In the Land of INVENTED LANGUAGES Read Free Page B

so I entered the land of invented languages. I read the books and made a sincere attempt to learn the languages. I studied example texts line by line to figure out how the rules worked. I scoured vocabulary lists and composed translations. I dug up informationon the lives of the inventors and got drawn in by their hopes and struggles. My journey also took me beyond the land of books, to gatherings of Esperantists, Lojbanists, and Klingonists, where I witnessed (and participated in) the unexpected phenomenon of invented languages brought to life.
    What follows is not just a collection of stories about individual languages. 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 language.
    It is also a story about natural language. In answering the question of why invented languages fail (and indeed, why they sometimes succeed), we will touch on topics like the relationship of concepts to words, the revival of Hebrew, Chinese writing, sign language, the role of logic in language, and the effect of language on thought. We will see what happens when you attempt to take the flaws out of language, and those “flaws” will be revealed as more important than we realize.
    This is a story of why language refuses to be cured and why it succeeds, not in spite of, but because of, the very qualities that the language inventors have tried to engineer away.

     

The Six-Hundred-Page
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    S ixteen sixty-six was a hard year for John Wilkins. It was a hard year for everyone in London. The previous summer the Plague had swept through the city, killing thousands. Wilkins, like most who could afford to, had fled to the countryside. The emptying of London brought the activities of the Royal Society—the scientific academy that Wilkins had recently helped to found—to an abrupt halt. This was a minor inconvenience, of course, compared with the Black Death, but still an inconvenience, and Wilkins did what he could during that time to continue advancing the cause of science. He and a couple of fellow Society members used the various instruments they had hauled up from the city with them to carry on with their experiments. By the summer of 1666 the epidemic appeared to have run its course, and the streets ofLondon began to fill with people again. Then a baker neglected to extinguish his oven fire one night and the city went up in flames.
    The Great Fire of London burned for four days and destroyed most of the city. Wilkins lost his house. And because the church where he was vicar was also destroyed, he lost his job. A few years before, when he had been pushed out of his position as master of Trinity College for political reasons, he had bounced back relatively quickly with the help of influential friends. But the disruption to his life was more severe this time, and his friends were concerned about his low spirits.
    This time he had lost something much more difficult to replace than living quarters or income. The fire had also claimed his “darling”—his universal language. He had been working on it for a decade, through the vagaries of national political upheaval and the pain of chronic kidney stones. His manuscript—hundreds of pages, finally complete, already at the printer's shop—was now reduced to ashes.
    Wilkins was at the very center of scientific life in his day, but his particular gifts were not of the type that go down in history. He was a mentor, an organizer, a promoter, a peacemaker, and a soother of egos. He befriended and encouraged the innovators who would gain more lasting fame. Robert Hooke (of Hooke's law, the relationship of force to stretch in springs) said of