None
4 stars
Entertaining history of invented language - which as Ms Okrent says is not what linguistics should be about; it is supposed to report, not create. And how early attempts at a 'philosophical' conlang aimed at universality and instead created the thesaurus and the groundwork for Linnean taxonomy. She goes into much about Esperanto, and Loglan, and Bliss symbols - and having mentioned Laadan goes back to Logjam (as I collectively call Loglan and Lojban), despite Laadan being possibly more interesting, its creator Suzette Haden Elgin having been one of few women to create a conlang.
Another was Hildegarde von Bingen, and one more is Sonja Lang, creator of Toki Pona which I really thought was going to get more of an airing here, as it is in stark contrast to the heavily agglutinative and overthought and overwrought conlangs we have been used to. For me the interesting ones are Toki …
Entertaining history of invented language - which as Ms Okrent says is not what linguistics should be about; it is supposed to report, not create. And how early attempts at a 'philosophical' conlang aimed at universality and instead created the thesaurus and the groundwork for Linnean taxonomy. She goes into much about Esperanto, and Loglan, and Bliss symbols - and having mentioned Laadan goes back to Logjam (as I collectively call Loglan and Lojban), despite Laadan being possibly more interesting, its creator Suzette Haden Elgin having been one of few women to create a conlang.
Another was Hildegarde von Bingen, and one more is Sonja Lang, creator of Toki Pona which I really thought was going to get more of an airing here, as it is in stark contrast to the heavily agglutinative and overthought and overwrought conlangs we have been used to. For me the interesting ones are Toki Pona (with its 123 words and possibly Taoist overtones) and Elefen (a mix of Latin languages, somewhat downstream of Ido and Interlingua).
But that is possibly by the way, and I forgot to mention Klingon. I am sure there is a pun about the Worf Hypothesis somewhere but this is not the place for it. Klingon, like Esperanto, has taken off because one thing you need for a language is a culture. And even if it's an invented culture like Klingon, or in the case of Esperanto a cheery pacifist/humanist international gathering rather like we imagine pre-war cycling and rambling clubs to have been (outdoorsiness was once a very lefty pursuit, perhaps unlike now. Just peruse the words of "The Manchester Rambler" if you're in any doubt).
Elefen tries to do it for the whole of (Western) Mediterranean culture, and the various forms of Interslavic for the slavic languages (more point to that one: Russian overwhelms by numbers, but speakers of other slavonic tongues hate the Russians, so what to do? Have a conlang that would be of use to the all of them.)
This book is a useful beginning though. How do you build a perfect language? You don't. It isn't perfect. There are cracks, and that's how the light gets in.
