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

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred 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)
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From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com One surefire way to become aware of the absurdity of the English language is to have a kid. My 5- year-old son's sensible linguistic assumptions are constantly butting up against the deep weirdness of our mother tongue. He tells me "I runned to the store." He should be right. He says "no more asparaguses." That should be correct. And what's the opposite of "upside down?" "Upside up," of course. As opposed to "right side up," which is peculiar and confusing. As Arika Okrent writes in her new book, "In the Land of Invented Languages," "from an engineering perspective, language is kind of a disaster." English in particular is choked with irregular words and anachronistic phrases that long ago stopped making intuitive sense. If it were a car, it would be a jalopy patched together from a bunch of spare parts. Such is the curse of the natural language. It's not as if French is much more logical. So it's easy to understand why thousands of people over hundreds of years have tried to create a better language from scratch. Okrent's book is a fascinating look at some of these attempts, from the well-known (Esperanto) to the obscure (Toki Pona, which "uses only positive words . . . to promote positive thinking.") As she notes, the efforts have been mostly failures. If they are spoken at all, these languages are spoken by fringe groups, few of whom get much more respect than those Trekkie Klingon speakers. But it's still worth learning about them, because they shed light both on the perils of idealism and on the evolution of natural language. Okrent -- a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Chicago -- starts her tale with the 17th-century crusade by British intellectuals to come up with a universal math-based language. One method? Simply assign every word a number, as did the Ipswich man who decided 742 should mean "embroider" and r2654 is "loosenesse in the belly." A more sophisticated attempt came from scientist John Wilkins, whose language tried to categorize the world in a logical way. The problem? It devolved into hundreds of arbitrary categories such as "purgations, vaporous . . . from gut upwards" (e.g., belching) and "purgations, vaporous . . . from the guts downwards" (e.g., farting). Two centuries later, ophthalmologist Ludwik Zamenhof created Esperanto, the most famous artificial language. He hoped it would eliminate misunderstandings and foster peace. As they say in Esperanto, "La tot' homoze en familije konungiare so debà" (May the whole of humanity be united as one). The irony is that Esperanto advocates themselves split into warring factions. Esperanto has had some unlikely fans over the years, from Leo Tolstoy to the young George Soros, but the whole of humanity never adopted it. Estimates of Esperanto speakers range from 100,000 to 2 million. Okrent befriends several of them at an Esperanto conference, where she rocks out to some Esperanto pop music -- such as the classic "Tute Ne Gravas" ("No Big Deal") -- and watches Esperanto flag ceremonies. It's an amusing account -- Okrent is that rare linguist with a gift for lively language. The book also covers modern constructed languages, including a feminist one called Laadan, which has finely tuned words for emotions, as well as six words for six ways women can experience menstruation, such as joyfully, painfully or late. There's also Loglan, created in the 1960s by a science fiction author named James Cooke Brown, who believed that English fostered sloppy thinking. So could a more logical language make people think more clearly? Loglan speakers -- and there are still a few -- say yes. But it's not user-friendly. It's more like spoken computer code. The sentence "All Dogs are blue," for example, becomes "All-x-that x dog if-then x blue." Or as they say in Logland, "radaku da kangu u da blanu." Okrent ends the book at a Klingon convention, where she enjoys translations of Beatles songs, learns Klingon insults, such as "your mother has a smooth forehead," and feels sorry for the waitress who "patiently guessed at what my costumed tablemates were pointing to when they insisted on giving their orders in Klingon." My only gripe is that Okrent lets natural language off the hook too easily. She says her studies gave her a deeper appreciation for the messiness of language: "Ambiguity, or fuzziness of meaning, is not a flaw of natural language but a feature that gives it flexibility and that, for whatever reason, suits our minds and the way we think." True enough, but the way we think is pretty messy and illogical. Maybe a total language overhaul a la Esperanto is doomed to fail. But can't we at least try to tinker with it? Can't we make it a bit clearer? Can't we all start saying "upside up?"
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Spiegel & Grau; 1 edition (May 19, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385527888
• ISBN-13: 978-0385527880
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #39,485 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book about constructed languages and their users, May 28, 2009

By	Jonathan Badger (Washington, DC United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Finally a linguist who takes the matter seriously!, July 4, 2009

By	Gunnar Gãllmo (Stockholm, Sweden) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What a Trip, June 2, 2009

By	Julie Brotje Higgins - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.)