In the Land of Invented Languages

about his made-up exotic culture.

On Esperanto, see:

Marjorie Boulton, Zamenhof, Creator of Esperanto (Routledge and Paul,1960).

Peter G. Forster, The Esperanto Movement (Mouton, 1982).

Wendy Heller, Lidia: The Life of Lidia Zamenhof, Daughter of Esperanto (George Ronald, 1985).

Pierre Janton, Esperanto Language, Literature, and Community (State University of New York Press, 1993).

Don Harlow maintains a very informative Web book about Esperanto at donh.best.vwh.net/esperanto.php .

On Hebrew, see:

Jack Fellman, The Revival of a Classical Tongue: Eliezer Ben Yehuda and the Modern Hebrew Language (Mouton, 1973).

Shlomo Izre’el, “The Emergence of Spoken Israeli Hebrew,” in Corpus Linguistics and Modern Hebrew: Towards the Compilation of the Corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew (CoSIH), edited by Benjamin H. Hary (Tel Aviv University, 2003).

Charles Bliss and the Language of Symbols

On the rise of English and an analysis of how a language comes to world prominence, see:

David Crystal, English as a Global Language (Cambridge University Press,1997).

Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (HarperCollins, 2005).

 

For information about Elias Molee, see:

Marvin Slind, “Elias Molee and ‘Alteutonic’: A Norwegian-Americans ‘Universal Language,’” Norwegian-American Studies (forthcoming).

 

Molee’s papers are held at the Norwegian-American Historical Association, St. Olaf College.

On the strange, strange life of Edmund Shaftesbury, see:

Janet Six, “Hidden History of Ralston Heights,” Archaeology, May/June 2004.

 

For some good stories about Ogden, see:

J. R. L. Anderson and P. Sargant Florence, C. K. Ogden: A Collective Memoir (Elek, 1977).

K. E. Garay, “Empires of the Mind? C. K. Ogden, Winston Churchill, and Basic English,” Historical Papers, Communications Historiques (1988), pp. 280–91.

 

The hieroglyphic example comes from:

Florian Coulmas, The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems (Black-well, 1996).

 

On how Chinese writing really works, see:

John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (University of Hawaii Press, 1984).

 

For a good introduction to the linguistics of sign languages, see: Edward S. Klima and Ursula Bellugi, The Signs of Language (Harvard University Press, 1979).

On Gestuno, see:

Bill Moody, “International Sign: A Practitioner’s Perspective,” Journal of Interpretation (2002), pp. 1–47.

 

If you’d like to see Bliss in action, the 1974 film Mr. Symbol Man, directed by Bruce Moir and Bob Kingsbury, can be ordered from the National Film Board of Canada.

James Cooke Brown and the Language of Logic

On Korzybski, see:

Marvin Gardner, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (Dover Publications, 1957).

Michael Silverstein, “Modern Prophets of Language,” University of Chicago, MS, 1993.

 

On Whorf, see:

John E. Joseph, “The Immediate Sources of the ‘Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis,’” Historiographia Linguistica 23, no. 3 (1996), pp. 365–404.

Penny Lee, The Whorf Theory Complex: A Critical Reconstruction (John Benjamins, 1996).

John Lucy, Language Diversity and Thought: A Reformulation of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (Cambridge University Press, 1992).

Michael Silverstein, “Whorfianism and the Linguistic Imagination of Nationality,” in Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities, edited by Paul Kroskrity (School of American