The livingest languages

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, language, languages

My youthful conclusion has been confirmed by a linguist and the experts he cites: It is harder to learn German than most other languages. Not nearly has hard as Vietnamese, perhaps, but hard enough. I learned French rather well in three years in high school, and carried on "pen pal" relationships in French for a number of years, with great enjoyment. In my first year of college, I found I needed to learn German if I wished to be a Chemistry major. No substitutions would be allowed. I flunked German 101, twice. After my sophomore year, during which I truly enjoyed the year of Organic Chemistry, I changed majors…I also moved to another state and changed schools, but mainly for other reasons.

Reading Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages by Gaston Dorren I had the fun of dabbling in his riffs on what he calls the "Babel 20". These are the languages needed to converse with at least half the people on Earth in their mother tongue, and with about 3/4 of all people in a language they know fluently.

I don't recall what I anticipated when I began to read the book. I found that each section, from chapter 20 (the first, on Vietnamese) through 2 (Mandarin), 2b (the Japanese writing system) and 1 (the last, on English) was focused on one thing or a few things that the author found interesting about the language. He speaks six languages and can read nine more, but they are all Euro-based. He spent six months, much of it in Vietnam, trying to learn Vietnamese, and failed. He got so he could sort-of read small portions of the newspaper, in a language that has the most diacritics of any. Even then, there would be at least a couple of words in every sentence he would have to look up.

A word on diacritics. They are accents, dots and other appurtenances added to our "familiar" Roman letters; it is generally considered that they make them into other letters. Written or printed English hardly has any. We have retained a very few, but they are dropping out of use. How many write "resume" when they mean "résumé" (a curriculum vitae, to use the Latin synonym), or "naive" rather than "naïve"? European languages have them, so that "Do you speak French?" becomes "Parlez-vous Français?". Notice the little squiggle below the "c"; it is called a "cedilla", pronounced "se-dee-ye". Both "résumé" and "naïve" are also from French. Scandanavian languages also have letters like "ø". Consulting Google Translate, I find that "Please show me the way to the restroom" becomes "Xin chỉ cho tôi đường đến nhà vệ sinh" in Vietnamese. Both "d" letters have a slash, some of the vowels have two "things" near them, and one "e" has a dot below plus a circumflex above. I don't know what kind of keyboard can be used to write it!

Two things seem to have conspired to make the language impenetrable to Mr. Dorren: firstly, the pronunciation is subtle, such that at the end of his half year of study, he still could not understand a simple spoken Vietnamese sentence; and secondly, the many levels of respect and politeness that affect the terms used, and they way they are written and pronounced. I learned a little of this kind of thing with Japanese (#13 of the Babel 20; my wife is Japanese), which has four levels: abrupt, ordinary (inside the home), polite (common street lingo; what you mostly learn in language classes), and super-polite. There is also a level of Japanese spoken only by the Emperor, and there are male and female ways of speaking. That's complicated enough, but Vietnamese is rather extreme by comparison.

Vietnamese also has six tones. To those who know a little about it, the four tones of Mandarin might be familiar. The way they distinguish the various meanings of words pronounced "ma" (as in "mama" for mother) is a common "fun story". Depending on tone, "ma" can mean "mother", "horse", "ride" as a horse, and it is also the "pronounced question mark". Thus, with appropriate tones, the phrase "Ma ma ma ma" means "Is Mom riding (the) horse?". Knowing that "dui" (pronounced "dway") means "yes", the answer is "Dui, ma ma ma." Tonal languages abound, particularly in Asia and Africa. Cantonese has nine tones. Luckily, you don't have to have perfect pitch to hear the languages. The tones are relative to the general pitch of the sentence and the person's voice, and some tones are moving, such as the way English speakers tend to end sentences with a rising tone or give one-word answers in a falling tone.

As I mentioned above, Japanese is #13. My nemesis, German, is #11, spoken as a first or second language by 200 million. So it isn't actually all that hard to learn. It is just hard for this Francophile English-speaker. But the author does riff for a third of the chapter on how German is indeed harder than average. Each chapter begins with a one-page summary of language characteristics. It includes such things as language family ("German belongs to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family", while "Arabic is the most widely spoken of the Semitic languages, … of the Afro-Asiatic family"), script (German uses Roman script, but used to be written using Fraktur, which looks a lot like Old English. My grandmother's grandfather was from Germany and he wrote Fraktur), and sounds (including tones and how many vowel and consonant sounds are in common use).

A word about sounds. This is one area in which I was disappointed. Although little variations can cause the number of "distinct" sounds in any language to exceed 100, they cluster around a more limited number. "Standard" English, primarily the language as described in the large dictionaries, has either 43 or 44 sounds or "phonemes". According to my enormous second edition of Websters Unabridged (published in 1979), there are 30 vowel sounds, but to my study, several of them collapse into one another, leaving 23 or 24, depending on whether a following "l" or "r" actually changes the sounds of "a" and "o". There are 20 consonants, but the number of "nonvowel phonemes" is probably 24, which underlies the claim I have seen for 48 sounds in spoken English. Most languages have fewer than this, usually fewer than 40. But Mandarin (I have been told by several Mandarin speakers) has 88 sounds. Most of them are vowels that English speakers who didn't hear Mandarin as a small child (and keep it up) cannot distinguish, and a number of the consonant sounds are also opaque to us. Thus the common question "Are you Chinese?" becomes "Zhōngguó rén ma". That accented "e" in "rén" is a sound I can neither hear accurately nor properly pronounce (my Chinese friends giggle behind a hand). And "zhōngguó" sounds to me like "choo-go", but I am assured that the "ngg" sound is actually nasalized, though to a lesser extent than ñ in Spanish. At the other end of the spectrum, I understand that Hawaiian has 13 sounds, five vowels and eight consonants. Anyway, the sections on "sounds" for each language do not provide a satisfactory guide.

Dropping that quibble, though, the book is a delight to read, and ends on a thoughtful note. English has become the modern lingua franca, the go-to language for diplomacy and international trade (and internet communications), just as French was a few generations ago, when the term lingua franca was coined. Will Mandarin replace it any time soon? The chapter on English, posed as an interview with a native English speaker, reaches the conclusion that the Chinese writing system(s) would prohibit that. Computer-expedited communication works better when an alphabetic script is used. My Chinese friends, when texting in Mandarin, use a phonetic input method, and the software in their phones picks out possible characters for them to choose. A smaller number use software that lets them draw the character with a finger. That method is actually slower! And, as a final conclusion, automated translation software continues to get better, so we may not need a lingua franca in the future. I have no idea if the Vietnamese sentence I used above is an accurate translation. In another 10-20 years, the translations will be of greatly improved accuracy. I already have an app on my phone that lets me say something in English, and it speaks a Chinese, Spanish, Korean, or whatever translation, and it works pretty well. The person's reply is turned into English that might be a little stilted, but is clear.

Too much fun. I understand the author wrote an earlier book about 60 languages. Worth looking into.

To make fake languages you need to know real ones

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, languages, linguistics, language creation

Languages, mainly written, and linguistics, have been a hobby and sometime obsession for my brother and me since we were children. He made a career out of it, becoming a calligrapher, including spending time in Japan to learn Japanese calligraphy (with a brush) and also the carving of netsuke. He eventually became a professor of art history and a Mayan archaeologist, one of a few people who can read and paint the Maya script. Not having a good artistic hand, I became more an observer than a doer.

Having gone into coding from an early age (about 50 years ago, now), I occasionally studied formal languages, as I call them; not only computer coding languages (FORTRAN, Basic, Pascal, C) and scripts (Perl, JavaScript), but also the broader scope of symbolic languages such as the standard sets of drafting details used in piping, architecture, and electronics design, for example. More recently, I had some interest in the icons used to launch programs (apps) on small-screen devices, but there is no grammar; they are all nouns (or, perhaps, imperative predicate phrases of the form "Do X!"). Also, there is an effectively infinite variety of them: 32×32 pixels ×256 colors, as the exponent of 2, comes to about 10⁷⁸⁹¹³ possible color patterns, and even if only a trillionth of a trillionth of them would "look like something", what remains is a truly incredible number (10⁷⁸⁸⁸⁹). Then there are the Emoji, which  seem to be settling down to some kind of standard, complete with a review board.

In my mid-twenties I got a little interested in the scope for creation of new languages in fiction by reading The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. I read somewhere that he invented five languages for Middle Earth, complete with scripts in at least two cases (I am sure many folks out there know better than I). So I was primed, with a slow-burning fuse, to thoroughly enjoy The Art of Language Invention, by David J. Peterson, when I came across it recently; it has been in print about four years.

The focus of the book is the creation of new languages to be used in fictional settings. The author was hired to create two languages used in Game of Thrones, for example. One might think, "Why create languages out of whole cloth? Aren't there languages enough already, something like 6,000? Couldn't one of these, which the right sort of 'soundscape', be used?" Perhaps. One significant problem arises, though: in the current legal atmosphere, intellectual property laws would require the permission of a language's speakers, and they might not like having their mother tongue used on the "lips" (or whatever) of tentacled villains from Aldebaran. Also, while we might use a human language for fictional humans, in the distant future perhaps, other languages are intended to be "native" to various kinds of aliens. Modern filmmakers are doing their best to put the era of aliens-as-humans-in-weird-suits behind them. If we ever encounter genuine space aliens, will it even be possible for them to make the sounds used in human languages…and vice versa? Most of all, though, for those so inclined, creation of a new language is great fun! The fun comes through in the author's writing, again and again.

The book turns out to include a powerful introduction to linguistics. Thinking about it, I realized it has to! Natural languages give a language designer the parameters of what languages can do, and ideas for how to stretch the limits as needed. The four sections of the book are Sounds (a lot more involved than just a discussion of "phonemes"; he also gets into sign languages and possible alien sound systems), Words (choices like inflected or not, cases and the presence or lack of case agreement, etc.), Evolution (history of a language and its sibling and offspring languages), and Writing (scripts and how they support the spoken word…or don't).

I'll just touch on a couple of items of interest to me. One is alien sounds. We have "alien" creatures aplenty around us, that make sounds we typically can't make: birds and dolphins—and whales in general—are best known. But also: Just how much symbolism is in the waggle dance of honeybees? How articulate is the postural language of a wolf or a bobcat? Is the Brown Thrasher, with its repertoire of 2,000 songs, each including many sounds, saying anything more than, "This land is my land"? More to the point on the bird: are the murmurings and cooings between a mated pair or Thrashers, Doves, Robins or whatever, more meaningful than the "comfort sounds" they are usually thought to be?

Another is the written scripts. In an appendix we find a phrase book for eight constructed languages (conlangs), six of which have scripts. I picked out a potentially useful phrase from each:

Dothraki and High Valerian are from Game of Thrones. The producers apparently didn't set the show up to require scripts for them. The others are from other projects. Some would be rather hard for any of us to write or draw. Indojisnen, in particular, is predicated on an alien species that went for genetic modification in a big way, including the development of hand skills that exceed those of any other species by a large margin. So the written language they invented, once they could write it, is intricate and hyper-regular.

I rather like Kamakawi. In both script and sounds, it is like a cross between Japanese and Korean. Some of the others may seem too loopy or whatever, but if you look in the front of an old Gideon's Bible, with John 3:16 translated into dozens of human scripts, you'll see just how loopy many human languages can be. The ones shown here are not at all out of line (except Indojisnen!).

I thought I knew a lot about variations of grammar. The Words section showed me how little I knew about it. I was fortunate to learn Latin at a young age, and French later. A friend who speaks these, plus Romanian and Russian, says, "French grammar is endless". It's true. Even though English has less than usual in the way of conjugation (of nouns) and declension (of verbs), some friends and I once figured out 48 verb tenses that are possible in English, if one takes account of moods and everything (of course, few of us use more than five or six). Then we tackled French, and we sort of ran out of steam when we'd racked up 256 verb tenses. There might be more; we couldn't be sure. Funny thing, even though there are inflections (word endings) to distinguish most of them in written French, most of them just sound like a cross between "-ei" and "-ee" in spoken French. That goes for the "-it" in conduit ("conduct", the verb, when "I" is the subject), as well as "-aient" in effectuaient ("were conducting", when "we" is the subject).

I can't figure how the author crammed so much linguistic knowledge into a book hardly exceeding 260 pages (in paperback, at least). If you want to try your hand at inventing a language, this book is a very good starting place for learning what you'll need to succeed. So much to learn, and presented very enjoyably.

More linguistic maundering

kw: programming, languages

I sometimes joke that I've written a mile of computer code in my career. Someone challenged that, so I decided to figure it out. To avoid being too nit-picky, I'll mostly confine myself to the period during which I programmed all day, every day, and sometimes into the night like any good hacker (when "hacker" was an honorable term).

Definitions and standards:

• A "line" takes up 1/6 inch on a line printer listing (what else would a programmer print on?).
• One foot of printout (ignore margins) contains 72 lines; one mile is 72x5,280 = 380,160 lines. That is my goal.
• There are 260 weekdays per year, but we must subtract 10 holidays and 10 days of vacation, and also allow 10% of the rest for meetings and administrivia. The balance is 215 productive days per year.

I learned FORTRAN II early in 1968. I was soon doing nothing but writing programs, doing my own card punching. I typed slowly in that period, but I could produce about 20 code lines daily. In FORTRAN, using cards, that means an average of about 30 characters. "Lines" include comment lines that consist of more than the comment character. This continued until very late in 1970, so let's consider it to be 2.5 work years. 215 days times 20 lines is 4,300 lines per year, or 10,750 lines. The machines I used were an IBM 1130, a CDC 3100, and a Xerox Sigma 7. During this period I was sent to a class to learn the "executive system" (an early version of OS360) and FAP, an assembly programming language that worked with FORTRAN II. I wrote too little FAP to count.

I did a little programming here and there in the next few years, while finishing a BS degree, but not enough to count. My next heavy programming gig began in 1975, and lasted 3 years. I improved both my thinking and my typing, with the help of a good mentor, and my production was 30 usable lines of FORTRAN IV daily, on a CDC 3600. No card punch now, but terminal input. 3x215x30 = 19,350 lines. Total to this point: 30,100.

I started graduate school and, while studying engineering, worked for the computer science department, first tutoring and then teaching, starting at the beginning of 1979. This lasted five years. The first summer I worked hard on my touch typing, getting my speed up to 50 wpm. My programming rate also went from 40 lines/day in 1979 to an average 75 lines/day thereafter, when I was writing FORTRAN (IV and then 77). This was in addition to full time class work! My wife sometimes called herself a "computer widow". This was all on small CDC Cyber machines, 720, 825 and 835. One year at 40 lpd = 8,600 lines; 4y at 75 lpd = 64,500 lines. Total: 94,600. That's a quarter mile, minus 440 lines.

At the beginning of the next period I learned the COMPASS assembly languages; there are two, one for the CPU and another for PPU's the peripheral processors. I became a system analyst at the university while finishing my engineering degree. For the following three years I wrote 1/3 FORTRAN 77 and 2/3 CPU COMPASS, but very little PPU COMPASS. Assembly languages are harder and require more think time. My COMPASS productivity did not exceed 50 lpd. Thus I wrote about 16,125 lines of FORTRAN 77 and about 21,500 lines of COMPASS, a total of 37,625 lines for a total of 132,225. It's just past 1/3 mile…

I got work at an oil company in 1986 as a systems analyst. I wrote only COMPASS for the first year: 16,125 lines. The machine was a CYBER 860. Then I wrote mostly FORTRAN 77 on DEC VAXes for a few "skunk works" programming groups until mid 1995. Here I hit my stride, averaging 100 lines per day, but now I'd worked long enough to have another week of vacation each year, so there were about 210 days in those work years. It comes to 7.5 years, or 157,500 lines. Total: 289,725 lines or a little over 3/4 mile.

I am closing in on the goal, but there is little programming left. I transferred to the parent company in Delaware, where I now work (and will retire in a few weeks). They needed me to lead a database project. I used FORTRAN in a more ancillary mode, for no more than a quarter of my time for the next four years. Lines produced: 21,000 for a total of 310,725.

The company quite using FORTRAN altogether in 2000. I learned Perl with the help of a colleague (who is presently my supervisor). Since that time I have written very little, all in Perl, not for web pages but for file conversion and text processing. It totals no more than another half year out of the past 12 years, or at best, 9,500 lines, since I am a little slower in Perl than in FORTRAN (I have to look stuff up).

Thus my lifetime total is about 320,000 lines, maybe a little more, in all languages I have used. I suppose I could add in a little VBA for a couple of Excel macros I wrote as Functions, but let's ignore that, and conclude that I didn't quite make my mile. It totals 0.84 mile of code, if printed out at 6 lines per inch. But, hey, this is a metric world: I comes to 1.36 km!

The average "line" is about 30 characters. 9.6 million characters, or less than 10 MBytes, represents about 22.5 years of full time computer programming! (over a 40-yar span) In space taken, it is equal to three JPEG files from my digital camera. Sic transit gloria mundi! On the other hand, those programs kept a lot of scientists very busy for decades.

Ape languages evolving

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals, chimpanzees, languages

Primatologist Andrew R. Halloran makes no secret of his stance; in a note early in The Song of the Ape: Understanding the Languages of Chimpanzees, he states, "There are few things more depressing than watching Koko: A Talking Gorilla. I encourage everyone to watch the film and draw their own conclusions." (p 78, note) Later in the book he describes the occasion of first observing the AOL "chat" between Koko and her fans, and how it completely turned him toward discovering how apes communicate among themselves when their experience is not distorted by laboratory methods and researchers' preconceptions. He saw no evidence during the "chat" session that Koko understood either the questions or her "answers".

I have been variously enamored of Koko, Whashoe and other apes that have been taught to use ASL (American Sign Language) signs. I was quite touched at the testimony of one young deaf woman who said, "I was conversing with a gorilla in my mother tongue!" Yet the transcripts of such conversations always left quite a lot to be desired. It requires a fertile imagination to attribute meaning to many of the ape's hand signs, that seem random in retrospect. Dr. Halloran is of the opinion that such signing is of no more significance than a circus trick, and nearly all the "meaning" residing in the mind of the researcher.

Starting with the "chat" in 1998, he spent about ten years as a zookeeper in a Florida animal park, a chimpanzee caretaker, working his way through graduate school. Rather than spend his time in libraries, as grad students are typically expected to do, he carried on his own "laboratory" work among the chimps, getting to know them, learning their habits and particularly their sounds, and finally recording and classifying the vocalization patterns of two groups of related chimps that had been moved to live far from one another.

The result of his work is unequivocal. The two groups, in just a few years, began to develop dialects that differed from one another. After the two groups lost contact (they began as a single large group that was split up when a younger male challenged the alpha chimp), some calls stayed the same but others changed. In particular, just a few years later, the repertory of calls being taught to infant and juvenile chimps in each group constituted a language that belonged to that group. The author expects that in a few more generations, the two groups will become mutually unintelligible. These are the hallmarks of genuine language, with a grammar all its own, but unlike any human language.

During most of the past seven million years, proto-humans (and later, humans) and proto-chimps (and later, chimps), developed their communication systems in isolation from one another. On rare occasions that hominids and apes met, they hunted each other for food. Communication was the last thing on anyone's mind. In central Africa today, chimpanzees are still hunted for "bush meat". It is only in a few Westernized societies that people have developed an interest in communicating with them. Dr. Halloran outlines the work of Yerkes and others who tried teaching chimps to speak, or to use "keyboard" languages such as Yerkish, and finally seemed to have a measure of success with ASL.

Many claim that ape utterances are not language; that they lack grammar or some other feature of human language and are thus not "up to the level" of genuine language. I see only a little merit in such a contention. Near the end of the book, there is a list of a dozen or more utterances that seem unambiguous among a particular group of chimps, with meanings such as "Stop it!", "I am happy with you", or "I found food!". I get the impressions that all the utterances that have been so deciphered are phrases, not words as we understand them. For example, there is a sound meaning "Come here!" that may be a neologism by one of the chimps. It is the only sound listed that has a single "phoneme", a raspberry blurt. There is no utterance yet deciphered that means, "I am coming," so it isn't known whether the phrases are composed of sounds we might call words. However, there are dozens of sounds that were recorded that have yet to be deciphered, and among them there may be some words.

This points up the fact that cross-species communication is hard. Dr. Halloran has not tried to "talk" to the chimps using their sounds, or at least, he does not report doing so. I suspect if he were to do so, it would be similar to my first visit to Japan. I knew a few words and phrases, and in a train station I asked a porter "Benjo wa doko desuka" (Where is the toilet?). He replied "Kore wa rōka ni arimasu, which I didn't understand, but fortunately he also waved down the hallway (rōka, I learned later), where I found the restroom. When asking a question in another language, it is best not to sound too fluent! Better to sound clumsy, and they'll answer more simply. Who knows whether chimps would be so polite to a human?

So far, the author has produced a phrase book that helps him understand certain utterances by two groups of chimps. It is of no help generally, because each group will have its own dialect. There is no more a single chimp language than there is a single human language. I suspect we will find it is equally so for dolphins (and perhaps certain other whales) and perhaps some birds (I am thinking of Alex and other African gray parrots that seem to understand at least some English grammar. I wonder what parrot grammar is like, and how we would find out. Alex has died; will others of his species act as interpreters? Would they have the patience to answer our questions? A parrot's attention span is shorter than any two-year-old's).

Dr. Halloran is not alone. He cites the work of a number of researchers, primarily "on site" primatologists, that have worked to determine the rules of chimpanzee behavior and how the sounds they make relate to their actions. I for one am convinced: An ape's language may be simpler than a human language, but is a language nonetheless. It is a necessary part of the social structure of ape families and groups. Knowing this is so takes the shine off all attempts to teach them any human language. We will do best to learn how they communicate among themselves, and take the onus upon ourselves to communicate with them in ways they find most natural.

Take the first left between the alphabet and the dictionary

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, languages, creativity

Many years ago, buying gas at an Oklahoma truck stop, I bought this soda can holder/cooler. It has served me well ever since. It has also sparked comment from time to time, as people notice it and falter a bit, knowing that I am the kind of guy who owns two Toyota Camry sedans (one is 10 years old, the other 19). I am just not the bad boy type, and I have never gone to an event to see monster trucks crush "ordinary" vehicles, in between chain races and other sorts of vehicular mayhem (correction: at age 13, I went with a church youth group to a Demolition Derby, an activity that got the youth leader into a bit of hot water).

I am much more the techno-geek type, a lifelong computer programmer, one who can read the encyclopedia or a dictionary for pleasure. It makes me very, very akin to the kind of people who like the Klingon language. Myself, having once been fluent in French (I can still read it), and later flunking a German class or two, and further getting just enough of a smattering of Japanese from my wife to get me in conversational trouble, I have no more interest in acquiring a new language. If I did, it wouldn't be Klingon anyway; it really is a "monster truck" sort of language (I'd pick Esperanto).

Klingon, as created by Mark Okrand and codified by the Klingon Language Institute, is one of four invented languages that has become, to some extent, a living language, with a generous handful of fluent speakers and hundreds who've learned enough to earn a first-level pin. Though this graphic shows a script invented for the language, so far as I know everyone who writes Klingon uses Latinized transliteration: nuqneH = "what do you want?", the closest Klingon equivalent to "hello".

Arika Okrent has earned her first pin in Klingon. As she reports in her book In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, LogLan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language, she has also become conversant in Esperanto and managed to translate a sentence or two into LojBan (a semi-living "logical language" that spun off of LogLan).

This last is no mean feat. Consider ei do cusku le do se skudji. Though this is intended to translate "You should say what you mean" (as the March Hare told Alice), when translated literally back to English, it comes out "You are obliged to say the desired-to-be-said thing". Because of its hyper-logical structure, LojBan has dozens of words for "is" (Bill Clinton would have loved it). Nonetheless, it has a number of at least competent speakers/users.

The fourth invented language still in use is Blissymbolics, which was intended as a universal pictorial script, but has become of use as a "bridge" script for disabled children to help them learn to communicate in a written language. Preliterate children who cannot speak are not helped by facilitated communication when presented with a board covered with English (or French or whatever) words. If they are first taught the symbols for a few dozen meanings, and these are then presented along with written equivalents, they soon learn to make themselves understood, and in the process, learn the written words.

The Bliss text above means "I like to go to the cinema". Three of the symbols/symbol groups can be figured out by most people, while the fourth, once it is explained to be "house+seeing+showing or projecting", makes sense and is easily remembered. This shows also the concept behind many "logical" languages, in which a "small" (a few hundred) easily-remembered concepts are grouped to express all other concepts. Ideographic languages, primarily Chinese, have a similar basis, but one needs the spoken language to learn the symbols, which do have a phonetic basis.

How many invented languages are there? Prior to the Internet's ubiquity, at least 900 created languages were seriously touted in print after about 1150 A.D., when Hildegard von Bingen produced Lingua Ignota and proclaimed it a language that facilitated (Christian) spiritual communication. Though Ms Okrent writes of "900 languages in 900 years", all the languages after Lingua Ignota were published after about 1500 A.D., so it is more accurate to write "900 in 500". In an appendix to the book, the author lists 500 languages with their creators and publication dates, ranging to 2007.

Few invented languages have hit print since 2000 A.D.; it is so much cheaper to publish on the Internet. Also, the reasons for language creation have changed over time. Prior to about 1950, there was an about equal emphasis on Logicality and Internationality. Since about 1980, these impulses have been reduced to a dull rumble, and "conlangs" and "artlangs" have taken over. The former are languages constructed, as Klingon was, more for interest than for a purpose, and the latter are those created purely for creative reasons. Many of these have decades of work behind them, and there are hundreds of them.

Nearly all language creators are men, and most begin at a very young age. Two women of note are Fra von Bingen, as noted above, and Suzette Elgin, creator of Láadan, with its unique feminine perspective (six words for various experiences of menstruation, for example).

Other than the four mentioned, and a few conlangs or artlangs that have a current following, invented languages fail of their object. Only Esperanto has become a widespread communication medium. Translating Hamlet into Klingon, for example, does not emable Klingon aficionados to enjoy the Bard in Klingon; it is more of a "neat hack", like a computer program that can produce a workable concordance at a single whack (a task usually done with five or six utility programs).

It is no surprise to me that most invented languages fail. Who is willing to learn to parse, or spell, pretzpxn ljbztur frateriorpur ("The price of my brother's book" in "A Universal Language" by James Ruggles), let alone try to pronounce it? Usually, nobody except the lone fellow who invented it. But if the "Simple English" used in some Voice of America broadcasts were ever codified, it would rank as a usable invented language, bringing the total to five.

Among all these, including the few still in use, I have a bit of interest only Ludwig Zamenhof's Esperanto, created and developed in the 1870s and '80s, and published in 1887, when its creator was 28. Zamenhof grew up in an area of Eastern Europe in which you had to know three or four languages just to buy groceries, and also saw the mutual animosities among members of the various language groups. He was motivated to produce a language for everyone, in hopes to foster peace through better communication. Hundreds of others have had the same impulse; what did he do right?

Timing was a key element. An older "universal language" named Volapük was losing ground, stranding adherents who were sympathetic to its goals. Another element was the use of word roots that stood midway between several familiar languages, being derived from Indo-European roots. And a huge element of the success was the use of suffixes to add meanings to the relatively small corpus of root words. Thus while the frat- root denotes siblinghood, frato means "brother", fratino means "sister", and other words that require gender distinctions use the -o and -ino endings to make it. The basic use of the -o ending, however, is to denote "noun", as in vero, "truth". Other endings indicate that a word is a verb, adjective or adverb, with variations of the verb ending to indicate tenses. Esperanto is a very inflected language, but the inflection system is much simpler than that of, for example French, which I find to be endless.

The single most important factor is that Zamenhof was not thin-skinned. He didn't keep tight control of every aspect of the language; he did not treat it as his "inviolable offspring". Nearly every other language creator wound up exhausting himself fighting with those who wished to use the language, but had their own ideas (as absolutely everyone does) about this or that detail. Esperanto became living because its creator let it live and encouraged the creativity of those who could help it become more and more comfortable to speak.

Languages require a certain amount of ambiguity to work well. Our mind is extremely good at detecting nuance; we are good at resolving ambiguity. This puts less of a load on a language's speakers to speak with exactitude. This is the problem with LojBan; it is so exacting that absolutely nobody, even its most ardent speakers, can carry on a conversation without the help of a lexicon to remind them of the precise way to express some exact shade of meaning. Its grammar book masses six hundred pages. English grammar can be conveyed in twenty pages, and you really only need the first two or three pages of the summary you'll find at the end of a good dictionary. Esperanto grammar is even sparser, because the words carry word-type meanings in their suffixes and affixes.

As a lifelong amateur linguist, I am very beholden to Ms Okrent for this volume. It banished in me for good any notion of producing a language of my own or to try a hand at "reforming" English spelling. It also confirmed for me that artificial languages make sense primarily in artificial contexts. I am fluent in Fortran, Pascal and Basic, less so in Visual Basic, and can get by in Perl and C only with the book open constantly (kind of like a LojBan speaker). These are all "formal languages" that are used to direct the operations of computers. Music notation is also a formal language, one that cannot be spoken, only either written or performed. It is like a computer program with the musician acting as the computer. I read music pretty well, but not with the fluidity of a competent conductor.

A final note: the primary impulse driving language creators in the past decade or two has been artistic. J.R.R. Tolkien was an early "artlang" creator, the producer of Welsh-inspired "elven" languages, which he published in 1955; he said more than once that his books were a vehicle to provide a context for the languages, on which he had spent forty years. Have a look at the Omniglot Conlang pages and Artistic Languages in Wikipedia for an introduction to the field. Also, the author maintains a website based on the book that contains lists of languages with dates and creators, and added material about many of them.

Et tu, tutor?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, languages, latin

Vos specto hoc candide.
Latin mortuus lingua est.
Is primo caedo Romanorum.
Hic me caudes est.

Latin's a dead language,
It's plain enough to see:
First it killed the Romans
And now it's killing me!

I am one of those nerdy guys who actually liked Latin, though I had only one year's instruction in ninth grade. Thereafter I learned French, one of Latin's direct descendants. I think Latin class was the first time I saw someone in love with a subject. The teacher was one of the older women on the faculty, one much feared by us all. Yet when she was speaking Latin to us, particularly quoting a classical author, she was animated, joyful, and seemed half her age.

(Two years later I briefly dated her daughter, and found her a most hospitable homemaker. She'd had the daughter rather late in life, so I sympathize quite much with her, now being over sixty with a teenage son!)

Her instruction took fairly well. My grandmother visited just after the school year ended, and when she found I'd had a year of Latin, gave me a quick drill of a couple of verb conjugations...and pronounced me "satisfactory." She'd taught young Okies the classics in a one-room schoolhouse prior to 1915. She said, wistfully, "I had to teach those farm boys a little Greek, also. I wonder if it did any of them any good."

So I could not pass up Carpe Diem: Put a Little Latin in Your Life by Harry Mount, journalist and former Latin tutor. Harry Mount is not the stereotypical dry, string-bean, eccentric tutor—oh, he's eccentric all right, but seems a congenial pub comrade nonetheless! He makes no bones that the book is a bit of a Latin text, but he's doing his best to un-dessicate (from de sicco, "nearly dried out") the subject; so he alternates pedagogical chapters with cultural notes, both ancient (Cato's Carthago delenda est: "Carthage must be destroyed") and modern (A toga-clad John Belushi), and a lovely chapter extolling his Latin instructors and tutors. And in no other Latin text do we have this to illustrate the Latin diminutive (using the -ulus ending):

Hunc homunculum mirabilem habemus, qui quotidie venit ut uxoris caput terat.

We've got this marvelous little man who comes in daily to massage my wife's head.

One side statement he makes vindicated a thought I'd had: The Latin language rules seemed so rigid and often arbitrary. Surely the people in the street didn't speak the way Horace or Tacitus wrote...did they? No, they did not. Part of the reason Latin is so "deadly dead" is that nearly nobody who could write every wrote any "street Latin." So the closest we can come to hearing Latin spoken colloquially is by listening to Italian, which has changed the least...say a lover's quarrel, or a shopper haggling with a grocer, or a taxi driver's monologue.

Because the mass of written Classical Latin was poetic, the "poet's license" produced a plethora (a direct Latin word from a root meaning "fullness") of expressions you'd never hear in spoken prose. So Latin has become something more like Fortran: inflexible and with a nearly endless grammar (though nothing like the French language, which has something like 48 tense/mood combinations in a full conjugation, each with six parts).

The closing chapter is a bit of an elegy to the impending death of Latin instruction. The language seems likely to die out completely. Nearly nobody, not even in England, the former bastion of classical studies, is taught even a smattering of Latin, and classical Greek is effectively vanished.

I confess I did nearly none of the exercises found throughout the book. I've got just enough Latin to lightly edit an InterTran translation of the little ditty above, and to puzzle my way through parts of my old copy of Winnie ille pu. It has been forty-plus years, after all. But it does increase my enjoyment of language to know a bit of where my words come from.

English is full of little Latinate expressions (quid pro quo; tempus fugit; habeas corpus) and about a third of our modern English vocabulary derives directly from either Latin or Norman French, which was closer to Latin that to modern French. Another third derives from Greek (or from Latin words that started as Greek words), and the rest is from Germanic languages such as Anglo-Saxon (I say "the rest" but there is almost a "fourth third" of English that comes from dozens or hundreds of the world's languages...we are great borrowers).

Robin Williams taught us all Carpe Diem! Gathering up another classical allusion or two is the least a fellow can do.