In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [50]
MR. gentle: It b preti wqm tsdα
(It be pretty warm today.)
MR. bluff: Wut b preti wqm?
(What be pretty warm?)
MR. G: W, du wedu.
(Why, the weather.)
MR. b: Wut wedu?
MR. G: Dis wedu?
MR. b: WΔI, hθ b dis wedu eni difrunt frqm eni udu?
MR. G: It b wqmer.
MR. b: Hθ ds ys no it b?
MR. G: Ik just supoz'd it b'd.
MR. b: B nqt du wedu du $αm evriver?
MR. G: W nqn, it b wqmer in $om plα$ez Δnd kolder in uduz.
And so on.
In the second era of language invention (that of the simplified international language), for every upstanding, respected member of society who had a language plan (the chemist Wilhelm Ostwald, the mathematicians Louis Couturat and Giuseppe Peano, the linguist Otto Jespersen), there were two or three Shaftesburys leaving their impression on the public perception of language creation. People who had once reacted to the practice with interest, bemusement, or mild irritation began to react with revulsion. One prominent psychologist had his own, distinctly Freudian explanation for this reaction: the drive to create languages was traceable to “displaced anal affects (ultimately derived from the satisfaction gained by the production of faeces or flatus).” The language inventors were smearing it on the walls, and the public was getting disgusted.
Pretty soon anyone with prestige to protect stayed as far away as possible. The torch was passed to brave souls who were either too passionate about their missions to concern themselves with respectability or too out of touch with reality to care.
And so began the third era of language invention. It is less well-defined than the first two. There was no unifying theme or idea behind the languages, no particular problem the inventors were trying to address. There were only individuals, working on the fringes of society, each with a separate, lonely agenda. They came up with further iterations of regularized Latin or English, or Esperanto-type hybrids. Some created philosophical-type languages, believing they were the first to have thought of such a thing. However, a few found a completely new approach, one that hadn't been tried before because it was so obviously unworkable. Only someone on the outside, someone heedless to calls for common sense, would be crazy enough to try it—a pictorial symbol language. One of those who did, in an unlikely turn of events, found success. But it was not the type of success he hoped for. He spent the rest of his life sabotaging his success and any respect he had earned from it. In the process he nearly destroyed those who had helped him to gain the recognition he always wanted.
Hit by a
Personality Tornado
What if your mind was sound but your body gave you no way to let anyone else know that it was? What if you had wishes, desires, complaints, and opinions but no control of your voice to speak them, no control of your hands to write or gesture about them? What if you could understand what everyone around you was saying—that you were a vegetable, that you were retarded, that it didn't matter what they did to you because you couldn't tell the difference anyway—and you could not let them know that they were wrong?
In 2007, I met with Ann Running, a woman in her thirties with severe cerebral palsy, at a group home for the disabled in Toronto. This is how we communicated: I moved my hand over a laminated chart of about eight hundred words that was attached to a tray on her wheelchair. The words were arranged both thematically (food words, sports words, color words, and so on) and by grammatical function (pronouns in one section, prepositions in another). At each section I stopped and checked to see whether she rolled her eyes upward. If she didn't, I moved to the next section. If she did, I pointed to the top of the first column of words in that section and checked for the eye signal, pointing to each column in turn until she indicated I had reached the correct one. When I had the right column,