In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [75]
So in 1979, Brown turned the institute into a “membership-controlled corporation,” and most of the Loglan volunteers, around a hundred people, paid the fifty-dollar fee gladly. This would allow them to at least hire a permanent secretary while they worked on what Brown called “the Commercial Success Project,” from which, he declared, all the members would eventually benefit.
There had never been any question among the Loglan volunteers that Brown was in charge. It was his language and he had the last word. But when they became paying members of his ostensibly membership-controlled corporation, they naturally expected more of a say in the development of the language. Under Brown's direction, they began an overhaul of the rules of Loglan word formation (something still referred to in Loglan lore as the Great Morphological Revolution) and developed their own opinions on the best way to proceed. However, Brown proved unable to relinquish any control, even going so far as to prohibit the members from discussing (in their newsletter) any issues he had not personally approved for discussion. In 1984 his mounting ledger of perceived slights and disloyalties drove him to make belittling personal attacks on the very members who had donated the most time to the Loglan cause. When the board objected, he fired the board, ordering them to have nothing to do with Loglan for one full year, after which time, if they made suitable apologies, they would be allowed back.
In the newsletter, a member named Birrell Walsh expressed sadness that Brown was “driving away ALL those who appreciate the magnificent thing he had built,” and asked, “Do we owe it to Jim to give him a chance to wake up before he empties Log-landia?” His answer, like that of everyone else, was no. He concluded with a striking example of Loglan in action, an original poem:
le sitci fa nu kalhui ea nirve
i lo nu gunti vu darli
i la ganmre vi krakau
va lo nortei troku
This city will be destroyed, empty;
the people are far away;
the king is a howling dog
by the unlistening stones.
Most of the membership fell away, and the journal, the Loglanist, shuttered its doors for good.
In the midst of all this, Bob LeChevalier, Nora's future husband, sent in his check to become a member of the institute. He didn't know any of the other members, having been exposed to Loglan only through Brown himself, and he had no idea what was going on. Bob had been living in the San Diego area (where Brown—and the institute—were located in the late 1970s), and a friend of his, who was interested in Loglan, came to visit and decided to look Brown up in the phone book. Brown invited him over to talk, and Bob gave his friend a ride. “I knew nothing about language or linguistics and wasn't really interested, either,” he told me. “I was just the transportation.”
But he ended up enjoying the conversation that evening and kept in touch with Brown, visiting him occasionally to talk about Loglan or to assist him with other projects, such as testing out a new board game he was working on. Soon, he was a member of the institute and was assigned the task of putting together a digital dictionary.
Bob moved to the D.C. area to take a job as a computer systems engineer for a government contractor, and Brown moved back to Gainesville, but they had long talks on the phone, during which Bob tried to explain why he wasn't making much progress on the dictionary and Brown encouraged him to try harder. In 1986, Brown became ill with a life-threatening infection. “I called Jim in the hospital, and we talked about Loglan,” Bob told me. “It seemed like he had had