In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [1]
The variety of shape, pattern, and color found in the languages of the world is a testament to the wonder of nature, to the breathtaking array of possibilities that can emerge, tangled and wild, from the fertile human endowments of brain and larynx, intelligence and social skills. The job of the linguist, like that of the biologist or the botanist, is not to tell us how nature should behave, or what its creations should look like, but to describe those creations in all their messy glory and try to figure out what they can teach us about life, the world, and, especially in the case of linguistics, the workings of the human mind.
In libraries organized according to the Library of Congress call number system, linguists can usually be found in the stacks classified in the first half of the Ps, anywhere from subclass P, which covers general linguistics, to subclass PN, where “literature” starts. When I was in graduate school, I used to wander this territory, in a procrastinatory haze, noting how the languages covered by the intervening categories became more and more “exotic” the farther I got from PA (Greek and Latin). I would first pass through aisles and aisles of Romance languages, then Germanic, Scandinavian, English, Slavic. There at the end of the Slavic section, at PG9501, things would start to get interesting, with Albanian, followed by the offerings of PH—the Finno-Ugrics (Veps, Estonian, Udmurt, Hungarian), the mysterious Basque. By the time I got to PL, I would be far from Europe, drifting through Asia and Africa, lingering over A Grammar of the Hoava Language, Western Solomons or The Southern Bauchi Group of Chadic Languages: A Survey Report.
The final subclass, PM, was a tour through the New World, starting with the Eskimo languages of Greenland and Alaska and proceeding southward through Tlingit, Kickapoo, and Navajo to the Mayan and Aztecan languages of Mexico and Central America, down across the Amazon, through the Andes and the plains of Brazil, until I reached the islands off the southernmost tip of South America with Yámana-English: A Dictionary of the Speech of Tierra del Fuego. From there, there was nowhere to go but to the borders of language itself—the contact, or “mixed,” languages, the pidgins and creoles of the PM7800s: Spanish Contact Vernaculars in the Philippine Islands; Le Créole de Breaux Bridge, Louisiane: étude morphosyntaxique, textes, vocabulaire.
At the very end of this lush orchid garden of languages there was one more section, where linguists don't generally care to visit—a few lonely shelves of faded plastic flowers, the artificial languages. The Klingon Dictionary was here, among other books on languages I had never heard of: Babm, aUI, Nal Bino, Leno Gi-Nasu, Tutonish, Ehmay Ghee Chah. These were not lighthearted language games, like pig Latin, or the spontaneous results of in-group communication, like Cockney rhyming slang or surfer jargon. They were invented on purpose, cut from whole cloth, set down on paper, start to finish, by one person. They had chapters and chapters of grammar and extensive dictionaries. They were testaments not to the wonder of nature but to the human impulse to master nature. They were deliberate, painstakingly crafted attempts to tame language by making it more orderly, more rational, less burdened with inconsistencies and irregularities. There were hundreds of them. And they were all failures, dead in the water, spoken by no one.
Well, of course they were. If you plant a plastic flower, will it grow? So I was skeptical about the claims that Klingon—Klingon?—had really defied the odds and sprouted roots. In the name of research, I registered for the annual Klingon conference, or qep'a', to occur in Phoenix at the end of the summer. I wanted to be prepared, and so I arranged