Helen FieldsScience Writer

I just finished a thoroughly entertaining book about made-up languages: In the Land of Invented Languages. It’s by Arika Okrent, a linguist who’s interested in people’s attempts to create languages, mostly perfect languages that will eliminate ambiguity, be easier to learn, and/or bring about world peace. Yes, that all worked out really well.

She goes through the whole history, from Hildegard von Bingen, who wrote down about 1,000 words of a language called “Lingua Ignota,” through a 17th-century English guy who thought he could cut away the ambiguity of English by organizing everything, on to the guy who invented Esperanto in the late 19th century and the language fans today who develop their own languages and share them on the internet just for the heck of it. It’s a great read – lots of fun, with human stories and plenty of fun language facts.

Being a language nerd herself, she also decided she had to get her first-level certification in Klingon, which turns out to be a really difficult language. It’s got crazy word order and is agglutinative, which means you glom suffixes and prefixes onto roots to make big long words that can be whole phrases. (“If it’s in your way, knock it down” is two words.) Even the linguist who invented Klingon doesn’t speak it very well. When he introduces new words and phrases, he has to be careful not to make mistakes, because the real Klingon speakers will catch them. He’s gotten good at explaining them away. (Ah, well, see, when Klingons make formal toasts, they’re using an obsolete word order.)

She mentioned, without explaining, “ergativity” as something some languages have. I looked it up and found this blog post. Um…I’m still confused. I mean, Japanese was tough and all, but at least it’s not ergative.

So. Good book. And sooner or later I’ll get back to my own language nerdiness and bring the Dictionary of the Week back from hiatus.