In the Land of Invented Languages

by Arika Okrent

  Nora’s check arrived at a moment of financial crisis for the institute. Brown’s third and last-chance proposal for a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) had just been rejected, an outcome that shocked and surprised him. He felt he had been treated unfairly by reviewers who showed “unmistakable signs of total ignorance of the project,” and he asked that it be “done over again.” His appeal, which included a point-by-point rebuttal of the reviewers' misgivings, burned his bridges to the science-funding academic establishment all the way to the top.

  It also betrayed a damning lack of sophistication about how these things work. Brown had submitted almost two thousand pages of supporting documents with his proposal—grammar books, textbooks, dictionaries, and every copy of the Loglanist that had been printed so far—and was outraged that the reviewers had not made themselves intimately familiar with all this material. The terse, carefully worded reply that Brown received to his initial appeal emphasized that the scientific community cannot judge the value of a project by reading every single thing the author has to say about it. The usual yardstick by which merit is measured is a body of scientific results and reviews published in peer-reviewed journals (and journals published by the author himself generally do not count as such).

  Because Brown had received an initial minor grant shortly after his first article on Loglan was published, he fully expected that the fifteen-plus years of work he had put into the language since that time would secure him a major grant. But when he left his job at the university, he also cut himself off from the normal channels through which a fundable reputation is established. Though he did seek advice and criticism as he worked on Loglan (he loved nothing better than a good, lively argument), he tended to surround himself with admirers. Those who could not submit to his powerful, stubborn temperament did not last very long in his circle. Those who excused the insults, the accusations, and the occasional angry blowup in order to remain in the orbit of this often intensely charming, always intellectually exciting man became his lifelong friends and collaborators.

  After spending the early 1960s devoting his full attention to Loglan, Brown put out some materials on microfilm, intending to make them available to the scientific community for review. He did receive one review in a top-tier linguistics journal, but it was not something he would have wanted to emphasize to the grant committee. Though the reviewer praised the project for its ambition and ingenuity, he threw serious doubt on its usefulness as any kind of scientific tool. The general verdict on Loglan was that it was an interesting, fascinating, and diligently executed … hobby.

  Shortly after that, Brown left the country, losing contact with many of the people who were working on the language with him. He had divorced his third wife, a former student of his at the university who had done much of the work calculating the “learn-ability scores” for his Loglan vocabulary, and, in order to evade a custody dispute, took their toddler daughter to Europe and didn’t return for a few years (his ex-wife wouldn’t see their daughter again until she was a teenager). Loglan took a backseat to other projects—he wrote a Utopian science fiction novel and worked on something he referred to as a “statistical study of interpersonal relationships.” He got married again, this time to a woman who was one of his (openly acknowledged) mistresses during his previous marriage (his “progressive” politics carried over into the realm of sexual relationships, though in a rather one-sided way). When that marriage fell apart, he came back to the States and published a revised version of his Loglan grammar and dictionary, this time in book form, and purchased an advertisement for it in Scientific American.

  The book stirred up interest again (many readers had been waiting for it since the 1960 article), and soon Brown had a group of followers who were willing to devote their time and skills to developing and promoting Loglan. Most of these volunteers were “computer guys” (Nora being the rare non-guy among them) who were excited about the possibility of the language serving as a human-computer interface. Brown also became excited about such a possibility and, after his first NSF grant proposal was rejected, put together “A Proposal for the Establishment of a Service/Support Relationship Between the Loglan Institute and the U.S. Computer Industry,” in which he asked “the industry” to provide the institute with “approximately $275,000 per year.” He expected them to fork over the money for the general good of the industry (surely, he emphasized, having a human-machine-interface system made available would benefit them all); exclusive rights to use any “proprietary information” would remain with the institute. Apparently, there were no takers.

  So in 1979, Brown turned the institute into a “membership-controlled corporation,” and most of the Loglan volunteers, around a hundred people, paid the fifty-dollar fee gladly. This would allow them to at least hire a permanent secretary while they worked on what Brown called “the Commercial Success Project,” from which, he declared, all the members would eventually benefit.

  There had never been any question among the Loglan volunteers that Brown was in charge. It was his language and he had the last word. But when they became paying members of his ostensibly membership-controlled corporation, they naturally expected more of a say in the development of the language. Under Brown’s direction, they began an overhaul of the rules of Loglan word formation (something still referred to in Loglan lore as the Great Morphological Revolution) and developed their own opinions on the best way to proceed. However, Brown proved unable to relinquish any control, even going so far as to prohibit the members from discussing (in their newsletter) any issues he had not personally approved for discussion. In 1984 his mounting ledger of perceived slights and disloyalties drove him to make belittling personal attacks on the very members who had donated the most time to the Loglan cause. When the board objected, he fired the board, ordering them to have nothing to do with Loglan for one full year, after which time, if they made suitable apologies, they would be allowed back.

  In the newsletter, a member named Birrell Walsh expressed sadness that Brown was “driving away ALL those who appreciate the magnificent thing he had built,” and asked, “Do we owe it to Jim to give him a chance to wake up before he empties Log-landia?” His answer, like that of everyone else, was no. He concluded with a striking example of Loglan in action, an original poem:

  le sitci fa nu kalhui ea nirve i lo nu gunti vu darli i la ganmre vi krakau va lo nortei troku

  This city will be destroyed, empty; the people are far away; the king is a howling dog by the unlistening stones.

  Most of the membership fell away, and the journal, the Loglanist, shuttered its doors for good.

  In the midst of all this, Bob LeChevalier, Nora’s future husband, sent in his check to become a member of the institute. He didn’t know any of the other members, having been exposed to Loglan only through Brown himself, and he had no idea what was going on. Bob had been living in the San Diego area (where Brown—and the institute—were located in the late 1970s), and a friend of his, who was interested in Loglan, came to visit and decided to look Brown up in the phone book. Brown invited him over to talk, and Bob gave his friend a ride. “I knew nothing about language or linguistics and wasn’t really interested, either,” he told me. “I was just the transportation.”

  But he ended up enjoying the conversation that evening and kept in touch with Brown, visiting him occasionally to talk about Loglan or to assist him with other projects, such as testing out a new board game he was working on. Soon, he was a member of the institute and was assigned the task of putting together a digital dictionary.

  Bob moved to the D.C. area to take a job as a computer systems engineer for a government contractor, and Brown moved back to Gainesville, but they had long talks on the phone, during which Bob tried to explain why he wasn’t making much progress on the dictionary and Brown encouraged him to try harder. In 1986, Brown became ill with a life-threatening infection. “I called Jim in the hospital, and we talked about Loglan,” Bob told me. “It seemed like he had had a
taste of mortality, and he was worried about what would become of the project—like this might be the last chance.” When he recovered, Brown invited Bob to Gainesville, and they spent a very intense weekend working on the language together. Bob was flattered; he felt like he was being treated as a full partner. Brown was preparing to sail across the Atlantic, and Bob left with the sense that he had been handed some sort of responsibility for the legacy of Loglan. He returned to D.C. full of renewed energy for the dictionary project, and a determination to do everything he could to please his mentor by helping Loglan succeed.

  He decided to organize some local user groups where people who were interested in Loglan could get together and brainstorm, coordinate projects, and help each other learn the language. He began to contact people; Brown had given him a few names, and he found some others in old Loglan publications. Someone directed him to Nora, who was still an institute member (she had sent in a second five-hundred-dollar donation in 1984, so her membership was paid up for at least a decade) and lived not too far away in Philadelphia. They talked on the phone for hours, and a few weeks later she came down for a visit so they could work together on updating a Loglan flash-card program she had written. When Bob asked the former editor of the institute newsletter, which hadn’t come out in about a year, for some addresses of other Loglanists, the editor sent him the entire mailing list. Bob used it to mail out an update on the work he and Nora were doing, and issued a rallying cry for other Loglanists who were near each other to establish their own working groups. From some of the members who were no longer active, he collected half-completed computer programs and bits of other work and started recruiting volunteers to revive these projects.

  Over Labor Day weekend, Bob hosted the first annual Logfest at his house. About ten people showed up with sleeping bags, but not much sleeping went on, as they stayed up all night snacking on cold cuts, hashing out ideas, and trying to see how far they could go with live Loglan conversation (not very far, it turned out, but it was a start). They also did a detailed group review of a revised description of the language that Brown had asked one of them to have a look at. Bob put together a complete report of everything that had been accomplished over the summer, more than a hundred pages of comments and materials, and, with a rush of exhilarated pride, mailed it to Brown, who was due back any day from his sailing adventure.

  When Brown did get back, about a week later, he exploded in fury, yelling at Bob over the phone, accusing him of stealing the mailing list, of making a power grab. “I told you to work on the dictionary! I didn’t tell you to contact anyone! I didn’t tell you to review that draft.” He accused Bob of consorting with “enemies” and “fomenting a revolt.” Bob, flattened with bewildered disappointment, struggled to explain that he was only trying to be helpful, and spent the next four hours apologizing. At the end of their discussion, he was back in Brown’s good graces, but very tenuously so.

  And not for long. When Bob and Nora finished the flash-card program (they had been spending more and more time together), they told Brown they were planning to distribute it as shareware on a computer bulletin board so that other Loglanists could take advantage of it. Brown informed them they would do no such thing. Loglan was the property of the institute. He would consider letting them distribute the program only if they signed a statement of acknowledgment that the institute owned the copyrights to the language and agreed to pay the institute royalties.

  Bob wasn’t so sure anyone owned the rights to the language, or what that would mean in practical terms, and his own research into copyright law indicated that if he tested Brown’s claims legally, they wouldn’t hold up. He didn’t want to have to test them, he explained in a series of letters, but he wouldn’t sign any agreement. Through the first few months of 1987 the conflict escalated, with Brown demanding that Bob resign from the project (“Sorry it hasn’t worked out for you, Bud”) and Bob refusing (“If I can’t find a way to work around our dispute, I will take up the gauntlet you have thrown down, Don Q. But I’m not a windmill and neither are you”). Though Bob had initially agreed that some type of legal protection for Loglan was necessary in order to give the language a chance to stabilize (he just thought the members who were working on it should be given more freedom with it), as the argument grew more heated, he transformed into a sort of Loglan public-domain crusader. In his view, the only way to advance the language was to give it to the users and let them run with it. His position slowly crystallized into a mission: he would bring this creation to life, even if it meant going against the will of the creator himself.

  In March, Bob proposed to Nora in Loglan and she accepted. In April, when Bob ordered some Loglan materials for the class he was teaching, Brown sent his check back. Orders would only be filled for those who signed an “Aficionado Agreement” with a “non-disclosure” clause. When Bob explained to his students what had happened, one of them asked whether they could get around the copyright problem by just making up their own words and substituting them into Loglan sentences. Could they? It was worth a try.

  On Memorial Day weekend Bob drove to Philadelphia to help Nora pack up her things and move her into his house in Fairfax, where two of his Loglan-interested friends were visiting. The four of them spent the rest of the weekend laying out a system for creating the new vocabulary, and Bob and Nora then spent their first summer together generating great heaps of paper in their “relexification” of Loglan, which they called Loglan-88. In August they hosted the second Logfest, where the attendees voted on whether it was worth splitting up this already small community in order to have the freedom to do what they wanted. They decided it was, 18–0.

  Still, the split was not complete. Bob considered himself to be working on Loglan—Brown’s language—and he still held out hope for the possibility of reconciliation. In October, Bob and Nora married. On their honeymoon in Colonial Williamsburg, in a demonstration of their commitment both to Loglan and to each other, they sustained a two-hour Loglan conversation. Most of it was spent trying to establish that each had understood what the other one said, as good a foundation for a marriage as any.

  Upon their return, Bob redoubled his efforts toward his mission. He announced Loglan-88 at a science fiction convention, collected new recruits, and started putting out his own newsletter. A few weeks into 1988, “Jim had fifty Aficionados, and I had a mailing list of three hundred.” In March, he received a letter from Jim, notifying him that he was in violation of Loglan’s trademark (to be registered shortly) and that, should he not cease such violation, he risked being sued “for the recovery of profits, damages and costs, with, as you may know, the possibility of treble damages and attorney’s fees.”

  With that letter, the gauntlet had been irretrievably thrown. Loglan-88 was officially renamed Lojban (from the new words logji, “logic,” and bangu, “language”), and the Lojbanists incorporated their own, competing (nonprofit) organization, the Logical Language Group (LLG). A year later, the LLG challenged the Loglan trademark. After almost two years of motions and counter-motions, the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board ruled that the trademark should be canceled. A few months later, Brown filed an appeal, and the case went to trial before the federal circuit court. Bob hadn’t seen Brown for six years, and hadn’t had any direct communication with him for five, when they finally came together in a courtroom in 1992. But no words would be exchanged, not even a glance. “I’d never been snubbed so completely,” Bob told me. “He refused to look at me, like I didn’t exist.” Brown lost the appeal.

  Can a person own a language? The law is still not really clear on that. The Loglan case did not settle the matter; it said only that the word “Loglan” could not be trademarked because at the time the trademark was filed (over thirty years after Brown had coined the word) it was already in general use as a “common descriptive term.” (The Loglan case would later be cited in a judgment against Harley-Davidson when the motorcycle company claimed that another company’s use of “hog” to mean “motorcycle�
� was trademark infringement.) The Lojbanists were free to use the word “Loglan” to describe their project (though they continued to call it Lojban).

  There is much more to a language, of course, than its name. At the beginning of the dispute (but not in court), Brown claimed he owned the rights to the vocabulary of Loglan. Did he? Brown did have copyrights on his books, including the dictionary. But copyright does not extend to each individual word in a copyrighted work, only to the particular configuration of the words. Would it have been possible for him to copyright each Loglan word sepa-rately? Perhaps, but he didn’t; to do so would have been too costly and time-consuming (and useless, since the Lojbanists had already made their own words). In any case, such a strategy for language ownership has never been attempted, and it is not clear what the law would have to say about it if challenged in court.

  There is yet more to a language than its words. Language is also a system, a set of rules for creating sentences and deriving other words. These rules were very explicit in Loglan, and they were the part of the language that had involved the most effort to develop. Can the rules of a language be owned? Probably not. You can patent a machine that uses a certain mathematical formula, but not the formula itself. You can own an implementation of an algorithm, but not the algorithm. There is, however, some blur in this area within the murky world of software patents, so given the right lawyer and the right judge, who knows?

  There is one invented language that is essentially owned by a private company, though the terms of ownership have not been tested in court: Klingon is protected by a trademark held by Paramount Pictures. Without proper license, you cannot use the name “Klingon” to describe, say, a book of your own original Klingon poetry. But could you sell the same poems if you didn’t explicitly call them “Klingon” poems? It’s probably not worth it to you to find out, unless the sales of your poetry have somehow provided you with the resources to fight off a bottomless barrel of lawyers. As a practical matter, Paramount owns whatever aspects of the language they say they own. As a legal matter? Unless someone comes up with a very compelling reason to bring on the lawyers, we’ll never know.