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By Root 616 0

like to draw pictures, playact scenes, and make up little tunes, and many of them also go through a phase where they experiment with sounds and invent their own words. When my son was two years old, he started saying, “Goaji, goaji, goaji,” with a strange Hindi sort of intonation, to represent “talking going on.” (He would say it when he heard a foreign language—though he never heard Hindi—or when people were talking around him without paying attention to him.) I don't know why he settled on goaji except that it just felt right to him. This doesn't mean he is any more likely to grow up to be a language inventor than he is to continue his passion for coloring into adulthood, but the raw urge to create is there, as it is in everyone. As with painting, or music, or acting, only in some does that urge take root and blossom into a lifelong passion.

The language inventors of previous eras spent a lot of energy trying to convince others of the practical justifications for doing what they did. They had rational reasons for making their languages. But the artistic drive has always been there. In a recent book on Hildegard von Bingen's twelfth-century language, the medievalist Sarah Higley (herself an accomplished conlanger and science fiction author working under the pen name Sally Caves) argues that the purpose of Hildegard's language was personal expression, that she “looked upon her invention as a purer way than even Latin, Greek, or Hebrew to dignify and describe her world.” It wasn't, as some scholars have argued, a secret code for her nuns to use or the spontaneous product of a religious trance. It was the first published conlang.

You can see the art in the way John Weilgart, the creator of aUI, felt so sure that “ah” was the sound of space and “j” was the sound of evenness. Or in the way Johann Schleyer stubbornly clung to his beloved umlaut when the Volapük reformers argued that it hurt their international chances. It was there for Wilkins in his quest to make sense of the universe and order it accordingly, and for Suzette Elgin when she filled Láadan with her favorite natural-language features. It is even there in Esperanto, which Tolkien once praised for intuitively capturing the right balance between engineering and aesthetics. He criticized one of its competitors for looking too much like a “factory product,” for seeming “made of spare parts” and being without the “gleam of the individuality, coherence and beauty, which appear in the great natural idioms, and which do appear to a considerable degree (probably as high a degree as is possible in an artificial idiom) in Esperanto—a proof of the genius of the original author.”

The artistry is obvious to the Esperantists, who tell stories, write poetry, and make jokes in what only they can fully appreciate as a quintessentially Esperanto way. It is there for the Lojbanists, one-upping each other by composing tongue twisters, riddles, and plays on words that work only in Lojban. It is there for the Klingon speakers, who put up with an awful lot of abuse in order to do what they love.

I finally ran out of time to study for my Klingon test. I went into the test feeling confident but weary. I was ready to go home. I needed to get back into the world and reassert my coolness.

First I had to endure the institute's business meeting, where at least thirty minutes was devoted to a discussion of whether the journal HolQeD should continue to be published in a print version in addition to the electronic version. (Pros: “It's neat to be archived at the Library of Congress.” “There's one on display at the Museum of Peace in Uzbekistan.” Cons: “It costs too much.” “It's redundant.”) “Who cares?” I grumbled under my breath from the back of the room, where I was flipping through my flash cards one last time.

Finally, the room cleared, leaving me, Louise, and a couple of other, more advanced test-takers. I dug in as soon as the test was laid in front of me, knowing my fragile web of mnemonics wouldn't last very long. I filled it out quickly. I couldn't remember the word for “sergeant