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

The job of the linguist, like that of the biologist or the botanist, is not to tell us how nature should behave, or what its creations should look like, but to describe those creations in all their messy glory and try to figure out what they can teach us about life, the world, and, especially in the case of linguistics, the workings of the human mind.

What kind of a world do we live in that has room for dog yoga but not for Esperanto?

Before you judge me as some kind of 'anything goes' language heathen, let me just say that I'm not against usage standards. I don't violate them when I want to sound like an educated person, for the same reason I don't wear a bikini to a funeral when I want to look like a respectful person. There are social conventions for the way we do lots of things, and it is to everyone's benefit to be familiar with them. But logic ain't got nothin' to do with it.

The variety of shape, pattern, and color found in the languages of the world is a testament to the wonder of nature, to the breathtaking array of possibilities that can emerge, tangled and wild, from the fertile human endowments of brain and larynx, intelligence and social skills.

How many Lojbanists does it take to change a broken light-bulb?” goes the old Lojban joke. “Two: one to decide what to change it into and one to decide what kind of bulb emits broken light.

At one stage in the history of English, the past tenses of verbs were marked by a regular vowel change process; instead of “help/helped,” we had “help/holp.” Over time, -ed became the preferred way to mark the past tense, and eventually the past tense of most verbs was formed by adding -ed. But the old pattern was preserved in verbs like “eat/ate,” “give/gave,” “take/ took,” “get/got”—verbs that are used very often, and so are more entrenched as a linguistic habit (the very frequently used “was/ were” is a holdover from an even older pattern). They became irregular because the world changed around them.

If the word "clear" is imprecise, it is mercifully so. And not necessarily to the detriment of meaning. "It is clear that..." carries with it a bit of transparent glass, the bright ring of a bell, a sunny day, a candid conversation, an uncluttered table.

As revolutions broke out and tensions increased, language inventors found not only a new strategy for building the structures of their languages but a new reason for building them in the first place.

Esperanto is a ‘linguistic handshake,’ a neutral ground where people of different nations can communicate as equals.” Nice idea, but people don’t speak languages for abstract reasons. The Irish feel a strong emotional attachment to the once-persecuted language of their heritage, but despite mandatory school instruction, they don’t speak Irish.

Sometimes we do find the words to express an idea, and only then realize what a stupid idea it is. This experience would suggest that our thoughts are not as clean and beautiful as we would like to believe.

Seventeenth-century philosophers and scientists were complaining that language obscured thinking, that words got in the way of understanding things. They believed that concepts were clear and universal, but language was ambiguous and unsystematic.

The way people think about language is influenced by the times they live in, and it is possible to show how changing times led, in a general way, to changes in the types of languages that inventors came up with. There are trends, or eras, in language invention that reflect the preoccupations of the surrounding culture, and so, in a way, the history of invented languages is a story about the way we think about languages.

He suggested that people test the language by writing to a friend in a foreign land, enclosing a small leaflet with the translations of a few roots and affixes, and leaving it up to the recipient to make sense of it.

All this fighting stems from the illusion that people choose to learn a language for rational reasons, that they are looking for the language that has the most useful features, the best agenda. But no one is out there comparison shopping for an artificial language. They find what they like, and there's no accounting for taste.