In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [29]
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