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

by Arika Okrent

The English language may be packed with irregularities, but at least its curse words are easy.

The same cannot be said of many of the made-up languages Arika Okrent examines in her history of the eccentric and often erratic dreamers who sought to improve on all our spoken tongues by inventing their own. Okrent, drawn to the “faded plastic flowers” among the “lush orchid garden of languages,” explores some ambitious languages and their inventors. The languages might be mostly dire failures, but Okrent’s study is fascinating, accessible, and offers interesting insights into what we say and how we say it.

Between earning a certification in Klingon and attending global Esperanto conferences, Okrent tries mightily to find the word for “shit” in one of the earliest and most comprehensive invented languages. John Wilkins created the Philosophical Language in the 17th century, when it seemed that “any self-respecting gentleman of the day could be expected to have some sort of universal language up his sleeve.” The wholly logical universal language fad compelled Wilkins to create “a sort of arithmetic of letters,” by which everything in the universe was classified and numbered, and each word was composed of letters assigned to classifications. A word, then, would convey Wilkins’ assigned meaning with absolutely no ambiguity. After an exhaustive search of Wilkins’ 600-plus-page dictionary (organized by category, not alphabet), Okrent finds “shit”: “Cepuhws. A serous and watery purgative motion from the consistent and gross parts (from the guts downward).” (Okrent includes a diagram of all “purgation,” which she calls “the seven-year-old boy’s dream catalog of bodily function.”)

Through all the bull-cepuhws of navigating these invented tongues Okrent manages to translate, so to speak, these languages’ “logic” and their often radical notions of what, why, and how we should communicate. She explains languages like the Chinese-character-inspired Blissymbolics, sometimes used for developmentally disabled children, and Basic English, an 850-word version of the language advocated by Winston Churchill. (Though, as Franklin Roosevelt told him, “blood, work, eye water and face water” doesn’t have quite the same ring as “blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”) She finds the word for “to menstruate joyfully” in the female-oriented Láadan, and discovers the closest thing the higher-purpose-free Klingon has to “hello” is “What do you want?” Okrent, a linguist, writes the clean, elegant English of someone who has studied language until it seems to lose all meaning, and come back around to clarity.

Interestingly enough, “clear” is one of the words that gives her some trouble as she tries to translate a Jorge Luis Borges passage on the difficulty of a universal tongue. In Wilkins’ language, she finds 25 options for the word “clear” (unsurprisingly, Wilkins did inspire Roget, it seems, and the thesaurus). And it’s no easier in Loglan — invented by sociologist James Cooke Brown in an attempt to “make logical forms speakable,” to create a language completely free of culture-specific connotation. For her translation, Okrent had to grasp the complex grammar of Loglan (or rather, Lojban, sort of a Loglan 2.0 that Brown tried and failed to squash), and though she managed, Lojbanists told her she was slightly off.

Yes, they’re called Lojbanists, even though there are very few of them and their language is nearly impossible to speak or write. In fact, no matter how obscure and difficult the language, Okrent finds passionate adherents. While language inventors are often motivated by a quixotic search for clarity — to escape from “word magic,” the spell cast by metaphorical and idiomatic or even plain uses of language — language adopters often have different motives and methods, Okrent notes. They are “self-selecting,” they fall in love, and simply by participating in their chosen tongue, no matter its claim to fixed logic and universal applicability, they create a culture complete with customs, idioms, metaphors, and puns. We not only have a drive to invent language, Okrent shows, but also an urge to be inventive within languages. No matter how rigidly logical languages aim to be, communicating, it seems, is always an art.

Excerpt: The primary motivation for inventing a new language has been to improve upon natural language, to eliminate its design flaws, or rather the flaws it has developed for lack of conscious design. Looked at from an engineering perspective, language is kind of a disaster. We have words that mean more than one thing, meanings that have more than one word for them, and some things we’d like to say that, no matter how hard we struggle, seem impossible to put into words. We have irregular verbs, idioms, and exceptions to every grammatical rule — all of which make languages unnecessarily hard to learn. We misunderstand each other all the time; our messages are ambiguous despite our best efforts to be clear. Most of us are content to live with these problems, but over the centuries a bold idea has bloomed again and again in the minds of those who think these problems can be solved: Why not build a better language?

Further Reading: The Search for the Perfect Language (The Making of Europe) and The Artificial Language Movement (Language Library)