It's not very often that somebody comes up with a completely original idea for a book, but in this case it has happened. Mr Rosenfelder has published the first ever off-line how-to manual for inventing a completely new language.
Intended for sci-fi and fantasy writers who want to create their own languages, the Language Construction Kit is also an entertaining and original introduction to linguistics.
Invented languages are nothing new. Zamenhof created Esperanto in the late 1800s, hoping it would become a universal second language and foster international peace. Other people have made up their own languages purely for pleasure. Tolkien's Elvish languages, Quenya and Sindarin, have become famous thanks to his masterpiece Lord of the Rings. Star Trek's huge fanbase has ensured the spread of Klingon. However, until the development of the internet, most conlangs remained in their inventors' exercise books.
Mr Rosenfelder is a programmer who does linguistics as a hobby. His website [...] includes a bulletin board for language inventors, several linguistics essays and other resources, including the original version of the Language Construction Kit, which consisted of two main sections, phonology (or sounds) and grammar. For the book version, the LCK has been revised and considerably expanded, with additional chapters on Semantics, Pragmatics, Language Families and Writing Systems. The author has published no less than fourteen of his own languages on the web, including several members of a language family, one with an absolute-ergative case system, and a non-human language which uses vowel continua to indicate degree (and violates several other universals). An upcoming colang, Lé, will feature tones. One of these languages, Kebreni, is featured in the book, as an example.
The bibliography is an excellent resource for conlangers and linguistics students, featuring works by JC Catford, Bernard Comrie, Noam Chomsky, RMW Dixon, Daniel L. Everett, and George Lakoff. Web resources are listed on his own site, including the Sound Change Applier, a piece of free software designed by the author for generating daughter languages. The chapter on Language Families includes a how-to-use section for the SCA.
I only have minor criticisms. British readers should be aware that the vowel diagram on page 41 is for American English: British English would include "part" and "pert". While some people might think the chapters on Semantics and Pragmatics are unsatisfactory, they should remember the study of those topics is still in its infancy and nobody has come up with a unifying theory that hasn't been debunked.
Quotes
"Non-linguists will often start with the alphabet and add a few apostrophes and diacritical marks. The results are likely to be something that looks too much like English, has many more sounds than necessary, and which even the author doesn't know how to pronounce."
"Semantics is something like a rain forest: a huge area of obvious scientific interest, but not well mapped; paths have been hacked into it, but don't seem to meet up to allow us to form a coherent overview."
"In our own tradition pragmatics is something of the trash bin of linguistics: anything that didn't fit into truth-conditional semantics was shoved aside into pragmatics, to be dealt with later if at all. However, many of the items put aside-- utterances, speakers, conversational rules and strategies, speech acts, real-world knowledge-- turn out to be pretty interesting, and close to the core of what language is."
"Why Kebreni? Well, unlike Verdurian, it's short enough to fit in the book; and Kebreni was a sort of playground for trying out non-Indo-European features, so it makes an interesting example."
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subversive@lineone.net
Brilliant book!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 9, 2014