Customer Reviews

In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language

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Linguists have their ideas. Many of them look down at what's often called "artificial languages" (actually all normalized languages are more or less artificial, including the Queen's English, and written languages definitively so - there are no letters in nature).

Arika Okrent doesn't.

She started out with the prejudiced idea that planned languages can't be living tongues, but after some research, including visits to Esperanto congresses and Klingon conventions, she had to admit that yes, they can. At least Esperanto doesn't even behave as a Golem or Frankenstein's monster; just like any language, but easier than most to learn.

She has concentrated at a few high-lights of the more than nine hundred projects she has found: Wilkins' logical language from the 17th century, Esperanto from the 19th but still very much in use, and from the 20th Bliss' symbolical language (with a few details about the character of its creator that made me feel rather bad), Logban and its offshoot Lojban as more a less a return to Wilkins' ideas of a perfectly logical language, and finally Klingon.

She is rather short about languages with similar goals as Esperanto, like Volapük that was defeated by it, or Ido and Interlingua which failed to defeat it. She is also rather short about the languages connected to Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings", allthough at least Sindarin may actually have about as many fans as Klingon. (Unlike Esperanto, neither Sindarin nor Klingon was created to be actually used, but fans have their ideas.)

In the list of 500 "invented languages" at the end of the book she includes Anglic, which actually is just ordinary English with a revised spelling, not a language in its own righ (she might have included Shaw's spelling ideas as well), and Basic English, which also is hardly a language of its own - just plain English with a limited word-stock.

Last not least: she has a sense of humour.

As someone who is interested in constructed languages (I have a reasonable knowledge of Esperanto, Volapuk, and Ido, and have looked at others such as Lojban and Glosa) I can't overstate how much I enjoyed this book.

Most books on constructed languages just give a historical overview of the subject, mentioning highlights such as Wilkins' Real Character, Volapuk, and Esperanto, and then end with the conclusion (comforting to anglophones) that the global success of English in the 20th century makes the whole issue of international communication moot (I wonder what the anglophones will think when Chinese or whatever displaces English?).

Okrent's book is somewhat different. While she does give the standard historical overview, her focus is on modern conlangs that have user communities and hold conferences. She has apparently learned at least the basics of Esperanto, Lojban, and Klingon and has attended relevant conferences. She dispells the stereotype of conlangers being "weirdos" -- even the Klingon speakers seem less geeky than one would expect.

In the Land of Invented Languages is an amazing work of linguistic lore, representing the very best of popular science, packaged as erudite travel writing. True to its title, In the Land takes us around the globe in a quest for the perfect language. Not only is one invited (even if, like me, you are not a linguistics scholar and only speak one language...) to actually participate in the theory, math and utter zaniness of communication, but we're privileged by way of Okrent's deft hand to explore each language land through the eyes of a native. Therein lies the true joy of this journey - Okrent is a great wit and intellect; the very best of travel companions. My bags are packed for the next trip.

(I originally purchased the Kindle edition only to discover that another delight of Okrent's work is the design of the book itself. It offers time-lines, language symbols and even a `tree of the universe' that cannot be fully appreciated with the electronic version. I recommend buying the hardback - which I did half way through.)

This may sound strange, speaking about a book detailing the history of artificial languages, but I couldn't put it down. This book was informative and funny all at once.

Okrent begins at the end, with Klingon, which seems like a lonely and ecctentric little hobby, but she promises she will get back to it.

Then she takes us to the twelfth century and the mysterioius, private language of a German nun. From there, she takes us through various stages and fads of language invention. We meet the eighteenth century men of reason who set out to invent perfect, philosophical languages, but who ended up producing complex languages that were completely unusable. We see the nineteenth century utopian language builders, who only wanted a common language that would heal the divisions among peoples, but who ended up splintering into an array of competing and hostile language camps. We see the science-based languages of the twentieth century, one of which has since proven useful as a tool for teaching handicapped children, and another that has taught computer scientists to be aware of their own thinking.

She comes back to Klingon at the end of the book, and we meet the modern conlang enthusiasts, who are an interesting and linguistically well-informed bunch. Anyone with an interest in language - invented or otherwise - will enjoy this book.

Everyone knows the Old Testament story of Babel, wherein God got so irritated by the uppity humans he created that he scrambled their languages so that they would be divided evermore and everyone would have trouble understanding each other. He did a good job, but for centuries people have been trying to do the opposite, to make a language that everyone could understand and use. Others have invented languages as part of their artistic endeavors, or as a lark. Some of these inventions have been practical, some have been useful, some have been downright silly. They all get an overview in _In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language_ (Spiegel & Grau) by Arika Okrent. Okrent seems the ideal person to take on such a study; she has a joint doctorate in linguistics and cognition, and has obvious professional interest in the sideline of artificial languages, but this book is an entertaining romp through the land of the title, not an academic treatise. That does not imply that it is not packed with information, or with plenty of things to think about. By looking at the languages people have created for themselves, we get a better idea of what languages, like the natural ones we started picking up when we were infants, do and cannot do.

The languages Okrent reviews here "were invented on purpose, cut from whole cloth, set down on paper, start to finish, by one person... They were testaments not to the wonder of nature but to the human impulse to master nature." Perhaps that impulse has been successful in other arenas, but Okrent's book is a history of failures. None of the invented languages has done what the inventor set out to do. This history starts almost four hundred years ago, for "Language invention was something of a seventeenth-century intellectual fad." Okrent reviews as prototype of these attempts, the "Philosophical Language" of the Englishman John Wilkins, who published about it in 1668. He set out a taxonomy of objects and ideas, several hundred pages of tree-like diagrams that started with the very universe and branched down into particulars. Okrent has labored over Wilkins's brainchild and presents us with "as far as I know, the first sentences to be written in Wilkins's language in over three hundred years." Even the little sample she gives is tough to understand. Wilkins had hoped that his logical categorizations would facilitate logical thinking, but the language does no such thing, nor does it facilitate any kind of communication. Naturally Okrent spends some chapters on Esperanto, the nearest to success of all the languages profiled here. Esperanto works. It is used all over the world and can express ideas from many different fields. Esperanto is simple and orderly, and is demonstrably easier to learn than any national language. The Esperantists are doing their part for international understanding by their correspondence, their meetings, or opening their homes to Esperanto-speaking visitors from abroad. Okrent's final section is on one of the strangest of languages, and (especially when one looks at the book's appendix of five hundred invented languages in chronological order) one of the most successful, even if "most successful" means that only a small number of hyper-geek Trekkies can use it. A linguist named Marc Okrand invented Klingon, under hire from Paramount. Klingon is the on-screen language of a fictional warrior race of the future. Okrand specialized in different indigenous American languages, which are hard for speakers of European languages to learn. He borrowed some of their grammar and syntax, and deliberately made a tough language. It isn't only that Klingon has such oddities as an unorthodox word order (object-verb-subject) or that it has more than its share of guttural, back of the throat sounds; Klingon intentionally leaves out pleasantries like greetings. If you want to say "Hello" you cannot do so; the closest you can get is "nuqneH" which means "What do you want?" Okrent was able to master the beginnings of Klingon, but as a linguist she found it "completely believable as a language, but somehow very, very odd."

Odd, too, in that Klingon has no larger purpose. Unlike the rest of the languages profiled here, it is just for fun. It has no pretense, like the others, to promote a universal understanding, bring on world peace, or encourage logical thinking. In its limited way, it has succeeded, and Esperanto has succeeded in its limited way as well, but the other schemes here are not only failures but they are decidedly kooky. (Okrent even mentions Dritok, a language composed of noises made by humans imitating chipmunks.) The languages we customarily use, the national languages, are all far from perfect (I am certainly glad I never had to learn English as a second language), but not only have they been advanced by military might, they have a degree of history and culture behind them which invented languages can never claim. Language inventors who have tried to take the flaws out of national languages have not made flawless languages, and those who have tried to take ambiguity out have found that it could not be done, and even if a language had no ambiguities, it wouldn't have the richness and color that we want a language to possess. Klingon and Lojban have some sort of puzzle-solving appeal for their adherents, and Esperantists are to be commended for their global public spirit. The other experiments described in this entertaining book only show how much we ought to esteem our respective mother tongues.

As someone fascinated with the structure and development of spoken languages, I looked forward to this book more than any in years. Finally, I thought, Okrent's book will fill the need to communicate the most basic rudiments of language construction to the layman, not as a dry textbook, but in a readable "pop science" format -- the difference between a phoneme and a morpheme; the de-emphasis on information redundancy in modern languages, which no longer include noun declension; the equally fascinating science of constructing written languages, or "conscripts." High-level language use is the only achievement Homo sapiens can really claim as unique, and so any exploration into the structure and evolution of language can scarcely help but fascinate.

To my immense surprise, Okrent's book does not contain even an *attempt* at providing an overview of linguistic structure! For the first chapter I was in the dark on what Okrent was even setting about to achieve, then in chapter 2, 'A History of Failure,' she provides an anecdote about a kooky would-be universal language inventor, admitting, "It was this overblown ridiculousness that first attracted me to the artificial-language section of the library. It was very entertaining to read the unreasonable boasts..." Bluntly, Okrent selected her topic because she sees invented language enthusiasts (surely the target readership of her book?) as an easy target for belittlement. The thesis of her book is that *all* invented languages were designed for the sole purpose of replacing all existing languages with a new universal language, and so (using Okrent's historically phony metric), *all* invented languages are failures. A small sample of the fact-fudging Okrent has to perform to shoe-horn reality into her predetermined agenda:

* The oldest known constructed language (or conlang) was the Lingua Ignota, invented around 1150 A.D. by Hildegard von Bingen. In reality, von Bingen was among the most brilliant and successful innovators in history (for instance, expanding the science of music notation to compose hauntingly beautiful choral pieces that are still performed today - to hear a few, type her name into YouTube). There is NO historical evidence that von Bingen ever intended for anyone outside the two nunneries she supervised (plus a few friends) to ever discover that Lingua Ignota even existed, let alone replace all existing languages. No one has seriously proposed that Lingua Ignota was intended to be a new universal language since the 19th century (and even then it was voguish nonsense, not science). But to suit her agenda Okrent is willing to bend history sufficiently to include von Bingen as the first subject in her chapter "A History of Failure." It is simply not acceptable for a purportedly nonfiction publication to so grossly misrepresent the facts. I know pop science publishers aren't famous for fact-checking, but couldn't Spiegel & Grau (Random House) even have done a 2-minute reality check, and typed "Lingua Ignota" into Wikipedia? That's literally all it takes to glimpse the house of cards serving as this book's foundation.

* In reality, most constructed languages are created as linguistic exercises; tinkering with language structure is the surest way to grasp how the hidden mechanisms of language function, and how deeply our language structure predetermines which thoughts are even possible. Only a tiny number are created to overthrow all existing language. With her PhD in Linguistics, Okrent knows full well that NONE of the languages in her book's subtitle (Esperanto, Klingon and Loglan) were created to replace all existing languages -- so why does she conflate them together with those that were? Okrent consistently groups brilliant linguists like L. L. Zamenhof and J.R.R. Tolkien together with schizophrenics in a way that could easily mislead her non-linguist readers. I feel awful for the people giving this book 5-star reviews who don't realize they're mostly getting misinformation.

* Okrent's chief target is Charles Bliss. Admittedly, Bliss said and did some very kooky things (internment at the Dachau concentration camp would tweak anyone). But Bliss also invented a system for writing concepts as simple, picture-like symbols which proved far more effective than any other system in the world in helping some handicapped kids communicate. His system is still in use today. Bliss got into a tiff with a Canadian centre for kids with cerebral palsy when he wanted dictatorial control over how his language was used, and in 1982 the centre ended up settling for $160,000. Okrent summarizes this exchange as, "There's no other way to put it: Bliss, self-proclaimed savior of humanity, stole $160,000 from crippled children." Wow! I can think of at least one other way to put it: "In 1982 the OCCC *chose* to purchase Blisssymbols, which represented more than 30 years of work, because it dramatically helped handicapped children communicate, thus dramatically improving their lives, better than any other system in the world."

This book does NOT do an adequate job to qualify as even a pop-science history of artificial languages. This book does NOT teach the reader even the basics of language structure or construction (there are a few interesting observations on structure tossed in at the end, but haphazardly). This book is a series of loosely-connected anecdotes, written in the form of a travelogue, about would-be universal language constructionists (plus a few Kingon speakers) and their kooky, borderline schizophrenic behavior for the purpose of having a laugh at their expense.

Okrent is obviously bright, talented and well-educated. I have no doubt she's capable of writing a book that tackles equally complex subject matter while managing the same breezy readability, but without the omnipresent mean-spiritedness and brazen factual misrepresentations. Here's hoping Okrent moves on quickly to better things, and this book quietly fades from print and memory.

Initially this book was fairly amusing, but somewhere around the half-way mark its charms began to fade, and by the end it was just plain exhausting. This was certainly not the fault of the author, who was an engaged and enthusiastic tour guide throughout. But ultimately the cumulative craziness of the various language inventors takes its toll.

Okrent's tour of the "land of invented languages" covers a lot of ground, making five major stops, each of which considers a particular example in depth:

John Wilkins's "philosophical language" (1668)
Ludwik Zamenhof's Esperanto (1887)
Charles Bliss's symbolic language, "Semantography" (1949)
James Cooke Brown's language of logic, "Loglan" (1960)
Marc Okrand's Klingon (1985)

A major strength of the book is Okrent's ability to place each of these particular invented languages within its historical context. She also manages to convey the essential flavor of each language in a style which is not overburdened with linguistic technicalities, and with a refreshing sense of humor throughout.

Her tolerance for the sheer weirdness that permeates the various personalities she encounters along the way ultimately exceeds mine. I had a certain grudging admiration for John Wilkins's noble attempt to categorize everything in the universe, as well as for the idealism displayed by proponents of Esperanto. But the monomania of Bliss and Brown, their protracted legal wranglings in defence of their weirdly idosyncratic creations made for depressing reading. And, though I share a certain geekiness where language is concerned, it doesn't really extend far enough to make me find the development of Klingon and the antics of those who "speak" it anything other than tedious.

So, I think this book would have 5-star appeal only to someone far geekier than I. Nonetheless, it is an impressive and entertaining accomplishment. The author is to be congratulated.

This book is terrible on many levels. First, it is more of a pop-science polemic than a fair treatment of the material discussed. Okrent panders to the demographic that will scoff at constructed languages, and tries to sell her book by laughing at others' expense.

She includes languages in her chapter "A History of Failure" that don't belong there; for example, Lingua Ignota was never intended to be used by anyone but its creator, so it cannot rightly be called a failure. In addition, Okrent makes Esperantists out to be crazy, and although she sympathizes with them to some extent, a large section of the book deals with the so-called "failure" of Esperanto. Esperanto is a living language spoken by a vibrant community of 2 million people across the entire world, and is anything but a failure.

Okrent also seriously neglects the vast majority of constructed languages: artistic languages, designed not for serious use or to facilitate international communication, but for the aesthetic pleasure of the creator. Tolkien and the hundreds of other "artlangers"--whether famous or unknown--are crammed into a few pages in the last chapter, despite the fact that artlangs account for some of the most interesting and important constructed languages.

Don't get this book. It's filled with misinformation, distortions, and gratuitous mocking.

That's Klingon for "Well done!"

I started this book knowing little, and caring less, about artificial languages. Sure, I had read a few articles about Esperanto, as well as the Appendices to "Lord of the Rings". And I never miss the annual Talk Like a Pirate Day, if that counts for anything.

(Hey, "Pirate" is pretty much an artlang. Maybe I should be upset that Okrent ignored it. Arrr, I ortin' ta be takin' one star off of me ratin'! But I digress.)

Also, I had never heard of this book before. I stumbled across it in a bookstore, and thought it would be a diverting read that might teach me a thing or two.

In short, unlike a lot of the reviewers here, I didn't start the book with high expectations or a strong emotional investment in the topic. But I ended the book having a lot of respect for the creative and analytical thinkers who have invented hundreds of languages. And even more respect for natural languages. I think one of the most rewarding aspects of this book is the contrast Okrent draws between invented and organic languages. Along the way, she discusses verb irregularities, sentence construction, and the usefulness of ambiguity in expression. And it's all done in an engaging, story-based style.

This book didn't give me a thorough understanding of invented languages, but that's not what I was looking for. It provided some entertainment, satisfied my curiosity, and deepened my appreciation of language itself.

This book struck a great balance between history and the details of the languages themselves. It brought to light the historical and personal contexts behind some of the great constructed languages (some very well-known, some not so well-known) in an engaging way; it did not bore me with grammars, but there was enough there to sink my teeth into. This in-depth treatment of a few hand-picked languages was a good choice on the author's part, and contrasts nicely with the appendix, which gives a sampling of other conlangs.

As a speaker of Esperanto myself, I took interest in the section on that language. I have to say that though Okrent's treatment was very fair, she still wrote it as an outsider, in a bit of a patronizing way. All in all, though, it is nothing outrageous or unexpected, and it is noteworthy that she at least put out the effort to learn the language.

What I would have liked to see is some treatment of artistic constructed languages, such as Quenya (and others by Tolkien), Toki Pona (which I have dabbled in and find quite compelling), and maybe even Solresol. All the languages included were portrayed as ones aiming to change the world, or otherwise belonging to crazy people--more could have been made of Klingon as just an artlang, or of Esperanto's use merely for its own sake (and not for global dominion of any kind). Of course, choices had to be made, and some languages and not others, and the ones included were certainly great choices.