In the Land of INVENTED LANGUAGES

She sees the predominance of these other symbol systems as “a reflection of how society treats disability—‘pictures are good enough.’ There's no concern with enriching. They aren't worried about the dignity of full language.”

Esperanto is still pretty regular, and still pretty easy to learn, but it's governed by the way 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 variety of shape, pattern, and color found in the languages of the world is a testament to the wonder of nature, to the breathtaking array of possibilities that can emerge, tangled and wild, from the fertile human endowments of brain and larynx, intelligence and social skills. The job of the linguist, like that of the biologist or the botanist, is not to tell us how nature should behave, or what its creations should look like, but to describe those creations in all their messy glory and try to figure out what they can teach us about life, the world, and, especially in the case of linguistics, the workings of the human mind.

People find something very comforting about the notion that words are the problem, not concepts. When words fail us, we tend to blame the words. We've all experienced the frustration of not being able to say what we mean to say. When we struggle with language, we have the sensation that our clean, beautiful ideas remain trapped inside our heads. We accuse language of being too crude and clumsy to adequately express our thoughts. But perhaps we flatter ourselves.

Sometimes we do find the words to express an idea, and only then realize what a stupid idea it is. This experience would suggest that our thoughts are not as clean and beautiful as we would like to believe. Instead of blaming language for failing to capture our thoughts, maybe we should thank it for giving some shape to the muddle in our heads.

the urge to invent languages is as old and persistent as language itself.

It is at least as old and persistent as the urge to complain about language. The primary motivation for inventing a new language has been to improve upon natural language, to eliminate its design flaws, or rather the flaws it has developed for lack of conscious design. Looked at from an engineering perspective, language is kind of a disaster.

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.

What are Klingon speakers doing? They are engaging in intellectually stimulating language play. They are enjoying themselves. They are doing language for language's sake, art for art's sake. And like all committed artists, they will do their thing, critics be damned.

Klingons are rough, crude, loyal, violent, and honorable—a sort of Viking-Spartan-samurai motorcycle gang.

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.

They became irregular because the world changed around them.