individual motivations to produce a "perfect" language; I was truly amazed by the effort and dedication that went into some of these systems, usually with very disappointing results for their creators.
I definitely came away with more appreciation not only for the hard-working inventors of "logical" and "universal" linguistic systems, but for living, natural languages in all their maddening, grammar-defying, colorful glory... although if someone wants to take a crack at "fixing" Bengali spelling, I'm not sure I'd really complain. ^.^

Share/Like this Review?

If youve ever been frustrated by knowing whether to say who or whom, or ever tripped up over saying If it was up to me when you should have said If it were, then you understand the desire to improve a language.

Except why improve, when you make a whole new one? Former Highland Park resident Akira Okrent wrote a book about dozens of people who went this route, in her book In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language.

As an Esperanto speaker, I've been looking forward to getting this book for a long time. And to be sure, the passages on Esperanto were familiar ports of call in a voyage at sea both wondrous and strange.

Most people have heard about Esperanto, the most successful of the invented languages, but Okrent takes readers on a tour of the history of invented languages that is by turns fascinating and breathtakingly amusing. Among the stops are the Lingua Ignota of St. Hildegard of Bingen, purportedly the language spoken in Eden; philosophical languages such as the lingua generalis of Gottfried Leibniz, one of several linguists hoping to create a language where words themselves related naturally to the objects they referred to; and more contemporary creations like Volapük (1879), Esperanto (1887) and Lojban, the latter an attempt at a logically precise language whose chief speakers are computer programmers.

Among the stories I found most interesting was that of Blissymbols, developed by Charles Bliss in 1949 with the aim of creating a universal written language, inspired by his knowledge of Chinese pictograms. Like most other conlangs, Blissymbols was a complete failure, until a special education school working with Down Syndrome children discovered that their charges could use Blissymbols to communicate with astonishing facility and clarity.

Okrents affinity for her subject is evident, not only in the respect she gives her subject and the people she interviewed for the book, but also in that she took the time to learn several of the languages covered in the book, at least enough to address gatherings of the languages speakers. Yes, in addition to knowing English, Okrent is at least partially conversant in Lojban, Esperanto and Klingon.

In the end, even though she sympathizes with the dreamers who create would-be universal languages like Esperanto, and with those who learn them, even if its just for the fun or the challenge, as is the case with Klingon-speakers, Okrent offers her own, straightforward assessment of why conlangs generally fail to reach the success their advocates hope for: Were all just too plain attached to our mother tongues.

Share/Like this Review?