In the Land of Invented Languages

Starred review from March 9, 2009
Is there a perfect language? Probably not, according to Arika Okrent.
In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language
Arika Okrent
. Spiegel & Grau
, $24.95 (352p) ISBN 978-0-385-52788-0

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 15, 2009
You could say that a seminal moment in the history of language came in 1984, when Marc Okrand, a linguist, created the Klingon language for a Star Trek movie. The history of invented languages, Okrent tells us, is largely a history of failure because the vast majority of these languages are hopelessly unworkable, silly, or just plain unfathomable. In this hugely entertaining and informative book, Okrent, a linguist (and first-level student of Klingon, one of the more successful invented languages), takes us through this remarkable history. She introduces us to some of the people who made up their own languages, tells us the reasons why they did it, and explores the aftermaths. For example, in the mid-fifties, James Cooke Brown invented a language called Loglan that took its grammatical rules from the rules of logic. It became the basis of a landmark lawsuit (Who owns a language, its inventor or its speakers?). For linguists and language mavens alike, this is a massively enjoyable book, full of dreamers and geniuses who devoted their lives to building a better language and, quite often, failed spectacularly.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)