In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers who Tried to Build a Perfect Language is a 2009 non-fiction book by linguist Arika Okrent about the history and culture of constructed languages, or conlangs, languages created by individuals. Okrent explores the motivations for creating a language, the challenges faced by such projects, and the outcomes of a number of high-profile conlangs. The book revolves around six conlangs: John Wilkins' unnamed 'philosophical language', Esperanto, Blissymbols, Loglan and its descendant Lojban, and the Klingon language designed for the Star Trek universe. Okrent describes her personal experiences learning and interacting with these languages and their speakers, and provides historical and linguistic analyses of their structures and features. In the Land of Invented Languages was published by Spiegel & Grau, at the time an imprint of Random House, on 19 May 2009. The book received a generally positive reception from both literary critics and enthusiasts of constructed languages. It was praised for its humorous, intelligent, and informative style, as well as for its depth of research and accessibility to a wide audience. It was also noted for its perspective on the successes and failures of conlangs, and the paradoxes and dilemmas they pose for their creators and users.
Background Constructed languages, or conlangs, are intentionally created languages. Unlike natural languages, which naturally emerge from human communities, conlangs are developed by individuals or, rarely, small groups. Conlangs vary in their intent; artistic languages such as Quenya are designed for aesthetic purposes such as worldbuilding, engineered languages such as Ithkuil are designed for philosophical or experimental purposes, and auxiliary languages such as Esperanto are intended to be used for mass communication. Though conlangs have been recorded since the lingua ignota of Hildegard of Bingen in the twelfth century, they increased in popularity with the rise of the internet. Arika Okrent is a linguist and journalist. She has a master's degree in linguistics from Gallaudet University, a university with a mostly deaf student body, and a Ph.D. in psycholinguistics from the University of Chicago. In the Land of Invented Languages was her first book. Okrent is fluent in American Sign Language and speaks or understands some level of Hungarian, Esperanto, and Brazilian Portuguese. She is also certified as having a basic understanding of Klingon by the Klingon Language Institute.
Synopsis
In the Land of Invented Languages is a historiography of constructed languages that pays particular attention to six major examples: John Wilkins' unnamed 'philosophical language', Esperanto by L. L. Zamenhof, Blissymbols by Charles K. Bliss, Loglan by James Cooke Brown and its descendant Lojban, and the Klingon language designed by Marc Okrand for the Star Trek universe. The book opens with Okrent's surprise at discovering the Klingon-speaking community; most conlangs find little success even when explicitly intended for wide use, and Okrent had not anticipated that a language intended for fictional use had real-world speakers. She met Mark, a fluent Klingon speaker who lived in the same town as her, and began research on the history and popularity of conlangs. Okrent chronologies conlangs from the perspective that most of them were failed experiments, and introduces the book with conlang inventors who had expected their languages to see far greater success than they did.
Early philosophical languages
The first full section revolves around An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language, Wilkins' explication of his "ideal language". John Wilkins was a clergyman and scholar who abetted many of the academics of his era but sought relatively little recognition himself. His greatest focus was his constructed language, which intended to fix what he considered the problem "that words tell you nothing about the things they refer to"; Okrent sees this through the lens of a seventeenth-century fad for conlanging in general, which she ascribes to an Enlightenment drive to bring order to unordered natural languages. She discusses contemporaries such as Thomas Urquhart, himself interested in language construction, who wrote a manuscript on his attempt titled "Gold out of Dung". The title referred to wherefrom he salvaged the pages—beneath the dead bodies of soldiers who had captured him in battle, who commandeered them for what he called "posterior uses". Wilkins endeavoured to catalogue subjects by their traits and build words accordingly; Okrent gives the example of zitα ("dog"), which is built from the particles for "clawed, rapacious, oblong-headed, land-dwelling beast of docile disposition". Okrent discusses the difficulty of translating between Wilkins' language and any other, due to his desire to represent every concept with an individual word. When she attempts to find a translation for "clear", she finds multiple relevant definitions across vastly different parts of Wilkins' phylogenetic language structure. She credits his work as influencing the thesaurus, library classification systems such as the Dewey Decimal System, and taxonomy in biology, but describes his attempt to create a philosophically perfect language as succeeding only at "show[ing] that it was a ridiculous idea".
Esperanto
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