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implications of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.” He wanted to show that “the construction of a tiny model language, with a grammar borrowed from the rules of modern logic, taught to subjects of different nationalities in a laboratory setting under conditions of control, would permit a decisive test.” If the problem with the Whorfian hypothesis experiment was that natural languages couldn't be disentangled from the cultures in which they were spoken, then why not avoid the problem by using an artificial language? This “tiny model language” became Loglan (from logical language), a project that would occupy the rest of Brown's life. It would grow large enough to be used for original poetry, translations of works like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and, in one case, a proposal of marriage. It would bring Brown fame and disappointment, admirers and enemies, and a trip to federal court over the question of who rightfully owns a language—the man who invented it or the people who use it?

A Formula

for Success

In 1960, Brown published a sketch of Loglan in Scientific American. This was an amazing coup for a language inventor. In a post-utopian, postwar world, where no one even deigned to laugh at new language projects anymore, it was incredible that a major periodical would treat an invented language seriously enough to devote ten pages to it.

Brown had found a way to make language invention respectable by treating his creation with scientific detachment. He didn't say his language would stop war and heal the world; he presented it merely as an instrument for testing a specific hypothesis. He didn't crow about how easy it was to learn; he computed a “learnability score” for each word (based on how many sounds in the word overlapped with the sounds for that word in different natural languages) and proposed that the correlation between learnability scores and actual learnability could be tested in the lab. He didn't make wild claims about the profound and life-altering effects his language would have on thought; he demurred that he was “by no means certain yet that Loglan is a thinkable language, let alone a thought-facilitating one.” His approach, humble, rational, and unemotional, was nothing like the idealistic flights of foolishness that people had come to expect from language inventors. If you wanted to get any attention for your invented-language project in 1960, scientific detachment was definitely the way to go.

Another language called Interlingua tried to adopt a similar approach in the 1950s and 1960s, and got a little bit of success in return. Interlingua was created by a committee called the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA), which had been founded by Alice Vanderbilt Morris in 1924. The original goal of the association was to promote intelligent and objective discussion of competing invented languages and to encourage scholarly research into the matter of determining both the best form for an auxiliary language and the best uses for it. It was a meeting ground for the high-prestige language inventors and other professionals who were interested in the international language idea (linguists such as Edward Sapir, Morris Swadesh, Roman Jakobson, and André Martinet). Activity fell off in the 1930s and was further disrupted by the war, but the organization survived and ultimately published its own committee-designed Interlingua in 1951.

The first Interlingua periodical was Spectroscopia Molecular, a monthly overview of international work in … molecular spectroscopy. (It involves shooting energy at something in order to see what does or doesn't bounce back—physicists, chemists, and astronomers do it.) Next came a newsletter, Scientia International, a digest of the latest goings-on in the world of science. Interlingua positioned itself as a way for scientists of different language backgrounds to keep up with their fields. They wouldn't even necessarily have to speak the language. As long as they understood it, it would fulfill its businesslike function. By attaching itself to science, and refraining