In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [79]
You can almost see the film reel unrolling behind his starry eyes—the international news conferences, the front-page headlines, the Nobel Prize ceremony. His hopes for Loglan, and for himself, were much grander than he let on. Beneath the detached scientific demeanor lay the passionate soul of a language inventor.
“When he lost the case, Jim couldn't believe it,” his widow, Evelyn Anderson, told me. “Both he and his lawyer thought they had it for sure. But within a few months he wasn't talking about it anymore. He just moved on.” He put his energy into other projects—a paper on his theory of the origin of language, a book about his Utopian economic plan, called The Job Market of the Future. He continued to work with a small group of loyal Loglanists, one of whom told me he thought “the split did soften his attitude toward suggestions and criticism from those who stuck with him.”
Brown was seventy-one when he lost the case and had been working on Loglan for over thirty years. It hadn't brought him money or fame, but it did yield some happiness points. “He considered it pure joy when he was working on it,” Ms. Anderson told me. “Right until the end he was working out something that he found totally fascinating, and he was not put off by the fact that it had not achieved what he had …” She paused for a moment, then continued. “He went to his death thinking it was the greatest thing that he had published.”
Though Brown would never publicly make peace with or accept Lojban, one of the friends who stuck with him in the split told me that “he acknowledged privately that he considered Lojban to be one of his intellectual children, albeit an illegitimate child, that he was still pleased to see succeeding.” Perhaps one day, he thought, after he was gone, the rift would be repaired. But even then, it would still have to be on his terms—they were written into his will. The institute could only accept rapprochement if Bob LeChevalier was no longer involved.
Brown died of a heart attack in 2000 while on a cruise off the coast of the southernmost tip of Argentina, and he was buried there. For about a week after that there was some discussion of reunification on the Lojban message boards—how the vocabularies might merge and so forth—but it faded away quickly. All the action was in Lojban anyway. And that's where it stayed.
Meaning
Quicksand
To all the language curmudgeons out there who insist that people ought to speak more logically, I say, be careful what you wish for. You go on about the “logical” mismatch between “everyone” and “their” in perfectly normal-sounding sentences like “Everyone clapped their hands.” You argue that phrases like “very unique” and “sufficiently enough” don't make logical sense. You harp on “hopefully” and “literally” and “the reason is because,” all the while calling logic to your side to defend your righteous anger.
Before you judge me as some kind of “anything goes” language heathen, let me just say that I'm not against usage standards. I don't violate them when I want to sound like an educated person, for the same reason I don't wear a bikini to a funeral when I want to look like a respectful person. There are social conventions for the way we do lots of things, and it is to everyone's benefit to be familiar with them. But logic ain't got nothin' to do with it.
And oh, how grateful I am. Do you know how good we have it, how much easier our speaking lives are made by the fact that language and logic part ways? Consider the word “and.” Why, you barely have to know what you mean when you