When you think of invented languages, what do you think of?

Esperanto? Klingon? The languages spoken in Tolkien’s books: high elvish, dwarf, the language of Orcs, the hobbit language¹?

How many deliberately constructed languages can you name?

How about the medieval nun, Hildegard von Bingham’s, Lingua Ignota, the language she used when she spoke in tongues. Scholars know that it existed – she recorded words, stories, sentences, on paper, although the purpose is unknown.

Sometimes purposes are known or stated. Some inventors are unhappy with the disordered, inconsistent, messy rules of organic languages, invent languages that, to them, make sense – except that others rarely share their enthusiasm and join them in speaking them. Language follows logic of its own.

My husband, in the early 2000’s, excited by a trip to Hawaii, wanted to learn the language of the islands and created flashcards for himself, and then created a database with words, prompts, and even recordings skimmed off the internet, to help him learn and remember the words. Except without someone to speak it with him – this was before the blossoming of social media – his command atrophied.

How about a mathematical language, where 3 means “to abate”. Or a language of symbols, where the word for god consists of a combination of symbols: “proper name” plus “to be” plus “act of”. Or perhaps a musical language consisting of Do, Re, Me, Fa, So, La, Ti that could be communicated through singing or playing music, or colors, or taps.

Sometimes invented languages are derived from bits and pieces of other languages, chopped up and reassembled in ways that make better sense to the inventors: the root “bon” used in bon-h-in (good) vs bon-zs-in (better) vs bon-zrmy-in (not good enough).

Sometimes they are not invented so much as rediscovered and fleshed out, such as Modern Hebrew, derived from the original Hebrew that died out, according to the author, in 200 AD. Although it was used as a middle eastern trading language, and retained its purity in writings, it had stopped being a native language, a language spoken by the people until someone dedicated themselves to making speaking it exclusively at home in the late 1800s, filling the gaps with logical insertions until it became a working language – and finally, it caught on and spread. As more and more Jews immigrated to and took refuge in Lebanon, they learned Hebrew.

Some languages are developed to help those who cannot use words verbally to communicate: sign language; and languages used to help people with cerebral palsy get their points across. I think about the beautiful image in Song for a Whale of a poem created in sign-language by a girl who is deaf. When her (hearing) teacher penalizes her because it does not “rhyme” when translated into spoken and written English, the girl retorts that it “rhymes” in sign.

Loglang, Lojban, Láadan (a gynocentric language), these and more are here in this book. A book where you learn about what comprises a language, how to construct a language, what works, what does not work – just in case you were planning to invent a language, or resurrect a language, or just try to make English make sense, gosh darn it.

Or maybe just learn a little Klingon.

Just in case.

1. Which, if you pay close attention, you will realize is the language that There and Back Again is written in. ↩︎