noktmezo en la ĝardenon de la utopistoj
That should be "midnight in the garden of the utopians", but I don't so much swear by as at my Esperanto.
Arika Okrent's In the Land of the Invented Languages is well worth reading, especially for anybody who comes from the artlang side of the constructed language community (and that would be almost everyone these days).
Okrent's book is about constructed languages, and while she is a professional linguist, she's actually fairly short on the linguistic aspects of these languages. Okrent's book really is more about what made these people tick, and also how the intellectual climates of their eras impacted the language. For that purpose, she picks five languages for in-depth examination (Wilkins' Language of Truth, Esperanto, Blissymbols, Loglan, and Klingon), and examines how each language succeeded or failed. The result is a history of eccentricity - many of these languages almost got somewhere, then fell apart due to backbiting or arguments over intellectual property or their proper goals.
This is most notable in her discussion on Blissymbols. Charles Bliss, the inventor, was clearly a crackpot of the first order, but his concept actually turned out to be useful in teaching palsied children to communicate in English. After initial enthusiasm for simply being recognized, Bliss goes progressively rounder and rounder the twist as his beloved universal language is used for something it's not intended to do!, culminating in lawsuits and restraining orders. This kind of ego-driven madness pops up in the story of each of the early languages (including, Esperanto, which is otherwise noted in the book for its almost hippie-like utopianism).
I think Okrent occasionally misses in failing to discuss the impact of these languages as a linguist. This may be partly a function of the relative youth of her discipline --- with the exception of Klingon, none of the languages she discusses was invented by a linguist, and I get the impression that she finds the grammar of the historical languages fairly dull(at one point referring to "another uninspired english-latin hybrid"). She occasionally comments on how the manic need to eliminate ambiguity shoots the languages in the foot --- because Lojban specifies things so precisely, for example, it's borderline impossible to actually generate a correct Lojban sentence on the fly.
This makes the final chapters particularly interesting, as they're about the modern conlang hobby. In comparison to historical conlangers, who were creating their languages for some utopian goal or to test a hypothesis, the majority of modern language inventors are doing so for some deep aesthetic urge. As a result, they are both deeply informed about languages and prone to speaking about the beauty of particular grammatical or semantic constructs. I think Okrent could have actually expanded her final five chapters into a book in themselves - there are so many languages now availabel for this, she touches on some of the notable ones (Klingon, Quenya and Ladaan), but examining the hobby as a whole could merit further reading.
In the end, I enjoyed the book, and all I can do at this point is hope she writes a sequel which focuses on the modern conlang movement in more depth.
Arika Okrent's In the Land of the Invented Languages is well worth reading, especially for anybody who comes from the artlang side of the constructed language community (and that would be almost everyone these days).
Okrent's book is about constructed languages, and while she is a professional linguist, she's actually fairly short on the linguistic aspects of these languages. Okrent's book really is more about what made these people tick, and also how the intellectual climates of their eras impacted the language. For that purpose, she picks five languages for in-depth examination (Wilkins' Language of Truth, Esperanto, Blissymbols, Loglan, and Klingon), and examines how each language succeeded or failed. The result is a history of eccentricity - many of these languages almost got somewhere, then fell apart due to backbiting or arguments over intellectual property or their proper goals.
This is most notable in her discussion on Blissymbols. Charles Bliss, the inventor, was clearly a crackpot of the first order, but his concept actually turned out to be useful in teaching palsied children to communicate in English. After initial enthusiasm for simply being recognized, Bliss goes progressively rounder and rounder the twist as his beloved universal language is used for something it's not intended to do!, culminating in lawsuits and restraining orders. This kind of ego-driven madness pops up in the story of each of the early languages (including, Esperanto, which is otherwise noted in the book for its almost hippie-like utopianism).
I think Okrent occasionally misses in failing to discuss the impact of these languages as a linguist. This may be partly a function of the relative youth of her discipline --- with the exception of Klingon, none of the languages she discusses was invented by a linguist, and I get the impression that she finds the grammar of the historical languages fairly dull(at one point referring to "another uninspired english-latin hybrid"). She occasionally comments on how the manic need to eliminate ambiguity shoots the languages in the foot --- because Lojban specifies things so precisely, for example, it's borderline impossible to actually generate a correct Lojban sentence on the fly.
This makes the final chapters particularly interesting, as they're about the modern conlang hobby. In comparison to historical conlangers, who were creating their languages for some utopian goal or to test a hypothesis, the majority of modern language inventors are doing so for some deep aesthetic urge. As a result, they are both deeply informed about languages and prone to speaking about the beauty of particular grammatical or semantic constructs. I think Okrent could have actually expanded her final five chapters into a book in themselves - there are so many languages now availabel for this, she touches on some of the notable ones (Klingon, Quenya and Ladaan), but examining the hobby as a whole could merit further reading.
In the end, I enjoyed the book, and all I can do at this point is hope she writes a sequel which focuses on the modern conlang movement in more depth.