In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [77]
In March, Bob proposed to Nora in Loglan and she accepted. In April, when Bob ordered some Loglan materials for the class he was teaching, Brown sent his check back. Orders would only be filled for those who signed an “Aficionado Agreement” with a “non-disclosure” clause. When Bob explained to his students what had happened, one of them asked whether they could get around the copyright problem by just making up their own words and substituting them into Loglan sentences. Could they? It was worth a try.
On Memorial Day weekend Bob drove to Philadelphia to help Nora pack up her things and move her into his house in Fairfax, where two of his Loglan-interested friends were visiting. The four of them spent the rest of the weekend laying out a system for creating the new vocabulary, and Bob and Nora then spent their first summer together generating great heaps of paper in their “relexification” of Loglan, which they called Loglan-88. In August they hosted the second Logfest, where the attendees voted on whether it was worth splitting up this already small community in order to have the freedom to do what they wanted. They decided it was, 18–0.
Still, the split was not complete. Bob considered himself to be working on Loglan—Brown's language—and he still held out hope for the possibility of reconciliation. In October, Bob and Nora married. On their honeymoon in Colonial Williamsburg, in a demonstration of their commitment both to Loglan and to each other, they sustained a two-hour Loglan conversation. Most of it was spent trying to establish that each had understood what the other one said, as good a foundation for a marriage as any.
Upon their return, Bob redoubled his efforts toward his mission. He announced Loglan-88 at a science fiction convention, collected new recruits, and started putting out his own newsletter. A few weeks into 1988, “Jim had fifty Aficionados, and I had a mailing list of three hundred.” In March, he received a letter from Jim, notifying him that he was in violation of Loglan's trademark (to be registered shortly) and that, should he not cease such violation, he risked being sued “for the recovery of profits, damages and costs, with, as you may know, the possibility of treble damages and attorney's fees.”
With that letter, the gauntlet had been irretrievably thrown. Loglan-88 was officially renamed Lojban (from the new words logji, “logic,” and bangu, “language”), and the Lojbanists incorporated their own, competing (nonprofit) organization, the Logical Language Group (LLG). A year later, the LLG challenged the Loglan trademark. After almost two years of motions and counter-motions, the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board ruled that the trademark should be canceled. A few months later, Brown filed an appeal, and the case went to trial before the federal circuit court. Bob hadn't seen Brown for six years, and hadn't had any direct communication with him for five, when they finally came together in a courtroom in 1992. But no words would be exchanged, not even a glance. “I'd never been snubbed so completely,” Bob told me. “He refused to look at me, like I didn't exist.” Brown lost the appeal.
Can a person