In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [74]
It also betrayed a damning lack of sophistication about how these things work. Brown had submitted almost two thousand pages of supporting documents with his proposal—grammar books, textbooks, dictionaries, and every copy of the Loglanist that had been printed so far—and was outraged that the reviewers had not made themselves intimately familiar with all this material. The terse, carefully worded reply that Brown received to his initial appeal emphasized that the scientific community cannot judge the value of a project by reading every single thing the author has to say about it. The usual yardstick by which merit is measured is a body of scientific results and reviews published in peer-reviewed journals (and journals published by the author himself generally do not count as such).
Because Brown had received an initial minor grant shortly after his first article on Loglan was published, he fully expected that the fifteen-plus years of work he had put into the language since that time would secure him a major grant. But when he left his job at the university, he also cut himself off from the normal channels through which a fundable reputation is established. Though he did seek advice and criticism as he worked on Loglan (he loved nothing better than a good, lively argument), he tended to surround himself with admirers. Those who could not submit to his powerful, stubborn temperament did not last very long in his circle. Those who excused the insults, the accusations, and the occasional angry blowup in order to remain in the orbit of this often intensely charming, always intellectually exciting man became his lifelong friends and collaborators.
After spending the early 1960s devoting his full attention to Loglan, Brown put out some materials on microfilm, intending to make them available to the scientific community for review. He did receive one review in a top-tier linguistics journal, but it was not something he would have wanted to emphasize to the grant committee. Though the reviewer praised the project for its ambition and ingenuity, he threw serious doubt on its usefulness as any kind of scientific tool. The general verdict on Loglan was that it was an interesting, fascinating, and diligently executed … hobby.
Shortly after that, Brown left the country, losing contact with many of the people who were working on the language with him. He had divorced his third wife, a former student of his at the university who had done much of the work calculating the “learn-ability scores” for his Loglan vocabulary, and, in order to evade a custody dispute, took their toddler daughter to Europe and didn't return for a few years (his ex-wife wouldn't see their daughter again until she was a teenager). Loglan took a backseat to other projects—he wrote a Utopian science fiction novel and worked on something he referred to as a “statistical study of interpersonal relationships.” He got married again, this time to a woman who was one of his (openly acknowledged) mistresses during his previous marriage (his “progressive” politics carried over into the realm of sexual relationships, though in a rather one-sided way). When that marriage fell apart, he came back to the States and published a revised version of his Loglan grammar and dictionary, this time in book form, and purchased an advertisement for it in Scientific American.
The book stirred up interest again (many readers had been waiting for it since the 1960 article), and soon Brown had a group of followers who were willing to devote their time and skills to developing and promoting Loglan. Most of these volunteers were “computer guys” (Nora being the rare non-guy among them) who were excited about the possibility of the language serving as a human-computer interface. Brown also became excited about such a possibility and, after his first NSF grant proposal was rejected, put together “A Proposal for the Establishment of a Service/Support Relationship Between the