In the Land of Invented Languages

by Arika Okrent

  As Sudre toured and struggled to make his mark, the world was changing in such a way that made the need for a universal language seem more pressing than ever. While the elites of previous eras had always had the opportunity to engage in international contact, industrialization was now bringing this opportunity to regular folks. The steamship, the locomotive, and the telegraph narrowed distances and expanded the range of communication situations a person might find himself in. Language barriers became that much more noticeable.

  And schemes to overcome those barriers started to proliferate. But these schemes looked nothing like the old ones. Babibu and 123 and doremi gave way to un nuov kind of glot. The new crop of language inventors built upon the recognizable roots of European languages. They took a little Latin, a little Greek, spiced it up with some French and German and a splash of English. The resulting systems were much easier to learn than anything that had come before. You didn’t have to know the whole order of the universe to be able to guess that nuov meant “new.”

  So why hadn’t anyone thought to do it that way before?

  The idea to create a language out of existing languages wasn’t completely new. An Arabic-Persian-Turkish mix called Balaibalan was designed sometime between 1400 and 1700 (the documents can’t be reliably dated), probably for religious purposes. Projects aiming to create a Pan-Slavic language (using common Slavic word roots) for the promotion of Slavic ethnic unity had occurred as early as 1666. A simplified version of Latin by someone called “Carpophorophilus” had been published in 1732, and in 1765 Joachim Faiguet, the treasurer of France, published a sketch for a simplified French in Diderot’s Encyclopédie.

  But the intellectual climate—the preoccupation with mathematical notation, the quest to discover the true nature of the universe—led most early language inventors away from existing languages. They were after a self-contained, perfectly ordered system, not a stitched-together hybrid. Natural languages had too many problems, so they had to start from scratch.

  The next era of language inventors focused on a more practical problem: people who spoke different languages couldn’t understand each other. Quotidian concerns pushed philosophical questions about meaning and concepts into the background. These new inventors also worked in a different intellectual climate, one where the similarities between natural languages had come to the foreground.

  In 1786, Sir William Jones, in an address to the Royal Asiatic Society, suggested that Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, and perhaps the Gothic, Celtic, and Persian languages as well, all developed from a common ancestor language, and the field of comparative philology was born. In the following decades, an explosion of scholarly activity confirmed Jones’s suggestion. The development of scientific techniques of comparison made it possible to show how languages as different as Bengali and Lithuanian were related. Those arbitrary differences between languages turned out to be not so arbitrary or different after all. They had sprung from a common well.

  These discoveries were not necessarily useful to the man set on inventing a universal language. It is one thing to be able to show that a complicated history of sound changes produced both the Hindi word cakka and the English word “wheel” from the same source (the hypothesized Proto-Indo-European word kweklo: kweklo > cakra > cakka; kweklo > hweogol > wheel), but to call a wheel a kweklo wouldn’t do much to help Hindi or English speakers. The new language inventors weren’t influenced so directly by the findings of the academic linguists.

  They were, however, influenced by a general awareness of common word roots and their histories. In its nineteenth-century heyday, the field of comparative philology (as sadly obscure a relic as it sounds today) made its way into popular culture in a wide-spread fashion for historical dictionaries and armchair etymology. Any reasonably educated person could be expected to know a bit about how languages were related to each other. Philology was in the air, and budding language inventors started paying attention to what languages already had in common with one another.

  One of the earliest inventors to turn toward natural languages was an American named James Ruggles. In the 1820s, he set out to create yet another Wilkins-type philosophical language but decided it was more practical to base his word roots on Latin rather than “the analysis of ideas.” The Latin roots were already somewhat intrinsically connected to the concepts they represented, he argued, echoing a popular linguistic belief of the time, because the sounds of all languages at one point had their origin in nature.

  I found Ruggles’s book, A Universal Language, Formed on Philosophical and Analogical Principles, published in 1829, at a library of pre-twentieth-century American history in Philadelphia. I was surprised to find in it a pretty complete grammar and an extensive dictionary. I had never seen this language mentioned in any bibliography or overview or list of invented languages. No one seemed to know about it. But Ruggles had been one of the first to take a step toward the more naturalistic style of language construction that would become popular fifty years later. However, he still had a foot firmly planted in the previous era.

  To his Latin roots he added arbitrary letters representing a range of other functions. For example, the root hom-, “man,” participates in the following words:

  Pretty much every kind of relation he can think of gets its own ending. There is a system for expressing degrees in adjectives. Here are a few of the twenty-four possibilities:

  At a certain point, the endings pile on to the point where the Latin roots stop doing you much good at all:

  pretzpxn ljbztur frateriorpur

  “the price of the book of the brother of mine”

  Vadcbhinpixs bixgs timzdxrcd pluvzdur

  “We can go out now without fear of rain.”

  Sings, pixrt kznhenpiots

  “Ladies and Gentlemen, will ye sup with us?”

  And then things just get crazy:

  lxmsgevjltshevjlpshev “179 degrees 59 minutes and 59 seconds of west longitude within one second of reaching 180 degrees west”

  pintjltstehjlpstehzponpx “It is fifteen minutes and fifteen seconds after one o’clock p.m.”

  Ruggles’s move toward practicality did not go far enough. He was still enamored with the idea of systematic, combinatorial completeness, as were most language inventors of his time. But unlike most of his peers, he had a refreshing humility about the prospects for the success of his project. He begins his 1829 book with a dedication to the Congress of the United States in which he expresses the hope that even if they do not find his project “of sufficient weight to be entitled to your legislative notice,” some of them, as individuals at least, might take an interest in looking it over. If they do, he continues, “your voices … will either approve or condemn; and should condemnation, which is not improbable, consign these pages to oblivion or contempt,” he will console himself that his own lack of time, resources, and “abilities for so great an attempt” was the “cause of the unworthiness of the production.”

  Congress never did anything with Ruggles’s submission, but he did get a letter from President John Quincy Adams, who said that his “opinion long since formed, unfavorable to all projects of this character has perhaps influenced that formed with regard to yours. From the examination, necessarily superficial, which I have been able to give it, I consider it creditable to your ingenuity.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but still something to be proud of.

  Meanwhile, Europe was transforming itself from a loose collection of kingdoms, principalities, and duchies into an angry cluster of nations. After the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, people began to organize themselves around feelings of shared identity and culture (rather than loyalty to local landholders and monarchs) and fight for their interests. Their new political identities were formed not according to the various empires they lived under—Russian, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman—but according to the languages they spoke. 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.

  Trouble in Volapükland

  Ludwik Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto, was born in 1859 in the city of Bialystok, now part of Poland. I have a historical atlas of eastern Europe that includes a map of “ethnolinguistic distribution” during this time. On the left side is a smear of Polish orange, speckled with tiny purple dots of German. On the right is a dramatic swath of Russian pink. Snaking down the middle is an irregularly shaped confusion of multicolored stripes. Bialystok sits in the center of it. Zamenhof wrote that his city of birth

  marked the way for all my future goals. In Bialystok the population consisted of four different elements: Russians, Poles, Germans and Jews. Each of these elements spoke a separate language and had hostile relations with the other elements. In that city, more than anywhere, a sensitive person might feel the heavy sadness of the diversity of languages and become convinced at every step that it is the only, or at least the primary force which divides the human family into enemy parts. I was brought up to be an idealist; I was taught that all men were brothers, while at the same time everything I saw in the street made me feel that men as such did not exist: only Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews and so forth. This always tormented my young soul, though many might laugh at such agony for the world in a child. Because at that time it seemed to me that adults had a sort of almighty power, I kept telling myself that when I was grown up I would certainly destroy this evil.

  Zamenhof began to develop his new language in earnest during his teenage years, after his rapidly growing family (he was the eldest of nine) moved to Warsaw, where his father, Marcus, took a position as the official Jewish censor. The job involved vetting all Hebrew publications for any statements that could be construed as insulting to the tsar, an ambiguous task requiring Marcus to gauge the paranoia of a government that was already disinclined toward him and other Jews. He was a strict father, and the pressures of his new responsibilities sometimes made him cruel. Ludwik responded by becoming dutiful and well behaved.

  The family spoke Russian and Yiddish at home, but Ludwik was familiar with Hebrew through his father (more as a scholarly language than as a religious one). Young Ludwik picked up Polish on the street and Latin, Greek, French, and German at school. His first attempts at inventing his own language didn’t go well. He began by developing a lexicon of one-syllable words, like ha and ka, but found that he couldn’t remember the meanings he’d assigned to them. He made things easier on his memory by substituting roots from languages he had studied—such as hom for “man” and am for “love.” However, the universe of things that require a name is large, and as his notebooks filled with his neat and careful script, he again lost his ability to keep track of them. This was a problem he had to solve. A language intended for all mankind wouldn’t work unless all mankind could learn it. Ludwik’s solution arose from an accidental insight:

  I noticed the formation of the (Russian) word shveytsarskaya (porter’s lodge) which I had seen many times, and of the word kondityerskaya (confectioners shop). This -skaya interested me and showed that suffixes provide the possibility of making from one word a number of others which don’t have to be learned separately. This idea took complete possession of me. I began comparing words and looking for constant, definite relations among them, and every day I threw large series of words out of my dictionary and substituted for them a single suffix defining a certain relationship.

  At about the same time, he began to study English in school. For a speaker of Russian, with its complex systems of verb conjugation and noun agreement, its accusative, genitive, locative, and other sundry cases, English must have appeared a dream of simplicity. He felt the freedom of gliding over ice-smooth paradigms—“I had, you had, he had, she had, we had, they had”—and purged his nascent language of unnecessary grammatical markers.

  On December 17, 1878, a Proto-Esperanto congress convened. Despite his shyness, Ludwik had convinced some of his schoolmates to involve themselves in his project. They gathered in his cramped apartment to celebrate over cake and take part in that most Esperanto of activities—the singing of hymns. On this day they sang a poem by Ludwik that succinctly captures the sentiment that inspired his diligence:

  Malamikete de las nacjes Kadó, kadó, jam temp està La tot’ homoze en familije konungiare so debà.

  Enmity of nations Fall, fall, the time has come May the whole of humanity be united as one.

  This poem is an example of early Esperanto. The language was further tweaked and modified when Ludwik was forced to reinvent it from scratch. Before he left for university to study medicine, a colleague of his father’s had remarked that Ludwik seemed awfully wrapped up in this language of his. Fearing that it would distract the young man from his studies, Marcus demanded that he leave it behind. The compliant son handed over his lovingly filled notebooks, and some time after he set out for Moscow, his father threw them on the fire. Ludwik didn’t discover this until he transferred home to the University of Warsaw. But he had no time to brood. Soon the enmity of nations bubbled up into a wave of violent pogroms that swept through Russia, including a two-day spree of bloodshed in Warsaw. More determined than ever, he started all over again.

  In the next five years he finished his education and began his practice as an oculist, general medicine having proved to induce debilitating guilt when he couldn’t do anything to help a patient. He continued revising and refining his language, and he met his future wife, Klara. She embraced him and his language, and they used it to write love letters to each other.

  The official birth of Esperanto occurred in 1887, the year that Zamenhof, using Klara’s dowry, self-published a small book titled Lingvo internacia. He modestly declined to attach his own name to it, signing it instead Dr. Esperanto, meaning “one who hopes.” He explained inside that an “international language, like every national one, is the property of society, and the author renounces all personal rights in it for ever.” Ludwik and Klara packaged the books and sent them into an unsympathetic world.

  Nothing says success like bitter, angry jealousy in the hearts of your competitors. In this case, the names read like the product of the perverted etymological strategies of the modern-day pharmaceutical industry: Interlingua, Ido, Glosa, Globaqo, Novial, Hom-Idyomo. These are just a few of the many languages proclaimed by their advocates to be simpler, more logical, and more beautiful than Esperanto. But Esperanto can afford to be smug. It’s the only one you’ve heard of.

  And this drives the other guys nuts. When I first became curious about the topic of constructed languages, I joined a Listserv called Conlang. The next day my in-box held 287 messages. After a few days of this, I decided I wasn’t that interested and unsubscribed. I didn’t know that I’d innocently stepped right into the “flame war” that ultimately led to the “great split,” after which things calmed down considerably.

  The split was between two groups. The first was composed of people interested in quietly developing and discussing the languages they crafted for science-fictional worlds, what-if-a-language-did-this playfulness, or Tolkienesque fun (the true conlangers). The second was composed of those who wanted to talk about an international auxiliary language for the real world (the auxlangers). The auxlang group included a few devoted Es-perantists and a larger number of supporters of alternate projects. Most of the war was conducted within the auxlang group, as vitriol hurled at Esperanto for its “totally ridiculous spelling system,” “the backward and confusing affix system,” and “the accusative -n abomination.” Additional fighting took place between the various Esperanto competitors—Ido took on Interlingua, and a new version of Novial took on an old version of Novial. The conlangers got fed up with “this stupid argument about something that is never, NEVER, going to happen anyway, FACE IT!!!” and the auxlangers, no doubt tired of being called “deluded lunatics” in the one place it was supposed to be safe to talk about invented languages, agreed to split off and form their own list. The conlangers wen
t back to tame exchanges about tense-aspect marking and vowel harmony, and the auxlangers took it outside.

  Every anti-Esperantist auxlanger is convinced that he (no need to fret about gender-neutral pronouns on this one) represents a superior product. Perhaps one of them does. Perhaps all of them do. It doesn’t matter. At an Esperanto conference, I witnessed a tired-looking man in a gray T-shirt defiantly introduce himself as an Interlingua supporter. “I think it is a better language,” he announced. “It’s clearer, more logical, and more beautiful than Esperanto,” and then, without the slightest trace of irony, “but I have no one to speak it with.”

  Esperanto may never have risen to its position of prominence if it hadn’t suffered its own great split early on. In the lore of Esperantoland, it is called the Schism, and if this makes you think of religious wars, you aren’t far off. The Schism served to draw off the people who were interested in the language itself (the prestigious scholars with linguistically sophisticated suggestions for improving and perfecting it) from the people who were interested in the idea behind the language (the idealistic true believers, or, depending on whom you ask, the kooks).

  Zamenhof was an amateur. He had no training in philology, no university chair. But because he was driven by the serious (if naive) hope that his language would help society, he devoted his energy to persuading people to use it rather than convincing them to appreciate its design. His book had included a form for the reader to sign, agreeing to learn the language if ten million others also signed the form. Fewer than a thousand came back, but enough interest had been generated to inspire him to translate the original Russian text into Polish, French, and German. He left the English translation to a well-meaning German volunteer, who produced choice manglings such as “The reader will doubtless take with mistrust this opuscule in hand, deeming that he has it here to do with some irrealizable utopy.” Before its chances were completely killed in the English-speaking world, an Irish linguist took interest and produced a more readable translation.