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Unspeakably hilarious
Language lovers beware: Philadelphia-based author and linguistics expert Arika Okrent, PhD'04, is not your average polyglot. Forget pig latin. She knows Klingon.
Okrent traces the history of Klingon and 499 other dreamed-up languages in her book In the Land of Invented Languages that New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz describes as "a lively, informative, insightful examination of artificial languages—who invents them, why, and why most of them fail."
Due to the book's popularity among the Magazine's editors, we asked Okrent to pull together a list of some of her favorites. As they say in Esperanto, gxuu! (Enjoy!)
Ten interesting words from invented languages
p2846
INVENTED LANGUAGE: Cave Beck's Universal Character (1657)
"hired mourners at funerals" In 1657, this concept was apparently a subject of conversation important enough to be deemed worthy of a "universal" number word.
cepuhws
INVENTED LANGUAGE: John Wilkins's Philosophical Language (1668)
"shit" While this word could be translated by a common profanity in English, doing so would obscure the fact that each letter in the word refers to a conceptual category that helps lay out the "true" meaning of the word. Cepuhws is "a serous and watery purgative motion from the consistent and gross parts (from the guts downward)."
lxmsgevjltshevjlpshev
INVENTED LANGUAGE: James Ruggles's Universal Lanugage (1829)
"179 degrees 59 minutes and 59 seconds of west longitude within one second of reaching 180 degrees west" Now that's a word!
dosifasol
INVENTED LANGUAGE: Jean Sudre's Solresol (1866)
"coffee" Solresol was based on the seven notes of the musical scale: do re mi fa sol la si. Words that are similar in meaning start with the same notes. So if you want milk and sugar with your coffee, you must also ask for dosiredo and dosifasi.
pük
INVENTED LANGUAGE: Johann Schleyer's Volapük (1879)
In Volapük, pük means "language." It comes from the English word "speak" but it's hard to tell (vol, means "world", so Volapük is "word language.") Unfortunately, it looks a lot like a different English word. And even more unfortunately, it shows up in various other words related to the concept of language: püked – "sentence" and pükön – "to speak."
birdo
INVENTED LANGUAGE: Ludwig Zamenhof's Esperanto (1887)
"bird" Esperanto is a hybrid built from a mixture of roots from existing natural languages, but it's predominately based on Romance languages. So when you see one of the English-based words, it stops you in your tracks, like an old friend dressed up in a disorienting costume.
radíidin
INVENTED LANGUAGE: Suzette Haden Elgin's Láadan (1984)
Láadan was a language designed to capture the unique perspective of women. This word means "non-holiday, a time allegedly a holiday but actually so much a burden because of work and preparations that it is a dreaded occasion; especially when there are too many guests and none of them help." Tell it, Sister.
qIvon
INVENTED LANGUAGE: Marc Okrand's Klingon (1984)
A body part of some kind. Not further identified. All we know is that there is a left one.
slicka
INVENTED LANGUAGE: Logical Language Group's Lojban (1989)
"cradle" What it really means in this language of logic is "x is a cradle made of y, holding z, rocking at speed a through positions b."
pona
INVENTED LANGUAGE: Sonja Elen Kisa's Toki Pona (2001)
Toki pona is a "minimal language that focuses on the good things in life." It has only 118 words, so words are used in multiple ways. Pona can be a verb ("improve," "fix," "repair," "make good"), an adjective ("good," "simple," "positive," "nice," "correct," "right"), a noun ("goodness," "simplicity," "positivity"), or an interjection ("great!", "cool!" "yay!"). Pona!
Arika Okrent, PhD'04
RECOMMENDED LINKS
- Shop: Amazon.com (hardback book)
- Shop: Powells (hardback book)
- Shop: Random House (audio book)
- Website: In the Land of Invented Languages
- Website: Arika Okrent
June 12, 2009
I appreciate that Arika has mentioned Esperanto on the front and back covers. I think supporters of Esperanto will benefit from her book. Similar books have appeared about once in ten years in English but this is the first time that a conversation can occur on-line among many people, including Esperantists.
Posted by: Neil Blonstein at September 14, 2009 12:54 PM
"p2846"? portuguese as a natural language has a precise word for that: "carpideira".... the practice is so old, even the bible mentions it
Posted by: alexandre at July 16, 2009 6:50 AM
Samideanoj,
Let's stop piling on Arika and "correcting" her. She's a linguist, she is fluent in Esperanto, and she's been to at least three Esperanto conventions that I know of; she knows what she's talking about, and has a good reason for saying tersely (in a single paragraph on Esperanto in an article which undoubtedly had a strict word count limit) that E-o is based mainly on Romance languages. That's strictly true of the vocabulary and arguably (pace Piron et al.) to a large extent of the morphology as well. In a longer article one could go into the aspects in which E-o is and isn't based on or similar to the Romance languages, but in one paragraph in an article of this type I couldn't do much better than she did.
Posted by: Jim Henry at June 24, 2009 12:48 PM
I'll be honest: I use hrududu in real life all the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapine_language
Posted by: This Is Me Posting at June 18, 2009 11:44 AM
Esperanto is unique in that (1) it was specifically designed to be easy to learn so that it could serve as a (common) second language even for those who find learning a language is difficult, and (2) in having widespread use: people speaking many different native languages have found Esperanto easy to learn, and (3) it has a large body of literature. Sooner or later someone will look at the *enormous* costs of translators and interpreters and multi-language printing for the UN, the EU, and other international bodies and decide to give Esperanto a serious pilot test.
Posted by: Leisureguy at June 17, 2009 2:01 PM
Your wrote that Esperanto is based predominantly on Romance languages. While it may appear so, the actual principle was one of 'maximum internationality' as far as possible. Thus' birdo' might seem like a strange choice at first sight, but the expected root 'av-' or 'avi-' was already taken, hence the need for a second-level choice.
Normal Esperanto can be heard daily from Radio Polonia:
http://www.polskieradio.pl/eo/
(and also Radio Vaticana and Radio China International).
Posted by: mansko at June 13, 2009 12:49 PM
I think that the choice, realistically, for the future global language lies between English and Esperanto, rather than an untried project.
It's unfortunate, however, that only a few people know that Esperanto has become a living language.
After a short period of 121 years Esperanto is now in the top 100 languages, out of 6,800 worldwide, according to the CIA factbook.
It is the 17th most used language in Wikipedia, and in use by Skype, Firefox and Facebook.
Your readers might also like to check http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_YHALnLV9XU Professor Piron was a translator with the United Nations in Geneva.
A glimpse of Esperanto can be seen at http://www.lernu.net
Posted by: Brian Barker at June 13, 2009 2:13 AM
What a delightful collection of words or pseudo-words!
I'll hope you'll allow me to add that Esperanto works. I’ve used it in speech and writing - and sung in it - in at least a dozen countries over recent years.
Indeed, the language has some remarkable practical benefits. Personally, I’ve made friends around the world through Esperanto that I would never have been able to communicate with otherwise. And then there’s the Pasporta Servo, which provides free lodging and local information to Esperanto-speaking travellers in over 90 countries. In the past few years I have had guided tours of Berlin and Milan and Douala in Cameroon in the planned language. I have discussed philosophy with a Slovene poet and humour on television with a Bulgarian TV producer.
Of course,Esperanto's words have to come from somewhere,and "birdo" is indeed from English. It is pronounced "beerdo".
Posted by: Bill Chapman at June 13, 2009 1:39 AM
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