Sorry, but if this book takes so little notice of the Tolkien languages, then I see no reason why I should take the writer's ideas seriously. To leave out such an enormous figure in the history of invented languages (or to summarize with a brief and clearly cribbed section) shows me that the research done was blinkered and self-serving. You can't talk about modern electricity and devote only a paragraph to Edison. Similarly, you can't talk about invented languages and leave out the master, who invented two entire languages plus framework for at least two more. It's just that simple.

>Natural languages are good enough for almost all of us ...

...

Not exactly. Lawyers created their own version of English

because they claim that standard English is ambiguous.

This version is difficult or impossible to understand for

most people, including those that learned English as a

second language. Even lawyers discuss about the

meaning of words when using their language. We all need

to read this language when signing any contract.

In both sides of the southern border they speak Spanglish,

because neither English or Spanish is good enough for them.

For the same reason exist at least 28 dialects of the English

language.

The main reason for the existence of Esperanto, is that it

takes less than 30 hours to learn the basics, and maybe

100 to get some fluency, compared to 1000 hours to much

more for other languages. Most people that have studied

English during 10 years, will never be a match for native

speakers.

Please take 20 hours of your time to learn Esperanto.

You will never regret it.

Best wishes,

Enrique

from Fremont, California, USA

A mention of auxlangs that includes the big three (Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua) as well as some others. Lojban also has a pretty interesting user community.

Two other interesting projects that have appeared over the last few years are Lingua Franca Nova and Sambahsa. The former is a creole-like language based on Romance languages, and Sambahsa is a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European base with loanwords from other countries; i.e. what might have happened if there had been a PIE-using country around the location of Ukraine or so that extended itself a fair amount and obtained loanwords from nearby countries.

also the open-source movement

This is not what the term "open source" means.

A nit-pick, I know; but this mis-usage elides the differences between two very different intellectual-property debates.

(But an enjoyable review!)

The author here seems to have no understanding of linguistics or programming.

First off, nobody in the open-source movement has "renounced any copyright". While there's alternative terms (e.g. copyleft), folks who contribute code to open source projects generally renounce nothing, but release their code under a license (just as proprietary software vendors do). The license happens to allow for modification, as long as original source code is included with distribution along with other criteria as determined by the particular open-source license used (of which there are several, each with their own quirks: GNU, Apache, BSD licenses, etc.). To compare this with a living language with an active speech community is laughable.

And Esperanto is no more a universal a language than English is. Both are a hodgepodge of European languages and Esperanto has little to no influence from non-IndoEuropean languages and virtually no true native speakers (apparently there are some wackos who teach their kids this from infancy, but it's debatable whether that counts). English happens to have the advantage of billions of speakers, so the point of Esperanto is lost on most people.

I read articles that cover subjects about which I know nothing, and they sometimes make me think. This is one of those article that covers a coupla subjects I know a bit about, and it makes me doubt every other article ever... perhaps journalists are all just bullshitters.

Interesting article. I wonder if Okrent mentioned modern Hebrew, a hybrid of a natural and invented language. At the time Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (né Eliezer Yitzhak Perlman from Vilna) started writing his dictionary, not a soul spoke Hebrew as a first language and "modern Hebrew" was a fantasy. (This was at the same time that Zamenhof, born less than two years later than Ben-Yehuda and of similar ethnic and geographic origins, was inventing his language in service of a quite different ideological vision.) Ben-Yehuda's son was the first native speaker of modern Hebrew, and of course was mercilessly teased by other children.

Like Esperanto, modern Hebrew has a pleasing structure elegance, although much of that survives from ancient Hebrew. I would be interested to read a comparison of the development of modern Hebrew and Esperanto.

The Russo-English hodgepodge created by Anthony Burgess for "Clockwork Orange." Without expressly saying so -- he allowed the lingo to make his point for him -- he envisioned a future where the Soviets had infiltrated British culture to the extent the Americans had up to that point.

Right horrorshow it is, me droogs!

Evolution. Languages evolve and function exactly like biological species. They are organic in a sense, and grow from the ground up rather from the top down- the ground being populations brought together but isolated enough from a critical mass of its various linguistic progenitors to force the population to develop its own means of communication. After awhile, the new language bifurcates as Latin did into the various Romance languages and on it goes. Living language is the product of many minds, time and circumstance then- which makes me skeptical of the idea that an individual could invent a language that would be fully lifelike like an evolved language, no matter how elegant this language may be. As products of evolution- which is not necessarily progressive and certainly not oriented toward any end beyond its own propagation- languages are inherently indifferent to an individual's idealistic notion of linguistic efficiency. If they were, English- a messy language that has grown in layers as its speakers have encountered other populations- wouldn't be the world's lingua franca now.

That being said, this sounds like a very interesting book despite its apparent marginalization of Tolkien. And time will no doubt prove me wrong anyway.