In the Land of Invented Languages

people use it—not by some perfect mathematical system or universal standard of meaning. Our languages have inconsistencies and irregularities because they are run by us, and not by some perfect rule book or grand philosophy. I don’t know about you, but the story of invented languages only convinces me that I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The transmission of customs and conventions, linguistic or otherwise, from one generation to the next is never perfect. Over multiple generations, any sign, symbol, or picture that once conveyed meaning may become completely unrecognizable. This is a problem that was addressed by the semiotician Thomas Sebeok when, in the early 1980s, he was asked by the Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation to prepare a report on how best to encode a warning message on sites where nuclear waste had been buried. To ensure the safety of future generations, the message had to be interpretable for ten thousand years. He recommended extreme redundancy of encoding: the message should be printed in all known languages; there should be pictures, icons, and other relevant symbols; repositories around the world should store technical messages written in mathematical formulas (or perhaps, he suggests, in something like Lincos, Freudenthal’s self-teaching logical language). But even all of this redundancy, he noted, might prove worthless in ten thousand years.

The best way to make sure the message would get through to the future, he proposed, was to include a second “metamessage,” with a “plea and a warning” that every 250 years or so the information (including the “metamessage” itself) be re-encoded into whatever languages, symbols, and unknown-as-of-yet communicative devices were current at that time. Still the possibility would exist that the people of the future would ignore the plea, or forget to comply, so as added insurance he suggests the creation of a sort of folklore, perpetuated through rituals and legends, that would promote the development of a superstition or taboo about the dangerous sites. An “atomic priesthood,” a group of scientists entrusted with the true reasons for the danger, “would be charged with the added responsibility of seeing to it that our behest, as embodied in the cumulative sequence of metamessages, is to be heeded … with perhaps the veiled threat that to ignore the mandate would be tantamount to inviting some sort of supernatural retribution.” Even if the “priesthood” should forget the original reason for its existence, it is hoped that whatever kind of entity it should evolve into would maintain some sort of authority and sense of responsibility toward passing on the folklore.

According to Sebeok’s analysis, the best chance for transmitting meaning ten thousand years into the future was not to find some optimal, stable, universal way to encode that meaning, because there is none. Meaning resides not in the symbol or the image or the language in which it is encoded but in the society that interprets it. New generations are born, societies change, and, with them, the interpretation of meaning. The best shot we had at getting our message across was to try to influence the society of the future—either by entreating it to adapt the encoding of the message to its times or by planting an aura of danger in a broad social tradition.

Though language inventors may have set their sights on issues a little more immediate than the ten- thousand-year communication problem, too many of them have made the mistake of believing that if they just worked hard enough, they could come up with a language that would transcend society. But it is society that creates meaning, and therefore language. The best hope a language inventor has for the survival of his or her project is to find a group of people who will use it, and then hand it over and let them ruin its perfection.

Though there have been successes in the story of invented languages, they have been qualified ones. Some languages have gotten attention or praise or even communities of speakers, but none of them have fulfilled their original missions. We still don’t have a worldwide international auxiliary language or a proven cure for all the supposed inadequacies of language. And so ambitious inventor types are still working on it. Every year still sees a few more proposals for a new world language, an improved Esperanto, or a perfect system of mathematical concept formation. I recently purchased a book, self-published by John Yench in 2003, on Idirl, “a universal language for all mankind, with none of the inconsistencies and awkward irregularities of existing natural languages, a self-consistent language where a word’s sequence of sounds alone tell you its meaning, without needing a dictionary.” Mr. Yench is a bit behind the times in his method of spreading the word about his language. These days, language inventors no longer scrape together their savings in order to print books and mail them out to the libraries and government offices of the world. Instead, they set up Web sites. The language inventors, like most everyone else, have taken their ideas and their products to the Internet.

And, like most everyone else, they are able to find some kind of audience this way. Well-established languages like Esperanto and Lojban, by providing forums where people can use and learn the languages without having to travel or wait for feedback, have attracted a good number of converts every year, and even old projects like Volapuk, Ido, and Interlingua have picked up some new life online. But so much easy access to information about so many projects makes the competition that much fiercer. As many languages as there are on the Web, there are more angry flame wars and long manifestos about why this language is more logical, more systematic, more international, more likely to be adopted by the UN, less biased toward Europeans, less difficult to learn, less ambiguous, less likely to be abused by politicians …

All this fighting stems from the illusion that people choose to learn a language for rational reasons, that they are looking for the language that has the most useful features, the best agenda. But no one is out there comparison shopping for an artificial language. They find what they like, and there’s no accounting for taste. There are Esperanto types, and there are Lojban types, and there are even a few proudly defiant Volapuk types.

As it turns out, it is possible for an invented language to succeed even if it has no useful features at all. One of the most successful languages of the current era is neither free from irregularities nor easy to learn. It has no mission: it wasn’t intended to unite mankind or improve the mind or even be spoken by people in the real world. But it suited the personal taste of a certain group of people so well that as soon as they saw it, they fell in love, clamored for more, and formed a community that brought it to life.

And so we come back to the story of Klingon.

The Go-To Linguist

When the Klingons first appeared on the original Star Trek television show, which ended in 1969, they were little more than grunting belligerents in greasepaint. They developed their trademark ridged foreheads for the first Star Trek movie in 1979, but it wasn’t until the second incarnation of the television series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, which began in 1987, that Klingons were portrayed as complex members of a richly articulated alien culture.

In that series and subsequent Star Trek movies, audiences learned that Klingons are rough, crude, loyal, violent, and honorable—a sort of Viking-Spartan-samurai motorcycle gang. They eat qagh (live serpent worms), drink strong alcohol, and sleep on hard surfaces. They have a rite of passage (a youth is ceremoniously beaten with something called a painstik) and a creation myth (the first Klingon and his mate destroyed the gods who created them and burned down the heavens). Cursing is an esteemed art form, one of the most offensive insults being “Hab SoSlI' Quch” (Your mother has a smooth forehead). Their mating practices involve the hurling of heavy objects and often result in injury. They are fond of reciting their numerous proverbs, which express their values: “quv Hutlh HoHbogh tlhIngan ach qabDaj 'angbe’bogh” (The Klingon who kills without showing his face has no honor); “Dubotchugh yIpummoH” (If it is in your way, knock it down); “bIjatlh 'e’yImev, yItlhutlh” (Stop talking and drink!); and my personal favorite, “bortaS nIvqu 'oH bortaS’e'” (Revenge is the best revenge).

Klingon is indeed difficult to pronounce, but at least it uses phonetic spelling—once you know what sound each letter represents, you can pronounce any Klingon word. The vowels are easy—a as in “father,” e as in “ten,” I as in “give,” o as in “phone,” u as in “tune.” The consonants are more difficult. The H is pronounced as the “ch” sound in Yiddish words like “chutzpah” or the German exclamation ach! The Klingon D is pronounced as someone from India might pronounce a d—place the tip of your tongue at the middle of the roof of your mouth rather than the