In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [104]
I got a score of 93 points, well above passing. Everyone congratulated me and remarked on how well I did. My mood lifted. I felt proud. I looked around and saw, near the reception desk, a group of glossy-toothed “mundanes” checking in to the hotel. They appeared to be in town for a sales meeting, or maybe just the wedding of an old fraternity brother. They looked at us, immediately noticing, of course, a costumed member of our group. One of these so-called normal people walked right up to him and, without asking for permission, took out his cell phone to take a picture, saying to no one in particular, and certainly not to the Klingon in question, “If I don't get a picture of this, no one will believe me.” The Klingon stood up tall and posed like a true warrior. At that moment, I knew whose side I was on. The world of Klingon may be based in fiction, but living in it takes real guts.
Louise didn't pass the test. “Oh, well,” she said with a shrug and a smile. “I will try again next year.” And I was there the next year, at a highway hotel outside of Philadelphia, when she did pass the test. I bought her a drink, and we toasted to perseverance.
The List of Languages
What follows is a list of five hundred invented languages in chronological order. Why five hundred? Why not all of them? For one thing, no one knows how many there are. Any claim to completeness in a list would surely be undone by the discovery of yet another self-published book or pamphlet in a library storage room somewhere. Another problem is determining what should count as an invented language. Should a few lines of made-up gibberish in a novel earn a place on the list? What about a sketch of an idea with none of the detail filled in?
When I started assembling this list, I had the ambitious intention to be as complete as possible, to include every project that anyone anywhere had any evidence for, but this soon proved impractical. The story I was trying to tell got lost in a swamp of data. I wanted the list to be big enough to impress, to make you exclaim, “I had no idea there were so many!” But I also wanted it to be manageable enough to serve as a sort of mini-history, where just by looking at the dates and the names of the languages, you could spot some general trends and get a sense of the connections between the ideas and the times.
I culled my list from the more than nine hundred languages covered in Aleksandr Dulichenko's Mezhdunarodnye vspomogatel'nye iazyki (International Auxiliary Languages, 1990). This massive piece of research includes all of the projects covered by previous overviews, such as Histoire de la langue universelle by Louis Couturat and Leopold Leau (1903), Bibliografio de internacia lingvo by Petr Stojan (1929), Historio de la mondolingvo by Ernest Drezen (1931), and Précis d'interlinguistique générale et speciale by Marcel Monnerot-Dumaine (1960), in addition to others mentioned in various sources. Dulichenko's work is about as complete as you can get. It's in Russian, and it's not easy to get ahold of, but you can find it at some major universities and the Library of Congress.
In deciding what to include in my own list, I didn't set any strict criteria. I just used my judgment and aimed for a list that would tell the story without distorting the facts. I left out a lot of works titled Pasigraphie, but put in enough to show that pasigraphies (universal writing systems) were big in the early nineteenth century, and still popped up occasionally after that. Although many languages from the early twentieth century got left out on account of having boring names (how many variations on “Lingua International” do you need to get the picture?), there are enough in there, proportionally, to highlight the explosion in the number of projects during this era. Languages with strange or interesting names got in, as did those whose authors exposed