by Arika Okrent
But it was curiosity about the authors of these projects that kept me there. Why did people invest so much effort in this pursuit? What made them think they could succeed? Who were these inventors? They usually provided very little information about themselves in their books, but I gleaned what I could from the way they presented their languages. Early in my wanderings through the invented-languages section of the library, I became particularly absorbed in the backstory alluded to by Fuishiki Okamoto, who in 1962, when he was seventy-seven years old, published a description of Babm, a “man-made language” for the “future World Society” and also “a theoretical system of the supreme good, which is assured by my philosophical Learning of Knowledge (not yet translated into English).” Since it is designed to be used easily by everyone from “the natives in the Himalayas” to “the inlanders of African ravines,” Babm is “planned most simply but perfectly.” Really? Here’s an example:
V pajio ci htaj, lrid cga coig pegayx pe bamb ak cop pbagt.
It means:
“I am reading this book, which is very interestingly written in Babm by a predominant scholar.”
More is revealed by the translation of his sentence than by the sentence itself. It shows something of his human yearnings. That he hopes to be found interesting. That he hopes to be considered a predominant scholar, and that perhaps he hopes that other predominant scholars will one day use his language. He does seem quite sure that “many experts in Babm are expected to appear one after another, who will present abundant and excellent examples of literary works.”
He is, of course, gravely mistaken.
But why? Why does this enterprise seem doomed to fail? After all, what do people do when they identify a problem with an existing tool? They try to invent a better one. Is it so crazy to apply this impulse to language? Hundreds of years ago dreamy souls were ridiculed for drawing up plans for vehicles that could travel underwater or fly to the moon. They have since been vindicated. But it’s also been hundreds of years since less dreamy, sometimes quite respected souls started drawing up plans for a better language. They and their successors are still ridiculed—if anyone has heard of them at all.
Maybe they deserve it. There is no shortage of arrogance or foolishness in the history of language invention. But after reading into the story of Mr. Okamoto and his beloved Babm, I didn’t feel much like ridiculing him. Of his own life he says little beyond that he was “born an extremely weak baby in the most miserable of circumstances,” but he unwittingly reveals more in the sentences he uses to illustrate the rules of his language:
V kog cald mtk, lrek deg cjobco ca mnom.
“I hope for an important matter, which is the consummation of the whole of humankind.”
V kij kdopakd aj modk.
“I choose a healthful meal rather than a delicious one.”
Sasn muq in ve hejp.
“No money is in my pocket.”
Vli cqeo.
“I have nothing of myself.”
Ox udek pbot.
“He does not carry out his original mission.”
Y uhqck V.
“I request you not to reproach me.”
Dedh cjis beg kobp.
“Time causes youth to be old.”
It seemed as if he had suffered enough. And he had worked so hard. “In spite of the fact that my physical body has so much weakened so that even walking annoys me,” he writes, “I am every day engaging in theoretical writings and compositions of Babm without even one holiday all the year round, from the early dawn of morning till the dark of evening.” He made me feel guilty. I had been born a strong baby in good circumstances, and yet here I was, lazing the day away, producing nothing but new procrastination strategies, and here was Mr. Okamoto, his body aching, his meals non-delicious, working all day every day to produce this book. He deserved a little respect for that, I thought.
Didn’t they all? Didn’t their hard work deserve at least a look? As I started piecing together the history of invented languages, I discovered amazing feats of work ethic that made me wish I could muster that kind of productive dedication. Of course, my respect was tried by the nutty claims made about these languages: It can be learned in twenty minutes! It can express anything you wish to say with a vocabulary of only fifty items! It is logically perfect! It will make you think more clearly! It will reveal the Truth! (And variations on these themes.) I didn’t have to believe these claims, but I thought it was only fair to at least test them for myself.
And so I entered the land of invented languages. I read the books and made a sincere attempt to learn the languages. I studied example texts line by line to figure out how the rules worked. I scoured vocabulary lists and composed translations. I dug up information on the lives of the inventors and got drawn in by their hopes and struggles. My journey also took me beyond the land of books, to gatherings of Esperantists, Lojbanists, and Klingonists, where I witnessed (and participated in) the unexpected phenomenon of invented languages brought to life.
What follows is not just a collection of stories about individual languages. The way people think about language is influenced by the times they live in, and it is possible to show how changing times led, in a general way, to changes in the types of languages that inventors came up with. There are trends, or eras, in language invention that reflect the preoccupations of the surrounding culture, and so, in a way, the history of invented languages is a story about the way we think about language.
It is also a story about natural language. In answering the question of why invented languages fail (and indeed, why they sometimes succeed), we will touch on topics like the relationship of concepts to words, the revival of Hebrew, Chinese writing, sign language, the role of logic in language, and the effect of language on thought. We will see what happens when you attempt to take the flaws out of language, and those “flaws” will be revealed as more important than we realize.
This is a story of why language refuses to be cured and why it succeeds, not in spite of, but because of, the very qualities that the language inventors have tried to engineer away.
John Wilkins and the Language of Truth
The Six-Hundred-Page Rewrite
Sixteen sixty-six was a hard year for John Wilkins. It was a hard year for everyone in London. The previous summer the Plague had swept through the city, killing thousands. Wilkins, like most who could afford to, had fled to the countryside. The emptying of London brought the activities of the Royal Society—the scientific academy that Wilkins had recently helped to found—to an abrupt halt. This was a minor inconvenience, of course, compared with the Black Death, but still an inconvenience, and Wilkins did what he could during that time to continue advancing the cause of science. He and a couple of fellow Society members used the various instruments they had hauled up from the city with them to carry on with their experiments. By the summer of 1666 the epidemic appeared to have run its course, and the streets of London began to fill with people again. Then a baker neglected to extinguish his oven fire one night and the city went up in flames.
The Great Fire of London burned for four days and destroyed most of the city. Wilkins lost his house. And because the church where he was vicar was also destroyed, he lost his job. A few years before, when he had been pushed out of his position as master of Trinity College for political reasons, he had bounced back relatively quickly with the help of influential friends. But the disruption to his life was more severe this time, and his friends were concerned about his low spirits.
This time he had lost something much more difficult to replace than living quarters or income. The fire had also claimed his “darling”—his universal language. He had been working on it for a decade, through the vagaries of national political upheaval and the pain of chronic kidney stones. His manuscript—hundreds of pages, finally complete, already at the printer’s shop—was now reduced to ashes.
Wilkins was at the very center of scientific life in his day, but his particular gifts were not of the type that
go down in history. He was a mentor, an organizer, a promoter, a peacemaker, and a soother of egos. He befriended and encouraged the innovators who would gain more lasting fame. Robert Hooke (of Hooke’s law, the relationship of force to stretch in springs) said of him, “There is scarce any one Invention, which this Nation has produc’d in our Age, but it has some way or other been set forward by his assistance.” He collaborated with Robert Boyle (of Boyle’s law, the relation of pressure to volume) and John Ray (father of natural history in Britain). He noticed the extraordinary talent of the young Christopher Wren (mathematician, astronomer, architect of St. Paul’s Cathedral) and took a special interest in promoting his career.
Wilkins’s own work was not groundbreaking (it was suggested that he got along so well with everyone because he didn’t arouse jealousy), but it did display a unique kind of creative verve. He drew up plans for land-water vehicles and flying machines. He designed an early odometer and a rainbow-producing fountain. He built a hollowed-out statue for playing practical jokes on people; he would speak through the statue’s mouth by means of a long pipe that allowed him to stand at a distance and observe the bewildered reactions of his targets. He constructed an elaborate glass beehive, outfitted like a palace with tiny decorations. Whimsical but also practical, it permitted the scientific observation of bee behavior. He presented a report on the differences between queens and drones at a meeting of the Royal Society.
Wilkins took a secondary role in the greater achievements of others both as an inspirer (his suggestions led to pioneering research on skin grafting and blood transfusion) and as a publicizer. He was perhaps the first popular science writer. Exasperated by dense, overly theoretical presentation styles, he made the promotion of plain language a lifelong cause. He wrote one book to explain Copernican astronomy to a general audience and another to explain mechanical geometry to people who might want to benefit from its practical applications. All applications of scientific theory were interesting to him; many of his own experiments veered toward the domestic (more efficient methods of embroidery, quicker ways to roast meat). He took great joy from science, and he knew how to make it accessible. Boyle may have been the true innovator when it came to the principles of air pressure, but it was Wilkins who thought to demonstrate the power of those principles in an experiment where, by blowing into a series of connected pipes, he levitated “a fat boy of sixteen or seventeen years” a clear two inches off the ground. The Society members were so entertained by his presentation that they agreed it should be performed for the king’s proposed visit.
Wilkins didn’t actively court fame for its own sake, but as generous and diplomatic as he was (one colleague said that he never met anyone else who “knew how to manage the freedom of speech so inoffensively”), he could not have been completely unconcerned with his own place in posterity. He did have one project that was exciting, important, and unquestionably his. It was a man-made language free from the ambiguity and imprecision that afflicted natural languages. It would directly represent concepts; it would reveal the truth.
Others had talked about creating such a language, or made preliminary attempts at it. Wilkins had collaborated with some of them and, in characteristic fashion, encouraged their efforts. But no one had put in the work he had. No one but Wilkins had been brave or industrious enough to take on the massive task that the creation of such a language required—a complete and ordered cataloging of all concepts, of everything in the universe. And now, after the Great Fire, the pages on which he had set down the universe were gone, along with his shot at immortal fame.
He was lower than he had ever been. But he was not one to indulge too long in self-pity. He got back to work, and within two years he had rewritten the whole thing. It came to over six hundred pages. When he presented it to the Royal Society in 1668, he acknowledged that he was “not so vain as to think that I have here completely finished this great undertaking,” and requested that a committee be appointed to “offer their thoughts concerning what they judge fit to be amended in it” so that he could continue to make improvements.
A committee was appointed. There was excitement, praise, and plans for translating the work into Latin. The king expressed an interest in learning the language. Robert Hooke suggested it should be the language of all scientific findings and published a description of the mechanics of pocket watches in it. The mathematician John Wallis wrote letters to Wilkins in the language and claimed that they “perfectly understood one another as if written in our own language.” Newton, Locke, and Leibniz read Wilkins’s book with interest.
Wilkins continued to work on perfecting his masterpiece, suffering with ever more frequent “fits of the stone.” In the summer of 1672 he sought a cure at Scarborough spa, but found no relief. In November, dying from “suppression of the Urine,” he told the friends and admirers who came to visit him for the last time that he was “prepared for the great Experiment” and that his only regret was that he would not live to see the completion of his language.
But he had seen it as complete as it ever would be. The king would not get around to learning it. The committee would never issue its report. Gradually, even Wilkins’s close friends and collaborators would stop talking about it. No more scientific reports would be written in it. No more letters. There is no evidence that anyone ever used it again.
What happened? Did it get lost in the shuffle of history? A case of wrong time, wrong place? Or was there a problem with the language itself? There was only one way to find out. I settled in for a long weekend with An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language. I emerged blinking and staggering, unsure of whether any word in any language meant anything at all.
A Calculus of Thought
Wilkins’s project was the most fully developed of all the many linguistic schemes hatched in his day. Language invention was something of a seventeenth-century intellectual fad. Latin was losing ground as the international lingua franca, and as the pace of advancement in philosophy, science, and mathematics picked up, scholars fretted about the best way to propagate their findings. Talk of universal language was in the air. It was not the first time. The search for a cure for Babel was as old as the story of Babel, but the cure proposed before this point usually involved the discovery of the original language of Adam as crafted by God. Now, in the throes of the scientific revolution, people started to think that perhaps a solution could be crafted by man.
It seems that any self-respecting gentleman of the day could be expected to have some sort of universal language up his sleeve. Of all the works published on the idea during this time, the one with my favorite title is by Edward Somerset, the second Marquis of Worcester: A Century of the Names and Scantlings of Such Inventions as at Present I Can Call to Mind to Have Tried and Perfected, Which (My Former Notes Being Lost) I Have, at the Instance of a Powerful Friend, Endeavoured Now in the Year 1655, to Set These Down in Such a Way as May Sufficiently Instruct Me to Put Any of Them in Practice.
There among his inventions ingenious (the steam engine), overly optimistic (an unsinkable ship), and fanciful (“a floating garden of pleasure, with trees, flowers, banqueting-houses, and fountains, stews for all kinds of fishes, a reserve for snow to keep wine in, delicate bathing places, and the like”) is a mention of “an universal character methodical and easie to be written, yet intelligible in any language.” He doesn’t, however, say much more about it.
Another gentleman inventor, who never missed a chance to say more about anything, was the eccentric Scotsman Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty. He made a name for himself as the English translator of Rabelais, and not, as he had hoped, as the inventor of “a new idiome of far greater perfection than any hitherto spoken.” In a characteristic display of his excessive lack of humility, he likened his universal language to “a most exquisite jewel, more precious than diamonds inchased in gold, the like whereof was never seen in any age.”
He described his language as a sort of arithmetic of letters by which every singl
e thing in the universe could be given a unique name that, through a simple computation, showed you its exact and true definition. What’s more, every word meant something read both backward and forward—or in any permutation of the letters. He published two works on this language: Ekskubalauron, or “Gold out of Dung,” in 1652; and Logopandecteision; or, An Introduction to the Universal Language in 1653. (He was an avid coiner of exotic Greco-Latin-based terms, often taken to—to use a phrase of his—quomodocunquizing, or “any-old-waying,” extremes.) Both of these works include an indictment of natural languages for their gross imperfections and a trumpeting of praise for the solution that he had devised. But he never gets around to the details. The remainder of the first work is taken up with an invective against greedy Presbyterians and a history of Scotland. The largest part of the second work consists of a chapter-by-chapter complaint against the “impious dealing of creditors,” “covetous preachers,” and “pitiless judges” who were compounding his money troubles.
He claimed to have completed a full description of his language, but the manuscript pages had been destroyed when they were appropriated for “posterior uses” by the opposing army after he was taken prisoner at the battle of Worcester. Seven pages from the preface, however, were rescued from under a pile of dead men in the muddy street (thus, “gold out of dung”).
Urquhart was such a shockingly self-aggrandizing hack that some scholars have concluded that he must have been joking. He had earlier published a genealogy of his family, placing himself 153rd in line from Adam, and a book on mathematics, which an “admirer” (who happens to use words like doxologetick and philomathets) said explained the subject in so clear and poetic a manner that it conferred the ability to solve any trigonometry problem, no matter how difficult, “as if it were a knowledge meerly infused from above, and revealed by the peculiar inspiration of some favourable Angel.”