In the land of invented languages Esperanto rock stars, Klingon poets, Loglan lovers, and the mad dreamers who tried to build a perfect language

Review by Choice Review

This book is a joy. Okrent offers 26 chapters of insights into some of the world's hundreds of invented languages. She is selective, of course, and organizes the material around a few key themes about language that resonate with any reader: transparency, perspective, accuracy, and invention. And Okrent has a feel not just for the languages but also for the people behind them. She introduces readers to some of the heroes and villains behind invented languages: one meets the charming John Wilkins (who constructed a philosophical language), the earnest Ludwig Zamenhof (whose Esperanto sought world peace), the bitter Charles Bliss (whose Blissymbolics helped children with cerebral palsy), and the controlling John Cook Brown (who devised the logical language Loglan). One also meets linguists Mark Okrand, inventor of Klingon, and Suzette Haden Elgin, who created Ladaan, a language encoding women's experiences, and who wonders why a language for women has languished while one for alien warriors thrives. And Okrenttakes the reader through her own experience studying Klingon, with its purposeful difficulty and hidden jokes (like ghotI', the word for fish, and Sa'Hut, for rear end). Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. E. L. Battistella Southern Oregon University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by New York Times Review

IF language were set in concrete, there would be no call for new books on how to use it. These days, most such books are at pains not to seem prescriptive. In 1996, Patricia T. O'Conner gave us the admirably entitled "Woe Is I," aptly subtitled "The Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English." In this lucid and sensible book she criticized the use of "hopefully" to mean "It is hoped" or "I hope": "Join the crowd and abuse 'hopefully' if you want; I can't stop you. But maybe if enough of us preserve the original meaning it can be saved. One can only hope." Now, in "Origins of the Specious," she says, "I'm not hopeful about convincing all the fuddy-duddies out there, but here goes: It's hopeless to resist the evolution of 'hopefully.' " So use it, she says. "Hopefully, the critics will come to their senses." According to how you look at it, O'Conner has turned on her fellow preservationists ("fuddy-duddies," is it?), or she has evolved along with the language. In "Woe Is I," she took a hard line on the difference between "disinterested" and "uninterested." Now she says the one, generally speaking, means the other, because "as we all know, in English the majority rules. All those usage experts will eventually come around. . . . You can take a stand, use 'disinterested' to mean not interested, and risk being thought an illiterate nincompoop by those who don't know any better." You'll note that "those who don't know any better," here, are the "usage experts." That is a bit much, coming from someone who is widely regarded as a usage expert. O'Conner goes on, however, to offer characteristically good advice, which is to finesse the issue (that is, to avoid confusion) by using "impartial" instead of "disinterested" and "not interested" instead of "uninterested." But enough about her. I say that only because in this new book, O'Conner, a former editor at the Book Review, and her husband, Stewart Kellerman, are coauthors who express themselves corporately as "I." They explain in an authors' note: "Two people wrote this book, but it's been our experience that two people can't talk at the same time - at least not on the page. So we've chosen to write 'Origins of the Specious' in one voice and from Pat's point of view." "Origins of the Specious" adeptly demolishes plausible but insupportable etymologies of "brassiere" (a garment whose inventor was not named Titzling), "rule of thumb" (nothing to do with wife beating) and other obliquely derived phrases and words. Which is not to say that the couple a k a "I" are beyond reproach. "I was a philosophy major in college," write Pat and Stewart (if I may be so bold), "so I have no excuse if I mess this up." Well, she/they does/do. The issue is "begs the question." The authors deftly lay out this expression's history and its traditional, logical definition: "taking for granted what you're trying to prove." But they go on to say, "English speakers have treated 'beg the question' illogically for more than a century and a half," which is no doubt true enough - but the authors' example, from Henry Adams, is quite consistent with the traditional meaning. The expression has been used, they write, "to mean avoiding, raising or dismissing a question, as well as prompting a different one." They thereby miss a chance to frame the contemporary usage issue more distinctly. Currently, "begging the question" almost always means, O.K., "prompting a different" question - but prompting with an urgency derived less from cogency than from the word "beg." Chicagotribune.com recently carried a far-fetched controversy over the decision of another newspaper's magazine section to run a cover photograph of an interracial couple kissing. "It's as if the couple is begging for attention," one posting contended about public displays of interracial affection. "Which begs the question of how real their affections were." The traditional usage of "beg the question" was analytic, probative. The current one lends itself to special pleading. English, we are reminded in "Origins of the Specious," is not "as logical as, say, Fortran or Cobol, or even Esperanto." Segue to Arika Okrent's fascinating "In the Land of Invented Languages." Shouldn't language be rational, foolproof, universal? Many people, in the passionate belief that it should be, have concocted alternative, ideal-in-principle tongues. Okrent lists 500 manufactured languages, dating back to Lingua Ignota (around A.D. 1150) and including Universalis Nyelvnek (1820), Ixessoire (1879), Ro (1908) and Prjotrunn (2006). Of the 500, the two spoken by the most people today are Esperanto and Klingon. (Modern Hebrew isn't exactly invented ; it revives and expands an existing liturgical and literary language that had functioned as a marketplace lingua franca.) Okrent, though no Trekkie, has gone so far as to make herself vocally proficient in Klingon, which was developed, and is still overseen, by the linguist Marc Okrand for the extraterrestrial world of "Star Trek." The author - who, according to the jacket copy, has "a joint Ph.D. in the department of linguistics and the department of psychology's Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience Program at the University of Chicago" - examines a variety of would-be languages and related philosophical tenets (there are no pure ideas, all signs depend on conventions) in a rigorously linguistical way. And yet her book is a pleasure to read. It shows how language systems connect, or don't connect, with people. THE most interesting character she turns up is Karl Kasiel Blitz, who changed his name, for connotative reasons, to Charles Bliss and set out to invent "a better, simpler system of pictorial symbols, 'a logical writing for an illogical world.' " In the 1940s he created Blissymbolics, which failed to transform human understanding but did prove a godsend - as a gateway to English - for children so impaired by cerebral palsy that they couldn't speak. Over Bliss's symbols hovered Bliss himself. Of his desire to realize substantial income from his decades of work, Okrent is rather less understanding than she might be. But she makes it clear that Bliss, personally, was no bargain. He was ecstatic when a rehabilitation center in Toronto recognized Blissymbolics' therapeutic usefulness - indeed, he offered its speech therapist his hand in marriage. But when the center applied his language too loosely, by his standards, he flew into tirades. "The more successful the program became, the more Bliss complained. . . . He was outraged that in one of their textbooks, they showed his symbol for vegetable . . . next to a picture of various vegetables, including tomatoes. They had totally misunderstood his system! This was the symbol for things you eat (mouth symbol) that grow underground! Tomatoes don't grow underground!" To catch on, Okrent concludes, a language must be useful to some particular culture. A popular presentation at the 2007 Language Creation Conference, she reports, was given by a librarian whose "language, Dritok, was born when he began to wonder if it was possible to make a language out of chipmunk noises. . . . The examples he gave sent waves of glee through the audience they sounded so strange, so inhuman, but there was a detectable structure or system that gave Dritok a scent of 'languageness.' He had also worked out aspects of a cultural context. . . . Dritok is the language of the Drushek, long-tailed beings with large ears and no vocal cords." Speakers of Esperanto are brought together by visions of world harmony. Speakers of Klingon have in common that they "are enjoying themselves. They are doing language for language's sake, art for art's sake. And like all committed artists, they will do their thing, critics be damned." Klingon's grammatical rules are flexible. "The language is just messy enough to be credible." Roy Blount Jr.'s most recent book is "Alphabet Juice."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Efforts to make language simpler, clearer, less divisive and more truthful have backfired spectacularly, to judge by this delightful tour of linguistic hubris. Linguist Okrent explores some of the themes and shortcomings of 900 years worth of artificial languages. She surveys "philosophical languages" that order all knowledge into self-evident systems that turn out to be bizarrely idiosyncratic; "symbol languages" of supposedly crystalline pictographs that are actually bafflingly opaque; "basic" languages that throw out all the fancy words and complicated idioms; rigorously logical languages so rule-bound that it's impossible to utter a correct sentence; "international languages," like Esperanto, that unite different cultures into a single idealistic counterculture; and whimsical "constructed languages" that assert the unique culture and worldview of women, Klingons or chipmunks. Okrent gamely translates to and from these languages, with unspeakably hilarious results, and riffs on the colorful eccentricities of their megalomaniacal creators. Fortunately, her own prose is a model of clarity and grace; through it, she conveys fascinating insights into why natural language, with its corruptions, ambiguities and arbitrary conventions, trips so fluently off our tongues. (May 19) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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One Scaring the Mundanes   Klingon speakers, those who have devoted themselves to the study of a language invented for the Star Trek franchise, inhabit the lowest possible rung on the geek ladder. Dungeons & Dragons players, ham radio operators, robot engineers, computer programmers, comic book collectors--they all look down on Klingon speakers. Even the most ardent Star Trek fanatics, the Trekkies, who dress up in costume every day, who can recite scripts of entire episodes, who collect Star Trek paraphernalia with mad devotion, consider Klingon speakers beneath them. When a discussion of Klingon appeared on Slashdot.org--the Web site billed as "News for Nerds"--the topic inspired comments like "I'm sorry but it's people like this that give science fiction a bad name." Another said that Klingon speakers "provide excellent reasons for forced sterilization. Then again being able to speak Klingon pretty much does this without surgery."   Mark Shoulson, who has a wife and two children, doesn't enjoy being talked about this way. "It's okay to laugh about it, because it's funny. It's legitimate to laugh. Klingon has entertainment as part of its face value. But I do get annoyed at some of the ruder stuff." Mark was my unoffi cial guide to the world of Kling on. When I met him, we lived in the same New Jersey town. I discovered this browsing the Internet, where I also found that he was assistant director of the Klingon Language Institute (KLI) and editor of the Klingon translation of Hamlet . I wrote him, and he e- mailed me back the same day, saying he was so excited by the prospect of another Klingon speaker so close by that he didn't even fi nish reading my message before he responded.   I wasn't yet a Klingon speaker, and I wasn't really planning on becoming one. I was a linguist who had developed a side interest in the subject of artifi cial languages, and I wanted to talk to Mark for research purposes. People really spoke Klingon--so claimed the Klingon Language Institute materials anyway--and I wasn't sure what that meant. When people "spoke" Klingon, was it playacting? Spitting out little words and phrases and putting on a show? A charades- like guessing game where someone sort of cobbled together a message and someone else sort of understood it? Or was it actual language use?   If it was the latter, then this was something I needed to see for myself, because that would make Klingon something so remarkable as to be almost unheard of--a consciously invented language that had been brought to life.   Although we like to call language mankind's greatest invention, it wasn't invented at all. The languages we speak were not created according to any plan or design. Who invented French? Who invented Portuguese? No one. They just happened. They arose. Someone said something a certain way, someone else picked up on it, and someone else embellished. A tendency turned into a habit, and somewhere along the way a system came to be. This is how pidgins, slangs, and dialects are born; this is the way English, Russian, and Japanese were born. This is the way all natural languages are born--organically, spontaneously.   The variety of shape, pattern, and color found in the languages of the world is a testament to the wonder of nature, to the breathtaking array of possibilities that can emerge, tangled and wild, from the fertile human endowments of brain and larynx, intelligence and social skills. The job of the linguist, like that of the biologist or the botanist, is not to tell us how nature should behave, or what its creations should look like, but to describe those creations in all their messy glory and try to fi gure out what they can teach us about life, the world, and, especially in the case of linguistics, the workings of the human mind.   In libraries organized according to the Library of Congress call number system, linguists can usually be found in the stacks classifi ed in the fi rst half of the Ps, anywhere from subclass P, which covers general linguistics, to subclass PN, where "literature" starts. When I was in graduate school, I used to wander this territory, in a procrastinatory haze, noting how the languages covered by the intervening categories became more and more "exotic" the farther I got from PA (Greek and Latin). I would fi rst pass through aisles and aisles of Romance languages, then Germanic, Scandinavian, English, Slavic. There at the end of the Slavic section, at PG9501, things would start to get interesting, with Albanian, followed by the offerings of PH--the Finno- Ugrics (Veps, Estonian, Udmurt, Hungarian), the mysterious Basque. By the time I got to PL, I would be far from Europe, drifting through Asia and Africa, lingering over A Grammar of the Hoava Language , Western Solomons or The Southern Bauchi Group of Chadic Languages: A Survey Report .   The final subclass, PM, was a tour through the New World, starting with the Eskimo languages of Greenland and Alaska and proceeding southward through Tlingit, Kickapoo, and Navajo to the Mayan and Aztecan languages of Mexico and Central America, down across the Amazon, through the Andes and the plains of Brazil, until I reached the islands off the southernmost tip of South America with Yámana- English: A Dictionary of the Speech of Tierra del Fuego . From there, there was nowhere to go but to the borders of language itself--the contact, or "mixed," languages, the pidgins and creoles of the PM7800s: Spanish Contact Vernaculars in the Philippine Islands ; Le créole de Breaux Bridge , Louisiane: Étude morphosyntaxique, textes, vocabulaire.   At the very end of this lush orchid garden of languages there was one more section, where linguists don't generally care to visit--a few lonely shelves of faded plastic fl owers, the artifi cial languages. The Klingon Dictionary was here, among other books on languages I had never heard of: Babm, aUI, Nal Bino, Leno GiNasu, Tutonish, Ehmay Ghee Chah. These were not lighthearted language games, like pig Latin, or the spontaneous results of ingroup communication, like Cockney rhyming slang or surfer jargon. They were invented on purpose, cut from whole cloth, set down on paper, start to fi nish, by one person. They had chapters and chapters of grammar and extensive dictionaries. They were testaments not to the wonder of nature but to the human impulse to master nature. They were deliberate, painstakingly crafted attempts to tame language by making it more orderly, more rational, less burdened with inconsistencies and irregularities. There were hundreds of them. And they were all failures, dead in the water, spoken by no one.   Well, of course they were. If you plant a plastic flower, will it grow? So I was skeptical about the claims that Klingon--Klingon?-- had really defied the odds and sprouted roots. In the name of research, I registered for the annual Klingon conference, or qep'a', to occur in Phoenix at the end of the summer. I wanted to be prepared, and so I arranged to meet with Mark.   For our fi rst meeting Mark showed up in a T- shirt with the International Phonetic Alphabet printed on it, and I soon discovered that all his T- shirts were a form of self- expression. In fact, everything he owns somehow advertises his interests to the world. On his minivan he has a KLI license plate holder and an LNX sticker (proclaiming himself a user of the Linux operating system). On the vest he wears most days, he displays his three Klingon certification pins; membership pins for the Dozenal Society ("they advocate switching to a base 12 system from the base 10 system we use for numbering"), Mensa ("it's a way for insecure people to feel better about themselves"), and the Triple Nine Society ("a more extreme kind of Mensa"); and a button he made that says "If you can read this you are standing too close" in Braille.   I usually met with Mark at a kosher pizza place. He's an Orthodox Jew who follows all the rules, but jokes that he would be an atheist "if I weren't such a scaredy- cat." He is slender and jittery, one knee constantly bouncing as he talks in a speedy patter. His eyes convey both friendliness and sadness, as if he hopes you will like him but wouldn't be surprised if you punched him. He never finished his Ph.D. in computer science, and he has had trouble holding down a job, to which he credits his attention deficit disorder ("It's not an excuse; it's an explanation"). He cares for his children while his wife, a physician, works, and he teaches computer programming part- time at a yeshiva in Newark. While many bright people like Mark tend to blame the world for not rewarding them more heartily for their smarts, he accepts his own responsibility in the matter. He knows a lot, but not much of it is career making. He is, as he might put it, a polymath of esoterica. His other interests include knot making, typography, mathematical knitting, and calendrical systems. We flew to Phoenix together, and when the plane took off, he pulled a book out of his duffel bag titled Science from Your Airplane Window .     Excerpted from In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language by Arika Okrent All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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