Review – In the Land of Invented Languages
Arika Okrent on Klingon, Esperanto, Blissymbols, and More
Jul 23, 2009
There are those for whom the 6000+ human languages in the world are symptomatic of the problem of human strife. For others, no human language has the features they are seeking. In both cases, people are driven to try their hand and ingenuity at inventing a language.
In this very engaging and entertaining book, In the Land of Invented Languages, Arika Okrent (PhD, Univ. of Chicago) gives the reader a sample of these constructed languages (“conlangs”): their history, their sound, their relation to the communities that maintain (or, more often, forget) them.
Why Do People Invent Languages?
Okrent seeks to answer two related questions: why people invent languages and who takes the time to learn these languages – and why most people don’t.
For the most part, the inventors seek a better world, or better people to populate this world. If only people adopted the same language, they would be able to communicate. If only humans would think more logically. If only humans communicated with self-evident pictures. If only a language represented women’s concerns.
If only humans were Klingons (or Elves) – although these last two examples developed not for utopian ideals so much as to serve fictional characters (in Star Trek and Lord of the Rings, respectively). They seek not to remake this world so much as express the culture of another. Insofar as some fans of these fictional worlds live out their fantasy, it can be argued they are more successful than many of the languages that actively seek to better the human predicament.
Why Do Conlangs Fail?
Many of these invented languages, or their inventors, have their fatal flaws. John Wilkin’s “Philosophical Language” and the logical Loglan of James Brown strove to streamline human thought. The end result in both cases was a complex of words and syntax beyond the capabilities of even the most devoted to master and speak naturally.
And then there’s the high strung Charles Bliss. He may have been disappointed that world governments didn’t resolve to promote his Blissymbols, but the pictograms did enable severely disabled children to communicate. He sued the school district for using the symbols – or, as Dr. Okrent puts it, this “self-proclaimed savior of humanity … stole $160,000 from crippled children.”
Four-Letter Words
An adolescent and sometimes self-deprecating wit in the early chapters puts the reader at ease. One can hardly be intimidated, much less bored, with the labyrinthine metaphysics of the “Philosophical Language” when one is searching for how to express what are, in English, four-letter words for bodily functions. And one feels her unease as teenagers titter at her Klingon colleagues. From this incident she concludes that Klingon courage has less to do with warrior prowess than displaying naked forehead-ridges in public.
For the curious, there are just enough new words and symbols to whet the appetite for some of the more developed constructed languages. A short primer on some of Esperanto’s grammatical endings lets us know in what ways it was a simplification over natural languages. Namely, that “nouns end in –o, adjectives in –a, adverbs in –e” so that frat-o means “brother” and “frata,” “brotherly.” One learns that the morphology of Laadan was designed to express subtle shades of feeling and meaning. The statement
Bii mehada ben wa
literally means “They laugh” but clues in the sentence indicate that it is a statement (instead of, say, a question) and that the speaker witnessed this herself (as opposed to supposition, or dreaming, or hearing it from another).
Does Language Change a Person?
But do the languages have the effect they are intended on those who learn them? The conclusion Okrent comes to is a qualified… no.
The real problem is that languages don’t change people. At least, they don’t transform them as fully as the inventors may like. More than one constructed language claims to make people think logically, yet these languages are hard to learn and hard to use. Natural languages are just that: they evolved to express human meaning as it exists. Constructed languages provide a new range of possibilities for how to express oneself, but like other utopian ideals, they can’t turn their speakers into different people.
Except, of course, for Klingon.
Sources:
Okrent, Arika. In the Land of Invented Languages, (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2009).
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