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

by Arika Okrent

  I wondered if any of those who thought they could do better than Wilkins ever tried their hand at a “practical application” of his system. It is easy to take issue with his tables or his grammatical apparatus or his general view of the universe. You barely have to look at any of these things before you can find something to criticize. But if you sit down and make a sincere attempt to use the language, you discover the really important flaw, not in his language, but in the whole idea of a philosophical language: when you speak in concepts, it's too damn hard to say anything.

  People find something very comforting about the notion that words are the problem, not concepts. When words fail us, we tend to blame the words. We've all experienced the frustration of not being able to say what we mean to say. When we struggle with language, we have the sensation that our clean, beautiful ideas remain trapped inside our heads. We accuse language of being too crude and clumsy to adequately express our thoughts. But perhaps we flatter ourselves.

  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. Instead of blaming language for failing to capture our thoughts, maybe we should thank it for giving some shape to the muddle in our heads.

  I'm no philosopher, and I am not qualified to make claims about whether thought is possible without language (although I think it is), or whether there may be other means than language by which we can give shape to the muddle (sure, why not?). I'm just saying that when it comes to expressing ourselves, we need some fuzzy edges, a chance to discover what we're trying to say even as we say it. We should be grateful to our sloppy, imperfect languages for giving us some wiggle room.

  To be fair, Wilkins didn't assume our thoughts were as organized as his language. But he did assume there was a truth “out there” that his language could help us to see “by unmasking many wild errors, that shelter themselves under the disguise of affected phrases.” His system would help us learn to think clearly. To know the word would be to know the thing. We would be able to see everything for what it was. And if we suspected something wasn't what it seemed, we could call it what it was—the serous and watery purgative motion (from the guts downward) of the consistent and gross parts of a male, hollow-horned, ruminant, cloven-footed beast.

  The “language as mathematics” idea, as we will see, had a resurgence in the late 1950s, another era of science and computation. It would be used as a tool of inquiry and experiment, a way to discover how language might work, how our minds might work.

  But the goals of the seventeenth-century language inventors went beyond that. They were after a cure for Babel. They wanted a real, working language that people could use. They neglected, however, to think much about usability.

  Except for poor George Dalgarno. Remember him? The stubborn schoolmaster whose disagreements with Wilkins had resulted in the end of their collaboration? He wanted to keep the number of root words in his language to a minimum. He wanted them organized in verses that were easy to memorize. Wilkins pushed for philosophical perfection. Dalgarno pushed back for usability. They came to an impasse.

  Dalgarno left Oxford for a few months to work alone. He returned to find that scholarly interest was now solely focused on Wilkins's emerging project. His own work was ignored or undermined by accusations that he was plagiarizing from Wilkins. In his disappointment he resolved to “make haste to cast it lyke an abortive out of my hands.”

  But instead, “after bemoaning myself and my unfortunate labors I made all haste possible.” He worked frantically, hoping to beat Wilkins to publication. In his anxiousness, his confidence faltered. He reorganized his root words, doing away with the mnemonic verses and replacing them with a hierarchical table of the type Wilkins had argued for. His list of root words grew. But he clung to his principles by presenting a method to aid memorization (a sort of word-association strategy that he doesn't elaborate on very much), and he was sure to emphasize that he did not provide root words for the enormous range of natural species (like he knew Wilkins would). He instead promoted his compounding strategy (for example, elephant = largest whole-footed beast; coal = mineral black fire).

  Dalgarno managed to publish Ars signorum (The Art of Signs) in 1661, seven years before Wilkins's Philosophical Language came out. His rush to publication went unrewarded. The one detailed review he received mocks him for his poor skills in Latin, implies that his benefactors supported him only because they felt sorry for him, and concludes by using his own language to call him nηkpim sυfa (the greatest ass).

  Because of Dalgarno's haste and his obvious discomfort with some of the Wilkins-influenced features he had decided to adopt, Ars signorum was, in fact, kind of a mess. And a great deal harder to figure out how to use than Wilkins's system ultimately was. But Dalgarno deserves credit for having been unique in at least thinking about the usability of his language in practical terms. The other language inventors of the time had their heads in the philosophical clouds. They assumed that if you got your theory of concepts right, the language would automatically be easy to learn and to use. Dalgarno, ever the teacher, gave a little more consideration to the poor soul at the other end of that assumption. And in doing so, he was a very early pioneer of the next major era in language invention.

  A Linguistic

  Handshake

  By the time Wilkins, Dalgarno, and the rest of the intellectual circle of the philosophical language inventors were dead, French had become the international language of culture and diplomacy. Scientific academies in Berlin, St. Petersburg, and Turin adopted French as an official language. Treaties were drafted in French, even when neither party was a French-speaking nation. The elites of all European nations could conduct their business in French. Scientists and philosophers no longer focused their attention on creating a new universal language—they had one that worked well enough.

  Language projects cropped up here and there, of course, especially after the work of Leibniz came into fashion among scholars in the 1760s. French was fine for communication purposes, but it was no perfect mathematical system. A couple of projects attempted to make French a bit more orderly, while others continued the tradition of starting from scratch with letters, numbers, and symbols in the quest for that perfect system. One of these, the Pasigraphie of Joseph de Maimieux, gained a bit of success—for a few years around 1800, it was taught in schools in France and Germany, and Napoleon was reported to have admired it. But probably only in theory. Had he actually tried to use it, his assessment may have been different. He would have found himself lost in a thicket of tables, sub-tables, columns, and lines, all serving to carve up the world of experience into arbitrary categories, all filled with odd-looking symbols that were hard to distinguish from each other.

  Maimieux, like most language inventors at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was still using a method that was now old and tired and, after two hundred years, had never resulted in a language that people wanted to use. When he died in 1820, no doubt dismayed that his brief brush with success had remained so brief, he might have comforted himself with the thought that he had tried to do something that was simply impossible. If the establishment of an international network of teaching programs was not enough, if the endorsement of an emperor was not enough, then nothing was enough. No one would ever be able to get people to use an invented language.

  But if he could have seen not even very far into the future, to the end of the nineteenth century, he would have been amazed. Not only would he have seen fierce new enthusiasm and optimism for the prospects of a universal language, he would have seen people, thousands of people, speaking to each other, writing to each other, and most of all arguing with each other in invented languages. The arguments were over which version of which language was the one best suited to be the universal language. Hundreds of projects and revisions of projects appeared during this time. In the end, none of them would become the universal langua
ge. But one of them, perhaps even more surprisingly, would become a living language.

  Kim Henriksen is way cooler than you'd expect an accordion-playing Esperantist to be. Tall, lean, and muscular, with creative facial hair and a European-cowboy style, he looks younger than he is. In Esperantoland, he is something of a rock star. Through the 1980s, his band Amplifiki played international youth congresses all over Europe, releasing hits like “Tute ne gravas” (No Big Deal) and “Sola” (Alone). The band's name came from an old Esperanto dictionary word for “amplify,” but a prurient mind might read it as am-pli-fiki (love-more-fucking). He later formed the Danish/Bosnian/Polish group Esperanto Desperado, which came out with party starters like “Skavirino” (Ska Woman) and “La anaso kaj la simio” (The Duck and the Monkey). I wasn't prepared to encounter anyone like him when I set out on my first trip to Esperantoland.

  “Esperantoland” sounds a lot sillier in English than it does in Esperanto. There is no land of Esperanto, of course, though not for lack of trying on the part of the Esperantists. In 1908 the tiny neutral state of Moresnet, the orphan of a border dispute between the Netherlands and Prussia, rose up to declare itself the first free Esperanto state of Amikejo (Friendship Place). More than 3 percent of the four thousand inhabitants had learned the language (a higher percentage of Esperanto speakers has never been achieved in any other country), and their flag, stamps, coins, and an anthem were ready to go. But in the increasingly tense and nationalistic atmosphere of prewar Europe, there was no place for a friendship place, and Esperanto never got its piece of terra firma. Instead, the proponents of Esperanto have made do with a virtual homeland. Esperantoland is located wherever people are speaking Esperanto. And contrary to what I had assumed, they really are speaking Esperanto.

  The earthly setting of my first Esperanto experience was the MIT campus, the 2003 venue for the annual congress of the Esperanto League of North America. As I drove from New Jersey through hellish Fourth of July traffic toward Cambridge, the clearest mental picture of an Esperanto congress I could muster was five gray-haired radicals on folding chairs bantering about the Spanish civil war and their stamp collections. I imagined they would be speaking Esperanto, but not for everything. Surely, as soon as something worth saying came up, they would lapse back into English. Just in case, though, I studied up. I brought my dictionary and grammar book and practiced having the maturity not to giggle when I spoke the textbook phrase for “How are you?” or more specifically “How are you faring?” which is rendered as “Kiel vi fartas?”

  More than eighty people turned up at the conference, and I can say that almost all of them spoke only Esperanto the entire weekend. Some were the retired teachers and spry socialist grandpas I was prepared for. Their emotional proselytizing about the noble ideals of “our dear language” clicked right into the Esperanto landscape I'd imagined. But there was no place in that landscape for Kim (known as Kimo in Esperantoland) and his 3:00 P.M. presentation on the importance of rock music in the history of Esperanto culture.

  I really wanted to hear what he had to say on the subject, but I had a terrible time understanding him. Three obstacles hindered my full comprehension. One was my incomplete grasp of the language. I had studied Esperanto for only six weeks, by myself, from a book. I thought I was doing pretty well. I understood every word of the opening lecture on the future of the Esperanto movement. I held my own in conversations about topics ranging from the language imperialism of English to Esperanto haiku. In fact, I was doing so well that I started to enjoy meeting my fellow conference goers so I could chitchat about my meager Esperanto experience. “Oh, I started a month and a half ago, no teacher, just a book,” I would toss off casually. If I really wanted a pat on the head, I'd add, “This is actually the first time I've ever heard it spoken.”

  I can be a bit of a show-off when it comes to facility with language. I have an aptitude for it that is probably much less impressive than that of the average European, but I've figured out how to work it to my full advantage by picking languages with high impact-to-proficiency ratios. Pretty good Hungarian gets you a lot more love in Budapest than perfect French buys you in Paris, and one well-placed word of Ibo to a Nigerian taxi driver can reward you with enough compliments to beat back the insecurities from all other parts of your life for a week. I wasn't expecting an ego boost from Esperanto. We are all speaking a second language here. Who's to impress? So when I heard, “Only six weeks? You're doing wonderfully!” I might have milked it a little. But I grew suspicious after four or five speeches about how we must do everything possible to encourage young people and keep them in the movement. A quick look around told me that I qualified as a young person (I was thirty-three at the time). The flattery may not have been inspired by my dazzling language skills.

  The second obstacle to my full understanding of the role of rock music in Esperanto culture was Kimo's impenetrable Danish accent. In one sense Esperanto pronunciation is standardized (each letter stands for one sound, no confusing c or gh), but it allows for a lot of bleed around the edges; my r sound and a French person's r sound will be different. Usually, this isn't a problem. I've since heard and fully understood British, Belgian, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, and Chinese Esperanto. But Kimo's consonants were nearly unrecognizable. The Danes have a saying about their peculiar phonology: “Danskerne taler med kartoffler i munden” (The Danes speak with potatoes in their mouths). Even the expert Esperantists were having trouble. One of them generously took me aside and said, “Don't worry if you can't understand the Danish guy. I can't either.”

  My final obstacle to Kimo comprehension had to do with the important sense in which he differed from all the other speakers at the congress. They were fluent, but he was rapid-fire fluent. I couldn't keep up with him. He spoke like a native. But this was not as confounding as the fact that he spoke like a native because he was a native. I discovered this when Kimo's son, a nine-year-old with purple hair and a skateboard tucked under his arm, wandered into the room to ask his father a question. The woman in front of me asked the man next to her, “Is his son a native speaker, too?” “Yes, second-generation,” he answered. “Wonderful, no?”

  When I cornered Kimo later in the day to find out everything I could about his no-doubt totally weird and fascinating upbringing, he met my falling-over-myself excitement with a shrug. Born in Copenhagen to a Danish father and a Polish mother who met through Esperanto, he appeared not to appreciate how bizarre it was to be a native speaker of an invented language. Esperanto was the medium of his parents’ relationship and of the entire home life of their family. Before you start getting indignant on his behalf, know that growing up he had plenty of contact with the world outside his home and learned to speak Danish as a native, too. But he considered Esperanto his true mother tongue.

  For Kimo, Esperanto was a completely normal fact of life in the same way that Polish would have been if both of his parents had been Polish.

  Kimo didn't choose to learn Esperanto, nor did his son, but everyone else at the conference did. Somewhere along the way they'd decided it worth their time to learn this Utopian pipe-dream language, and I wanted to understand why. The stated reason in pamphlets and speeches and passionate letters to the editor is too abstract: “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. So goes the story of hundreds of attempts by political and cultural organizations to convince people to speak a language. And the fact that Esperanto is an invented language makes the notion that anyone would speak it even more unlikely. By the time Esperanto came along, a couple centuries’ worth of invented languages had failed to attract more than a handful of speakers. None of them at any point had anywhere close to fifty thousand speakers, the most conservative estimate for Esperanto (the
least conservative is two million)—much less any native speakers.

  “Success” is probably not the first word that comes to mind when you think of Esperanto, but in the small, passionate world of invented languages there has never been a bigger one.

  Un Nuov Glot

  The nineteenth century saw a complete change in both the purposes and the methods of language invention. The change in method can be clearly seen in the following examples, the first from the first half of the century and the second from the second half:

  Dore mifala dosifare re dosiresi.

  Men senior, I sende evos un grammatik e un verbbibel de un nuov glot nomed universal glot.

  The second example, from Jean Pirro's Universalglot, published in 1868, can be understood by anyone with a passing familiarity with the general shape of European languages. It can be guessed at pretty successfully even if you only know English or French. But how to guess the meaning of the first example, from Solresol, developed by Jean François Sudre in the 1830s? Knowing what we know about the categorization principles employed by the language inventors of the seventeenth century, you might guess that the words beginning with do- all fall into the same meaning category. You would be partially correct. In Sudre's system all four-syllable words beginning with dosi- refer to a type of food or drink. The sentence above means, “I would like a beer and a pastry.” The sentence “Dore mifala dosiredo, dosifasi, dosifasol, dosirela, dosiremi, dosidosi, dosirefa, re dosifasol” means “I would like milk, sugar, coffee, fruit, butter, eggs, cheese, and chocolate.” Universalglot has a slightly ridiculous ring to it, but Solresol just sounds crazy.