Book 15 In the Land of Invented Languages
What do Gowron and Hildegard of Bingen have in common?
This week's Dewey was characteristically tricky. 494 was Turkic, Finno-Ugric and Dravidian languages. Unfortunately it was all dictionaries and language learning guides, which absolutely don't lend themselves to less than a week reading, so I went up to 49X "Other languages". Eventually I found an available, interesting looking book, Arika Okrent's In the Land of Invented Languages. And it was interesting!
I was stunned that once again, our old friend the Royal Society popped up. The first major attempt to create a universal perfect language was John Wilkins who you may remember as "Nose C" from my first art project. While his efforts failed, even after persisting when his only copy of his manuscript for the language was consumed at the printer in the London Fire of 1666, he did manage to do some good with it. Apparently Roget dug the way he classified words and it helped inspire the form of his thesaurus and Linnaeus was inspired by his hierarchical ordering of things that eventually became our species classification system.
Okrent covers the broad spectrum of invented languages, but pays special attention to Wilkins' effort, Esperanto, Blissymbol, Loglan/Lojban, and Klingon. This book talks about how invented languages can challenge our preconceived notions and I have to admit that I didn't pay much attention to information about the author and when she mentioned her husband, I was like, "Wow, he's gay? Cool!" Oops.
But besides exposing my internalized misogyny, I learned some interesting things. Apparently Hildegard of Bingen is the first person known to have invented a language and people are still arguing about why. There was an artificial language, Láadan, created for women by Suzette Haden Elgin that didn't take off. Of course that made it the rule, not the exception, as the book lists 500 artificial languages with many more unknowingly or deliberately left off for space. And apparently Tolkien was so ashamed of his love for his artificial languages he sort of wrote a book (Lord of the Rings) as a cover for his work on them.
Of course Okrent mentions the Onion article "Klingon Speakers Now Outnumber Navajo Speakers" which apparently thankfully isn't true of Navajo, but could be of many Native languages. Klingon was invented by a real linguist for Star Trek III and the author estimates maybe 30 people can speak it fluently enough for a conversation (but many more study it making it one of the most successful artificial languages out there).
BEST LINE: "We sang "Guantanamera" in Esperanto on ten separate occasions in ten different Cuban musical styles."
SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK? If you have any interest in linguistics it's definitely worth a read. My only real complaint is the topics seem to jump around a bit, but I suppose it really couldn't be helped given the non-linear aspect of the connections of language.
ART PROJECT: Gowron and Hildegard of Bingen both are associated with artificial languages. I was going to try to translate Tiptoe through the Tulips into Klingon as part of it, but kinda gave up and just went with the motif for a drawing instead. I'm not entirely pleased with how my tulip brush came out, but not entirely displeased either. I love making brushes.
