Inverarity is not a Scottish village

How much of a geek am I? I used to invent languages. Not just a few words -- I'd design the grammar, morphology, writing system, and even the phonology for my made-up languages. This was before I'd ever formally studied linguistics.

I knew that Tolkien had done this, but I wasn't aware, as a youth, that "conlanging" is actually a highly-respected activity enjoyed by millio-- okay, a weird hobby practiced by a few thousand nerds who rank somewhere between fan fiction authors and furries on the Geek Hierarchy.

(Hey, I ain't hatin' on the nerds -- I write fan fiction!)

But it wasn't always just a geeky hobby for aspiring SFF authors. It turns out that inventing languages was quite fashionable among the educated classes, going all the way back to the seventeenth century (or the twelfth, if you include Hildegard von Bingen's Lingua Ignota. Newton dabbled in constructed languages. Kings, popes, presidents, and prime ministers have been interested in the idea and even endorsed a few. Arika Okrent's book, In the Land of Invented Languages (subtitled: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and The Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language) is a fascinating look at the history of invented languages, from the many, many philosophers and intellectuals in the past who thought they could create a "universal" language, to today's hobbyists.

Okrent approaches the subject from a pop culture perspective (though she has a PhD in Linguistics herself), so while she gives the history of many obscure and interesting languages, and talks a little about language features, she spends a lot more time trying to make her narrative entertaining. She describes an Esperanto convention in Cuba, and SF conventions in the U.S., where she took the KLCP (Klingon Language Certification Program) Level 1 test. (She scored 93%.) She gives an entire chapter to Láadan, the "women's language" invented by science fiction author and linguist Suzette Haden Elgin, which tickled me since I've read Elgin's Native Tongue trilogy (first book was kind of interesting, the next two... bleah), and actually own a copy of her Láadan Dictionary and Grammar. I was disappointed that M.A.R. Barker's Tsolyáni got nothing more than an index entry, but Tolkien's Elvish of course appeared.

The history, however, really is interesting. Language inventors are really odd ducks, and tend to be control freaks. This repeats itself over and over, as Esperanto, Volapük, Loglan, and various other created languages that have actually managed to gather a following inevitably wind up being fractured by schisms among their "speakers," often as a result of the creator's egotism.

Perhaps the saddest case of this is the story of Blissymbols, invented by an Austrian Holocaust survivor named Charles Bliss. Bliss was trying to create a "universal symbol language," and not unlike many, many similar attempts in the past, Bliss's language went ignored and forgotten... until the staff at a home for crippled children in Canada came across his books and tried using his symbolic language to help children with severe cerebral palsy and other disabilities communicate. And it worked! Children who'd previously been thought too severely handicapped to ever communicate at all were soon able to communicate complex, abstract thoughts with Blissymbols.

When the staff contacted Bliss (who now lived in Australia), he was of course delighted and immediately flew to Canada to see his language being used. But unfortunately, it turned out that Charles Bliss was more than a little bit off his rocker, and his involvement became a trainwreck. Blissymbols are still used to this day in a few schools in Canada and elsewhere, but if not for Bliss's very nearly destroying the whole system, they might well have spread throughout the world.

This is one of many interesting stories in this book. You will also read about Esperanto native (i.e., first language) speakers, how an early attempt to create a universal language resulted in the modern thesaurus, how a linguist got to invent Klingon by chance, and a Loglan wedding ceremony.

If you are at all linguistically inclined, or have ever dabbled in constructed languages even a little (or are at least interested in Esperanto and Klingon), I recommend this book. It's an entertaining but informative read, and will give you more of an appreciation for just how varied and complex human languages are.

Latest from my Netflix instant queue: The Host. (In Korean, it's 괴물, Gwoemul - "Monster" - and has nothing to do with the Stephenie Meyer book by the same name.) If you like monster movies, give this one a try. It's a Korean movie with a pretty cool monster, some endearing Everyman characters, and an ending that is satisfactory if not exactly happy. There are chases and escapes and people trying to fight the monster without having massive amounts of Hollywood-style ordnance, a brave and resourceful little girl, and quite a bit of satirical political commentary as well, including about the American military presence in Korea.



The bad acting of the American characters was the only thing that really made me wince. Korean filmmakers probably don't usually have the budget to fly a big name (or even a C-lister) over from Hollywood, and I doubt there's a large stable of American actors hanging around in Korea waiting for parts, so I found myself wondering if they just sent someone out to grab Americans off the streets of Seoul. "Hey? Want to play an American in a Korean movie?"

It wasn't entirely the actors' fault -- I could actually tell when Korean conversational idioms had been translated into English for their parts. They must have had fluent English speakers check the script, because the Americans' lines were grammatically correct, but when an American spoke, it just wasn't quite idiomatic in the way a native speaker would naturally talk.

I'm sure speakers of other languages get the same vibe when Hollywood has someone speaking their language in an American film.

Likewise, it's usually easy to tell in British dramas when they're having a British actor play an American. Besides the fact that Americans in British dramas always find some reason to bring up the Second Amendment, no matter how irrelevant to the plot, British actors trying to speak with an American accent sound like they are talking around a mouthful of oatmeal. (Hugh Laurie excepted.) Yes, I'm sure most Americans trying to do a British accent are equally painful.

I was thinking about this all through Torchwood. (I just finished Season Two.) I was undecided about John Barrowman. Yes, he sounds American, but was he really American, or was he a British actor who does a really good American accent? There was just something not quite 100% Yank in his idiolect, I thought. So I finally consulted his Wikipedia entry. Aha! He's Scottish-born, but raised in the U.S., and still uses a native Glaswegian accent with his family.

I've never read any of Dan Brown's books, not so much because I've heard he's a sucky author, but because they just don't interest me. I've never seen the movies, either.

Language Log has done some really excellent academic snarking on Dan Brown's literariness, but I just found a couple of excerpts from his first book, Digital Fortress.

Well, now he's writing about things that I actually know something about.

( Dan Brown, you fail! )