In the Land of Invented Languages

and we will build ourselves a pueblo whose top will reach to the sky; and we will be famous if we are scattered sometime throughout the region.

 

Ceqli (May, 1996)

and letter-pronoun-j past speak, “invite come!—I-you future build one city, and one tower and letter- pronoun-t separator-particle top which is-located-in sky. And you-I future have-become fame-name for-prevent that I-you passive spread-throw to all-place which is-located-in the world.”

 

More samples of invented languages can be found at inthelandofinventedlanguages.com.

Notes

Much of the information in this book comes from my own reporting. As much as I could, I have consulted the original works of the language inventors I discuss. The Library of Congress has a good collection of artificial languages, as does Princeton University and the University of Chicago. For the biographical information on Bliss, Weilgart, and Brown, I am indebted to the friends and family members who allowed me to interview them. They were incredibly open with me about memories that were sometimes painful for them. I am also grateful to the people who had the foresight to allow their basements and attics to be taken over by piles of documents for years, so that I could one day come along and dig through them. In this regard Shirley McNaughton, Bob LeChevalier, and Andrea Patten have provided me with indispensable help.

But, of course, I have also relied heavily on the work of others. What follows is a list of some of the secondary sources I have consulted and some suggestions for further reading.

General books about invented languages:

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language (Blackwell, 1995).

Andrew Large, The Artificial Language Movement (Blackwell, 1985).

Marina Yaguello, Lunatic Lovers of Language: Imaginary Languages and Their Inventors (Athlone Press, 1991).

Nine Hundred Languages, Nine Hundred Years

For more about Hildegard von Bingen, see:

Sarah L. Higley, Hildegard of Bingen’s Unknown Language: An Edition, Translation, and Discussion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

 

The story of Joseph Schipfer comes from:

Norbert Michel, “Joseph Schipfer—Traumer oder Humanist?” Beitrage zur Wallufer Ortsgeschichte 1 (1993).

 

Information about Vela and Ben Prist is from:

Alan Libert, Mixed Artificial Languages (Lincom Europa, 2003).

John Wilkins and the Language of Truth

Eco’s book is particularly focused on this time period and contains a great deal of information about the historical background of the seventeenth-century language movement. Other books I have consulted for this section include:

Florian Cajori, A History of Mathematical Notations (The Open Court Publishing Company, 1928–29).

R. J. Craik, Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty (1611—1660): Adventurer, Polymath, and Translator of Rabelais (Mellen Research University Press, 1993).

David Cram and Jaap Maat, George Dalgarno on Universal Language: The Art of Signs (1661), The Deaf and Dumb Man’s Tutor (1680), and the Unpublished Papers (Oxford University Press, 2001).

James Knowlson, Universal Language Schemes in England and France,1600– 1800 (University of Toronto Press, 1975).

Barbara J. Shapiro, John Wilkins, 1614–1672: An Intellectual Biography (University of California Press, 1969).

Joseph L. Subbiondo, John Wilkins and 17th-Century British Linguistics (John Benjamins, 1992).

Ludwik Zamenhof and the Language of Peace

For a very entertaining account of Solresol, see:

Paul Collins, NOTES Banvard’s Folly: Thirteen Tales of Renowned Obscurity, Famous Anonymity, and Rotten Luck (Picador USA, 2001).

 

This book also tells the story of George Psalmanazar, who in the early eighteenth century made up a language to perpetuate a hoax where he pretended to be a native of Formosa, and gave lectures all over Europe