How to Build a Language Donald J.Harlow 2001.01.07 They all , after deter- mining that the public did not fa- vor Esperanto, nor adopt it with the same enthusiasm that they did, blamed this lack of success on the failures or imperfections they fo- und in the language. And since each of them had his own special opinion about the points in need of reform, each one of them presented his own proposals, declaring those of the others to be absurd... Only a few of these reformists had the con- stancy, or the necessary means, to finish up their schemes, publish them, and recruit adherents; the others, unable to realize their id- eal, either abandoned the movement entirely or went over to one of the fresh-baked projects. Gaston Waringhien. Lingvo kaj Vivo. - Meksiko, La-Laguno: Stafeto, 1959, p. 358. Warning: Emotions and tempers are sometimes aroused among those who have dedicated much of their lives to the devising and/or promotion of one planned language or another, when some- one (for whatever purpose and with whatever justification) dis- cusses somebody's favorite planned language. Consequently, the following material has, at times, been accused of being (a) in- accurate and (b) biased. No doubt, inaccuracies have crept in; and, as a proponent of Esperanto, I have never claimed to be un- biased. If you are looking for a totally objective, scholarly presentation of the history of the planned-language movement, I suggest that you look elsewhere. Another warning: you will pro- bably not find it (everybody writing on the subject seems to ha- ve his own set of prejudices) and if you do, it will probably be extremely boring. This presentation is, I believe, at least not boring. I can sum up the conclusions that can be drawn from this historical introduction in a relatively few words. Some one tho- usand (perhaps more) planned languages have been sketched or created during the past two centuries; the approximately a dozen treated here are those that have actually been devised to a fa- re-thee-well and have actually acquired a community of speakers, of whatever size. At the end of this period, the number of speakers of Esperanto now living exceeds, apparently by several orders of magnitude, the total number of speakers of all other planned languages in this list who have ever lived. I suspect that this demonstrates something; but I will leave it to you to decide what. Enjoy! Introduction Languages have been constructed by many people, for many differ- ent purposes, with varying degrees of success. You may be familiar with such literary creations as Austin Tappan Wright's Islandian lan- guage, which he developed for his massive social novel "Islandia", or with John Ronald Reuel Tolkien's languages of Middle Earth, which served as inspiration for "The Lord of the Rings" (When this was or- iginally written, Robert Jordan's massive fantasy novel "The Wheel of Time" had not yet begun to appear. Aaron Bergman's compendium and an- alysis of Jordan's Old Tongue, used heavily in the novel, can be ac- cessed here [1]. Other interesting well-developed artificial langua- ges used in science-fiction and fantasy include Suzette Haden Elgin's Laadan [2], "Alien Nation"'s Tenctonese [3], and, of course, "Star Trek"'s Klingon [4]). Others have, at one time or another, dabbled at creating their own languages, just to see whether it could be done. The idea of creating an artificial language for actual use between people of different linguistic backgrounds, while not particularly recent, is less widely known. The earliest such creation on record, although almost certainly not the first of its kind, was the Lingua Ignota, invented by Hilde- gard of Bingen, the 12th-century Abbess of Rupertsberg, a woman re- membered only by artificial language buffs until she was recently re- surrected by the feminist and gnostic movements as an early example of the Renaissance Woman. The Abbess Hildegard probably had no inten- tion of producing an international language, since in her world one already existed - Latin. More likely, it was intended as a means of secret communication, perhaps an early forerunner of Frank Patrick Herbert's battle languages as described in his Dune novels. Certainly its name (which means "Unknown Language") suggests that it was not intended for the common people. Traditionally, constructed languages are classified either as "a priori" - created out of whole cloth - or "a posteriori" - derived from already existing linguistic material, usually the Western Euro- pean languages. Several early Western European philosophers, e.g. Ge- orge Dalgarno and Bishop John Wilkins, devoted much time to develo- ping "philosophical languages" of the a priori type. Such languages were completely artificial, built to more accurately reflect the sec- ret workings of the human mind. Since those secret workings remain largely a secret even today, such languages were effectively still- born. I myself have never been terribly interested in them, and so I can't give you the full details. The most comprehensive treatment that I have seen is by Ernst Drezen [5]. There is a more readable one in a recent work by Pierre Janton [6]. For English speakers, Mario Pei touches on the subject in his popular work on constructed langua- ges [7], and Andrew Large [8] devotes a chapter or so to it. Here I shall dispose of such languages in a few words: if you understand the Dewey Decimal System, you already understand the principles behind their construction. While such languages generally went out of fashi- on two centuries ago, they have not disappeared completely, as Bar- nett's Suma and, more recently, James Cooke Brown's Loglan prove. The idea of the international language began to come into its own in the 18th century, when such men as Rene Descartes in France and Jan Amos Komensky in Czechia began to consider the problem and developed various criteria to be satisfied by an international lan- guage. Among these criteria were several that would play an important role in the development of later constructed languages, criteria such as phonetic regularity and grammatical rationality. One late a priori language that deserves special comment is Sol- resol. Developed by the French scientist Jean Francois Sudre, Solre- sol - a language with only seven sounds, based on the standard West- ern Europe tonic scale (the white keys on the piano) - attracted con- siderable interest in Western Europe during the 19th century. Its el- ements (words) were completely artificial and highly categorized, but reflected concepts out of daily life rather than high-flown philoso- phical ideals. Furthermore, Solresol because of its unique construc- tion could be sung, played, or whistled, as well as spoken. Perhaps because music hath charms that soothe the savage breast, or perhaps because trumpets can be heard further than voices, the French milita- ry authorities at one time considered adopting Solresol for their own purposes - a peculiar role for a purported international language, although military authorities, among them those of Imperial Germany and the United States, would later use Esperanto for similar purpo- ses. Solresol retained some of its popularity even after the develop- ment of Volapuek and, later, Esperanto, finally disappearing from the scheme of things only around the time of the World War I, after an almost hundred-year-long run. Volapuek (http://www2.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h0444wow/volagram.eo.html) In contrast to the a priori, largely philosophical, languages we have the a posteriori languages, developed on the basis of material already existing in the various ethnic tongues and intended for gene- ral spoken use. Although a few such languages already existed early in the nineteenth century, the first to attain any degree of popular- ity was Volapuek. The father of Volapuek, Johann Martin Schleyer, was a Catholic priest in Baden. According to Schleyer's own report (in a letter re- produced in translation by Reinhard Haupenthal in [9, p. 6]), the id- ea of an international language arose out of a conversation he had with one of his parishioners, a semiliterate German peasant whose son had emigrated to America and could no longer be reached by mail be- cause the United States Post Office couldn't read the father's hand- writing - an unfortunate situation, given that the father needed mo- ney from the son. Schleyer conceived a novel solution to this prob- lem, a universal alphabet suitable for all nations and climes. From there the idea, once rooted, grew, until one night God spoke to Schleyer in a dream and suggested that he brew up a complete interna- tional language. Schleyer, always amenable to divine advice, proceed- ed to do so, and in 1880 he published his project, which immediately received international acclaim. Volapuek societies sprang up all over Europe, then quickly spread to North and South America and even some parts of Asia. The international language, it seemed in that more innocent age, was an idea whose time had come. Within a very few years, Volapuek boasted well over a hundred thousand adherents - a figure that it would later take Esperanto decades to attain. The question of how many of Vola- puek's adherents actually spoke the language remains unanswered. The first world congress of Volapuek was held in Germany in 1884, the second in 1887, the third in 1889. At the first two con- gresses, business was carried on in German, the language of most of the participants. This may have been a good thing; at the third con- gress, business was carried on in Volapuek, and it was then that the Volapuek movement received its death blow. The forces that shattered the Volapuek movement were both lin- guistic and social in nature; language, after all, does not function in a vacuum. A quick look at them may be instructive and help us un- derstand the development and fate of later constructed languages, not least of Esperanto. Volapuek was a language with a heavily rationalized grammar and word-formation system; in many ways it was a structural precursor of Esperanto. Volapuek morphology was agglutinative, much like that of Esperanto. New words were formed either by the addition of affixes, or by the agglutination of smaller words - again, much like Esperan- to. But similar as the two systems were in concept, in function they were quite different. Where Zamengof's view of the international lan- guage was streamlined, Schleyer's was, to say the least, baroque. As a single simple example: there was only one noun declension in Volapuek, but four cases indicated by different terminal morphemes - only one fewer than Latin. English and Esperanto each have only two such cases, the English genitive or possessive and the Esperanto ac- cusative. E.g.: vol - world vols - worlds vola - world's volas - worlds' vole - to the world voles - to the worlds voli - world (acc.) volis - worlds (acc.) You might want to note, however, that these case and number end- ings are obviously agglutinative rather than inflected. What this means is that each part of the ending's meaning is changed by chan- ging only the corresponding part of the ending, not by having to change the entire ending as in Latin - or, e.g., in modern Spanish, German, or French. Esperanto was to use a similar system - but consi- derably simplified. Verbs in Volapuek are even more complex. There is only one con- jugation, but that one is a real bear, containing agglutinatable end- ings for person, tense, mood, and voice; one authority calculated that Volapuek had several hundred thousand different verb forms - more verb forms than speakers! English has only a few regular verb forms - though these must be augmented by some three hundred strong and irregular verbs - and Esperanto has only six verb endings and no irregularities. Yet the most common criticism of Volapuek - and, I must add in all fairness, from a global perspective the least important - arose from Schleyer's insistence upon deforming standard European roots to make them fit his rather unlikely phonology. It may be hard for the English-speaking reader to recognize that the very name "Volapuek" comes from English, but in fact this is the case - "vol" comes from "world" and "puek" from "speech". This criticism is valid only if the constructed language in question is meant to serve as an auxiliary to one or a group of already extant languages, not as an autonomous lan- guage in its own right - something not true of either Volapuek or Es- peranto. Nonetheless, with many people this criticism bears much weight. Within the Volapuek movement there developed a desire for re- forms to simplify the language's relatively complex (though not ne- cessarily complicated) grammar and bring its lexicon more into line with Western European practice - a desire that we shall see expressed elsewhere, later on. The leader of the reform faction was a French professor, Auguste Kerckhoffs, who at the second Volapuek congress was elected to head the Volapuek Academy. Friction immediately deve- loped between Kerckhoffs and Schleyer, since the latter perceived himself as the fount from which all wisdom about Volapuek must flow. By the time of the third congress, affairs had reached the status of open warfare. Kerckhoffs, formerly Director of the Volapuek Academy (equivalent of chief of government), was elected its President (head of state), a slap in the face to Schleyer. The autocratic Schleyer refused to recognize the Academy's authority and within a few short acrimonious years the whole movement collapsed, with most of its mem- bers converting either to Esperanto or to other constructed langua- ges. The best account of the third Volapuek congress and the collapse of Volapuek that I have seen is to be found in [10, p. 95]. By the turn of the century, Volapuek had all but disappeared. Large [8, p. 95] quotes the survival of one Volapuekist periodical until 1960; but Bernard Golden (in one of the last issues of "Eco-Lo- gos", 1979) in trying to hunt up speakers of Volapuek for the langua- ge's centennial in 1980, found only ten - all of them also speakers of Esperanto who had apparently learned Volapuek only out of linguis- tic curiosity. Still, according to personal communication from Prof. Gyoergyi Selyem rumors persist that a small Volapuek movement endures in Europe to this day, its members awaiting a sign from on high to become active once again in the interlinguistic field. If modern constructed-language aficionados reject Volapuek as being complex and unhandy, it should not be considered that they si- milarly reject what Schleyer did for the international language move- ment. In a sense, he created legitimacy where none had previously ex- isted. In his essay "Esenco kaj Estonteco" and in several public speeches, Zamengof explicitly emphasized the debt the international language movement as a whole owed to Schleyer, and at one point he even encouraged an Esperanto Congress to send a telegram of congratu- lations to the creator of Volapuek on the occasion of his birthday. Esperanto Unlike Father Schleyer, who created Volapuek because God told him to do so, Lazar Markovich Zamengof had far more personal reasons for creating an international language: he believed, not that an in- ternational language would be sufficient to turn the world into a ut- opia, but that it would be necessary to make it a tolerable place in which to live. Even Zamengof's name shows the difficulty of the conditions un- der which he had to live. I have called him "Lazar Markovich" above, and this is in accord with the name his parents intended for him; but the laws of his native country, Imperial Russia, required him to have a Christian name as well, even though his family was Jewish. Conse- quently, the name "Ljudovik" was added to his birth certificate, and he became known outside the Jewish community as "Ljudovik-Lazar Za- mengof". Early Western reports about his work invariably referred to him by this "Christian" name or Westernized variants - "Ludwig", "Louis", even "Lewis". Zamengof, by whatever name, was born and spent his early years in the city of Bialystok in what is now Eastern Poland and was then part of the Russian Empire. The population of the city was half Jew- ish, the rest being Russians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Germans [11]. The mutual distrust and hatred between the various ethnic groups, much of which he attributed to language differences, deeply impressed the young Zamengof, and it was at this time that he resolved to in- itiate an international language. Later life in almost equally poly- glot Warsaw only intensified his enthusiasm. For a very interesting description of the environment of the Central European 19th century Jewish Enlightenment, in which Zamengof's, like those of Zigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, evolved, see [12]. Much has been written about Zamengof's early life and about his work on Esperanto. Unfortunately, the only authoritative source is Zamengof's own letter [11] written in Russian long after the fact. Zamengof himself does not mention certain events which have become part of the mythology of Esperanto; e.g., his father's destruction of his papers may well be a product of Edmond Privat's fertile imagina- tion [13]. What we do know for sure is that a version of the language, ap- parently as well-developed as Volapuek, already existed at the time of Zamengof's nineteenth birthday party in December, 1878 - before Schleyer had even conceived the idea of Volapuek! We know that Zamen- gof was not satisfied with the shape of the language and spent what free time he had during the next few years, as a medical student at Moscow University and later back in Warsaw, polishing and reworking the language, largely through practical use in translating from the two or three ethnic languages that he knew well. We know that the language, as it existed in 1881, was considerably different from Classical Esperanto as we know it today, at first glance even more so than the prototype version of 1878. We know that the language had ta- ken on what was essentially its present form by 1885, and that Zamen- gof's next two years were spent in trying to find a publisher. And we know that after his marriage to Klara Aleksandrovna Zilbernik in 1887 she used part of her dowry to help him publish the first Esperanto textbook (in Russian) in July of 1887. The history of Esperanto, from that takeoff point, deserves at least a chapter or two all to itself. Leon Courtinat dedicates three volumes to it, but I am not so ambitious. In the context of this chapter I only want to touch upon its general relationship with other constructed languages, from 1887 until the time, in the early 1950's, that the movement to construct an international language began to languish, at least temporarily. By the early 1890's the same sort of sociolinguistic forces that had already broken the back of the Volapuek movement were beginning to develop in the budding Esperanto movement. One of the main reform- ists, a German surveyor named Wilhelm Heinrich Trompeter, was at that time the chief financial support of what was then the only Esperanto magazine "La Esperantisto". As a sop to him and the other reformists, in 1894 Zamengof actually proposed a reform project of his own, made up of suggestions offered by the reformists. The result was a heavi- ly-Europeanized variant of Esperanto that attempted to satisfy all the reformists and therefore bore little similarity to Classical Es- peranto. This patchwork, in my opinion, could not have emerged fortu- itously from the same brilliant mind that produced Classical Esperan- to, and I suspect that Zamengof deliberately created as unacceptable a reform project as he could manage, for the express purpose of kill- ing off the reform movement. The tactic was at least temporarily suc- cessful: this reform, and any others, were overwhelmingly rejected by the five hundred readers of the magazine - except for a few local groups, the only organized body of Esperantists in the world. The re- form movement was put to rest, a figurative stake through its heart; but, like a comic-book Dracula, it would reappear some thirteen years later in even more virulent form. Following the plebiscite, Trompe- ter, as expected, withdrew his support from the magazine, which was to disappear shortly in any case because of political considerations which I'll go into in another chapter. Ido (http://www2.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h0444wow/volagram.eo.html) Around the year 1900, Esperanto, which had been gradually making progress in such out-of-the-way corners of the world as Russia, Ger- many, and Sweden, was brought to the Civilized West by a group of French intellectuals, and during the next five years made significant headway in France and Britain. But not everyone west of the Elbe was pleased with the structure, phonology, and vocabulary of Esperanto. The supersigned letters, the many Germanic and occasional Slavic words, the agglutinative morphology, the Slavic syntax, all these seemed to some leading Western adherents of Esperanto a deviation from the world's linguistic norms - French and English. This basic theme - that "The Way We Do Things Is The One And Only Right Way" - would be reiterated over and over again, ad tedium, in the internati- onal language movement during the next half century. In 1900 the renowned French mathematician Louis-Alexandre Coutu- rat, with the help of his inseparable amanuensis Leopold Leau, under- took an ambitious program to convince a number of major international organizations that they should give their support to an international committee chosen to select an international language. Couturat him- self was apparently "an Esperantist", but I hope that I may be forgi- ven for supposing that his Esperantism was at best epidermal: his correspondence with Zamengof seems to have been exclusively in French. Nonetheless, to gain support for his plan from the already very large French Esperanto movement, he basically promised them that such a committee could not help but put its imprimatur upon Zamengof' s language. Over the next few years, in spite of massive help from the French Esperantists, such support was not forthcoming. Undaunted by this failure, he went ahead with plans to establish his committee, ignoring objections by Zamengof (and others) that such a committee, without authoritative backing, would be a laughingstock. The commit- tee - calling itself the Delegation for the Adoption of an Internati- onal Language - met in Paris in late 1907. Esperantists on the Delegation might be forgiven for being con- fused by its activities. Although Couturat had all but guaranteed that Esperanto would be the language selected, he seemed determined to bury it in a flood of strange artificial tongues with stranger na- mes - Balta, Bolak, Bopal, Dil, Orba, Spelin, etc., etc., etc. There were rules of procedure, but these were often selectively flouted or ignored. Zamengof, e.g., was not allowed by the rules to present his own "project", but had to be represented by the chief French Esperan- tist, the ultraconservative Marquis Louis de Beaufront who could be counted on to support Esperanto to the death; but the Italian mathe- matician Giuseppe Peano was invited to personally appear and defend his Latino Sine Flexione - later known as Interlingua (but not to be confused with the Interlingua discussed below) (Peano, in fact, was not only invited to defend his own language, but to be a member of the Delegation!). And then, one morning, the members of the Delegation arrived at their meeting table to discover, neatly laid out before their chairs, copies of a draft proposal for the modification of Esperanto to make it acceptable to "civilized" - i.e., French- and English-speaking - people. The author, a modestly anonymous person who signed himself "Ido" - Esperanto for "offspring" - obviously had only the best in- tentions - a few simple reforms such as removal of the supersigned letters and consequent dephoneticization of the language, abandonment of the anathematized "-n" ending, adoption of a system of derivation based upon certain theories of Couturat, the replacement of the ag- glutinative plural with a more Western inflected plural, purification of the vocabulary of barbarous non-Western elements - all of which would convert Esperanto into the Perfect International Language, im- mediately acceptable to everyone. Couturat found the whole idea enchanting and could not say en- ough good things about the anonymous author of these reforms. In light of future revelations, this was understandable. What was really surprising to the Delegation's Esperantists was Beaufront' s im- mediate and unrestrained enthusiasm. He immediately "packed it in" for Esperanto and converted to the Ido reforms, without so much as a telegram to his principal. The Delegation held a special meeting from which many Esperanto- speaking members were excluded by the simple expedient of failing to inform them of it, and closed its proceedings by declaring that it would adopt Esperanto "en bloc, with reforms along the lines suggest- ed by Ido". A permanent commission, consisting mainly of Couturat, was appointed to supervise the adoption of the reforms, and everybody went home, glad to be out of the mess. Recently James Chandler has suggested that the story is not fun- damentally as I have quoted it here. For the exchange of information between Chandler and myself, which includes the results of some of my own readings of the correspondence between a number of the princip- als, you may want to visit the page [14]. Most Esperantists felt betrayed, and they were no happier when Couturat quickly delivered an ultimatum to the Committee, demanding acceptance of Ido's reforms and insisting on a reply within a month. In a world without transoceanic aircraft or wireless electronic com- munications, an organization that already had members as far away as the Americas might be forgiven for considering this an unreasonably short time. Negotiations between the Esperantists and the reformers, henceforth to be known as Idists, proponents of a separate language known as Ido, broke down. A number of leading Esperantists, particularly in the French contingent, actually did go over to Ido, but a vast majority of those who had learned Esperanto simply to be able to use it did not - which led to a comment, popular at the time even outside the international language movement, that the Esperantists were an army without gene- rals and the Idists were generals without an army. Relations became even more strained when Couturat, by accidentally switching a couple of letters, revealed to the Danish linguist Jens Otto Harry Jesper- sen, a leading proponent of Ido but not part of the francophone cons- piracy that had created it, that it was Beaufront, presumably with the knowledge of Couturat, who had invented Ido. Jespersen, a honest man, insisted that Couturat reveal all details of the conspiracy to the world, under threat of losing his support for the "reforms". Sin- ce Jespersen was essential to the progress of Ido - he was the only linguist in the committee who had not either stuck with Esperanto or given the whole thing up in disgust - Couturat finally 'fessed up. More recent evidence suggests that "Ido" was a cooperative ven- ture between a group of French-speaking reformists, including Beau- front (who, it later turned out, was not a Marquis - but that's an- other story!), Couturat, a Belgian Esperantist named Lemaire, and an- other French Esperantist named Michaux. This was not their first at- tempt at instituting reforms; the story of how Zamengof, the poverty- stricken Jewish oculist, refused a bribe of 250,000 francs, offered secretly by Lemaire and Zamengof's close friend Emil Javal in return for his support for reforms, is not just a part of Esperanto mytholo- gy, but is documented by Lemaire himself [15]. Ido had a number of things going for it, not least the use of Jespersen, who was internationally respected, as a front man, and fi- nancing from Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald's Nobel Prize for Chemistry. But Ido, just as Volapuek and Esperanto before it, suffered from pro- blems that the mathematician and logician Couturat had not anticipa- ted, that he did not understand and for which he had made no provisi- on. "Reformomania" is an addictive disease. Once the precedent had been set, there was no dearth of Idists willing to make their perfect international language yet more perfect. At times, Ido seemed to be in a constant state of flux, one modification replacing another with lightning speed, so that the language you learned one day might not be quite the same as the language you were expected to speak on the next. Eventually, a "period of stability" was declared; one joker suggested that during this period reforms were permitted only every other day. Even though Couturat, the motor of the Ido movement, died in an auto accident in 1914, the movement itself went on by momentum well into the 1920's. A rump Ido movement exists even today. In 1988 I was given a co- py of 1987 issue #2 of "Ido Vivo", the 24-page typed and xeroxed of- ficial organ of the International Language (Ido) Society of Great Britain; there was no indication of how often it appeared. Three oth- er magazines were mentioned: "Progreso" (the main Ido organ) and "Nia Torcho", both of which appear once every four months, and "Komuniki", whose first issue appeared in April, 1987. There is some discussion about correcting the numerous "errors" (a possible reference to lin- guistic dissension among the remaining Idists?) that apparently dis- figure the pages of "Progreso", and there is also some discussion of changing the name of Ido to something more like Esperanto ("Esperido" is proposed). This question is not new; the original name of the lan- guage was intended to be "Esperanto Reformita", and Large reports Couturat' s complaint to Bertrand Arthur William Russell that such scum as Esperantists should have a monopoly on such a euphonious word as "Esperantist", and why couldn't Idists have something as nice? (Russell's suggestion of the term "Idiot" was apparently not well re- ceived.) [15] There is also a long letter from Russia, describing Ido's obvi- ous superiority over Esperanto; but the letter was originally written in Esperanto and had to be translated into Ido for publication. This reminds me of the letter that once appeared in (the now defunct) "Re- vista di Interlingua" from a minor Polish Esperantist poet, who prai- sed Interlingua to the skies and lauded its apparent superiority over Esperanto - and then, at the end of this letter written (and printed) in Esperanto, asked for replies in Esperanto, as he knew no other language but his own. The proof of the pudding, gentlemen! The surface differences between Ido and Esperanto are relatively minor. It is often said - correctly - that a person who can read one language can read the other. But the structural differences are ma- jor. Ido, like French and English, is a language with a relatively strict word-order; Esperanto is not. Esperanto has added some extra letters to ensure that it is phonetic; Ido uses only the standard twenty-six and is not. Esperanto has an agglutinative word-formation system that allows easy creation of new words; Ido has a complex word-derivation system that does not. Perhaps the best empirical demonstration of the difference comes from a study done at Columbia University in the 1930's. Two groups of students were asked to learn corresponding sets of words from Ido and Esperanto. The next day they were tested on their knowledge. The two groups did equally well in terms of passive recognition, but when it came to active knowledge - the ability to write the words down when given their English equivalents - the Esperanto group did about twice as well, to the surprise of the experimenter, whose own prejudices (as he admitted in his report) told him that the Ido group would do better, their set of words being more "natural". The Ido schism was catastrophic for the international language movement as a whole; among those outsiders who had already begun to accept the idea of a constructed international language, it cast doubt on the whole matter. But it was far from being an unmitigated catastrophe for the Esperanto movement; it served as a safety valve for drawing off the most vociferous forces in favor of "reforms". Henceforth linguistic dissension within the Esperanto movement, al- though at times relatively acerbic, would restrain itself well short of the level needed to provoke another schism. The proponents of Ido, on the other hand, having already shown their interest in reforms, were certain to be fertile ground for re- cruitment for the next major language project to come along. Postnote 2001: The era of the Internet may or may not have given Ido a new, though very tenuous, lease on life. Books in or, more often, about Ido continued to be published through the 1990's, numbering perhaps a dozen in that decade, about as many as were published in the 1970's before a slump in the 1980's (the record decade appears to have been the 1920's, with perhaps half a hundred books in or about Ido publi- shed). In addition, as of 2001 one webpage [16] lists some six Ido serials currently in publication: "El Correo Idista" of the Spanish Idist Society; "Ido-Saluto", published in Germany; "Ido-Vivo" of the International Language Society of Great Brittain [sic]; "La Kordiego Geyal", aimed at gay and lesbian Ido speakers; "Letro Internaciona", a magazine of various nonlinguistic topics; and the unkillable "Prog- reso". There are several Ido mailing lists, of which one has more than a hundred participants. Occidental (http://www2.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h0444wow/volagram.eo.html) It appeared shortly after the World War I. The inventor was an Estonian with the un-Estonian name Edgar von Wahl (later de Wahl). Wahl had been interested in language projects for many years and had in fact been one of the first to learn Esperanto to the point at which he became the proponent of the only modification to the langua- ge's structure that Zamengof found worthy of adoption after publica- tion of the "First Book". But he found Esperanto unsatisfactory in many ways; it simply was not Western enough for him. He left Esperan- to early and experimented with a number of "naturalistic" projects before, in the 1920's, emerging with his own, a language with the ap- propriately Western name "Occidental". "Naturalistic" is a term that is widely used (and even more wi- dely misused) in the movement for a constructed international langua- ge. It is generally used to refer to a posteriori languages which at- tempt to reproduce, although in a somewhat rationalized way, (South) Western Indo-European linguistic norms. A rationalized variant of Japanese, to the contrary, would not be considered "naturalistic". Most of this century's constructed languages have been "naturalistic" in this sense, for reasons about which I will theorize in the conclu- sion to this chapter. The best known examples are Occidental and In- terlingua, which is discussed below. Languages such as Esperanto (and, to a lesser extent, Ido), whose structures are rationalized be- yond similarity to the European languages, are referred to as "sche- matic". Occidental was developed by Wahl on the basis of an earlier pro- ject, Julius Lott's Mundo-Lingue. The language itself, although hea- vily rationalized, resembled an ethnic Romance language far more than any of its predecessors, and a linguist unfamiliar with it might be forgiven for assuming it to be a minor Romance dialect that had grown up after the collapse of Rome, somewhere in the Northwestern reaches of the former Empire - Northwestern because of the number of German and Scandinavian words incorporated into the language. Occidental, like Ido, sacrificed phoneticity, but it did restore supersigns - if only to show stress-location on words which were stress-irregular. The derivational system, in an effort to reproduce words of the Romance languages, was consciously analytical; that is, four or five affixes might have the same meaning, and which one was to be applied in any particular case was etymologically, not logi- cally, decided. So while the person familiar with several Romance languages might find it easy to recognize a particular derived word, it was impossible for him to derive new words on his own: he must de- pend on the dictionary. It should be added, in all fairness to Wahl's work, that the set of rules he developed for analyzing any derived word was simply bril- liant. These rules deserve the attention of any student of any of the Romance languages, starting with Latin, inasmuch as they seem to be generally applicable to that family of languages. The problem, of course, as far as an autonomous language is concerned, was that they permitted analysis of a compound Occidental word, but - because of the multiplicity of affixes - not synthesis. But perhaps the worst thing about Wahl's language was the appar- ent philosophy of those who supported it. Wahl and his disciples were interested in the West, and to him the rest of the world was unimpor- tant; it was doomed, or destined, to play, not merely a minor role, but no role at all. Civilization was a European phenomenon; only Eu- ropeans could be interested in international communication (plus tho- se few Asians - Africans may not have entered into his world-view at all - who would consciously adopt the trappings of the West: seer- sucker suits, neckties, Catholicism and a Romance language), and so an international language should be intended only for Europeans (for some thoughts on this philosophy, see e.g. [17], particularly part 3, "Li sociologic caracter" (in Occidental)). More specifically: Western Europeans, Wahl's followers, like many Westerners of his day, gener- ally expressed a cordial detestation for things Slavic, and this may have been the Estonian Wahl's attitude, as well. In an era when Italy was dumping mustard gas on Galla warriors armed only with spears and German crowds were screaming their delight as Adolf Hitler pumped out his anti-Semitic nonsense, it was to be expected that such a philosophy would strike a chord. One Occidental- ist author, writing in the magazine "Cosmoglotta" in 1936, greeted the Nazi ban on the teaching of Esperanto in Germany as proof that there was something wrong not with Naziism but with Esperanto. In fact, it is a surprising, and perhaps hopeful, sign that the Esperan- to movement in Western Europe was never even remotely threatened by the Occidental movement. Occidental survived the World War II and endured in straitened circumstances into the 1950's; but eventually it disappeared, its re- maining adherents attracted away by yet another variant of reforms. In 1985 Occidental's last periodical, "Cosmoglotta", ceased publica- tion, and its editor, Adrian Pilgrim, is quoted as having described Occidental as a "dead language". An attempt to revive Occidental by Robert J.Petry is now under way, though Petry appears to be implementing yet another name change, this time to "Auli-PRIM". It is worth noting that naming any planned language "dead" is perhaps indulging in over-optimism, or over-pessi- mism, depending on your preferences. More recently (1999-2000) it ap- pears that "Cosmoglotta" continues in publication, though whether in Europe or from Petry's headquarters in Tucson remains unclear to me. Basic English Basic English is something of a deviation from our general dis- cussion, as it was a deviation from the general development of con- structed languages. Published in 1930 by Charles Kay Ogden, Basic En- glish claimed to be English reduced to a vocabulary of 850 words, yet still suitable for uses in commerce, science, and the arts. Over its relatively short lifetime, Basic English gained support from a number of famous English speakers such as Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, whose enthusiasm may later have waned somewhat when he was told that "Blood, toil, tears, and sweat" translates into Basic English as "Blood, hard work, eyewash, and body water" - the last term, of course, being somewhat ambiguous. But Basic English ne- ver succeeded as a language in its own right, except in science-fic- tion novels, such as Herbert George Wells's "The Shape of Things to Come", which predicts its eventual success, or H. Beam Piper's "A Planet for Texans", which offers an entire courtroom scene in Basic English. Its claims were exaggerated; far more than 850 words turned out to be necessary for any reasonable form of communication. Fur- thermore, many people saw Basic English as a Trojan Horse for Stand- ard English. The event proved them right; in the postwar era, the British Council, an organization devoted to the promulgation of Eng- lish around the world, purchased the rights to Basic English, and since that time it has been used primarily as an introduction to standard - i.e., British - English for foreigners. It should be mentioned that Basic English had not only propon- ents but opponents among famous English-speakers. It was long assumed that George Orwell based the mind-controlling language Newspeak in his novel "1984" on Esperanto - Orwell, it happens, was closely ac- quainted with Esperanto and had what he considered good reasons - personal, not linguistic - to dislike the language (Apparently, Or- well, during his down-and-out phase in Paris, had to accept a room in the lodgings of a cousin. The fact that she and her live-in lover spoke only Esperanto together at home - a language he could not un- derstand - left him less than enthusiastic.); but a radio report in the early 1980's indicated that recently discovered papers proved that Newspeak had, in fact, been a satire on Basic English, which Or- well considered far more of a crime against the English language than Esperanto. There have been a certain number of other "simplified" ethnic languages proposed as international languages as well; e.g., Basic Spanish. The Nazis apparently intended a sort of Basic German to be the international language of a postwar united Aryan Europe [18]. There were also various constructed tongues aimed at the speakers of particular groupings of languages; e.g. pan-Teutonic, pan-Slavic, pan-Celtic. I have ignored these in this chapter, though an objective observer might insist that "naturalistic" languages such as Occident- al and Interlingua belong to this group in the "pan-Romance" catego- ry. Novial (http://www2.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h0444wow/volagram.eo.html) Novial, which was the brainchild of famous Danish linguist Jens Otto Harry Jespersen, mentioned earlier as an important supporter of Ido, is invariably mentioned in books about constructed languages. I am not sure why. It was a language of the same general type as Occi- dental, but less well known and perhaps a bit more schematic. Jesper- sen created it, I believe, as an attempted compromise between the schematic languages (Esperanto and Ido) on the one hand and the "na- turalistic" languages (Occidental) on the other. As far as I know, few people ever spoke it, and the only move- ment backing it was Jespersen himself. Its author modified it several times before it disappeared into the landfill of linguistic history. Its main impact on the history of constructed languages is that it served to decimate the Ido movement when it appeared in the late 1920's by attracting away a substantial minority, or possibly a majo- rity, of the earlier language's proponents. Commenting on the above, Chandler in personal communication with me, 1997.07.28, notes: "You say never had a movement, then you say that it took perhaps more than half the Ido movement with it when it was pub- lished. How can both be true? I believe that a few of the top Idists did go over to Novial, and also some Occidentalists. But I doubt that as many as half the Idists went over. The Ido journal "Mondo" (edit- or: Per Ahlberg) was renamed "Novialiste" from 1934 and served as the official Novial journal and organ of linguistic discussion, of which there was much. A "Lingue-Jurie Novialisti" was formed in 1937 and made some reforms. I am sure that Novial did have enough support dur- ing 1928-1939 that we can say it had a movement. But, unlike Ido, No- vial was it seems killed off by World War II. Jespersen's death in 1943 may also have contributed to its demise." This is a valid criticism, and I might better have said that No- vial virtually never had a supporting movement. While it took strength from the Ido movement (e.g. Chandler's comment on the maga- zine "Mondo" and its editor), the Ido movement by that time had al- ready been greatly sapped by Occidental, and it would seem that the individuals who went over to Novial lacked either the numbers or the enthusiasm to constitute a movement. The disappearance of Novial can indeed be attributed largely to Jespersen's death; note that no plan- ned language with a functioning movement at the beginning of the World War II disappeared on account of the war, as witness the rump Ido movement itself. That Novial could not survive its creator indi- cates that it had no functioning support movement. As of early 1997 a few individuals on the Internet are engaged in attempting to revive Novial; the title of this section is linked to the webpage of one of them. As is usually the case in such at- tempts, the would-be revivers are also attempting to modify the lan- guage to clean up what they consider to be the errors made by the or- iginal creator. Interglossa and Glosa (http://www2.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h0444wow/volagram.eo.html) One interesting constructed language of this period was Inter- glossa. Interglossa was created by Prof. Lancelot Hogben of Great Britain, who is best remembered in the United States for such works of scientific popularization as "Mathematics for the Millions" and "Science for the Citizen". Hogben attempted to fuse two completely distinct linguistic tra- ditions by creating a tongue whose vocabulary consisted entirely of roots from Greek - presumably a part of the common linguistic herita- ge of the West - but whose grammar was syntactically borrowed almost en bloc from Chinese. (Whether Hogben was actually using Chinese syn- tax or how much of his syntax has actually been carried over into la- ter Glosa, is the subject of some argument. It is a fact that almost all specimens of written Glosa that I has seen to date indicate that Glosa is merely recoded English - which may simply be due to the fact that most or all of its proponents are native English speakers.) Very few people followed up on this invention, and the language fell into desuetude for a quarter of a century. Then, in 1972, it was given a second chance when Ronald Clark in England discovered the language, decided that with some slight modi- fications it could be turned into the perfect international language, and - after obtaining permission from Hogben and with the help of a second English enthusiast, Wendell Ashby, - began to modify the lan- guage, renaming it "Glosa". By 1985 Large felt justified in devoting several pages of his book to Glosa; and in 1992, thanks largely to comments by one British Member of Parliament, the language had become fairly well-known in England [various communications from Robin Gas- kell, "Conlang" mailing list , Internet]. But it remains almost totally unknown elsewhere in the world, and there re- mains some question as to how many people actually speak it [communi- cation from Edmund Grimley-Evans, "Esperanto" mailing list , Internet; also, personal observation]. Interlingua (http://www2.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h0444wow/volagram.eo.html) The International Auxiliary Language Association was founded in 1924 by Alice Vanderbilt Morris, wife of the United States Ambassador to Belgium and member of the Vanderbilt family. During its early ye- ars it did much useful work in the study of the language problem; the experiment at Columbia, referred to earlier, was carried out under IALA auspices. IALA also sponsored a number of conferences in the 1930's; their main purpose was to try to reach some sort of compromi- se among the proponents of the various language projects. Compromise, however, was unattainable; the "naturalists" were unwilling to accept further "artificial" elements into their languages, and the Esperant- ists - who were the vast majority of all proponents of an artificial international language - saw no value in compromising with competit- ors who were no threat. In the absence of such a compromise, IALA set out to resolve the situation by building its own language. Francis Esterhill [19] suggests that IALA's idea was always to construct its own language: "In 1937, realizing that all of the previously elabora- ted languages were fundamentally flawed and that compromise was im- possible, IALA reverted to its original intention of doing its own independent work". However, Edo Bernasconi [20, p. 120], citing from W.J.A.Manders [21], suggests that "the purpose of IALA in 1924 was the scientific study of the problem of a planned language and the promotion of the generalized introduction of a planned language pro- ject, but not at all the creation of a new one". Certainly nothing in IALA's activities through the 1920's and early 1930's indicated that it intended to play such a role. The idea of creating its own planned language was apparently first officialized in a decision of 1933, a set of criteria for such a language (criteria to which the ultimate Interlingua did not very closely adhere) was proposed in 1937, and only by 1939 did actual work begin [20, p. 123]. I don't know how much of IALA's work was the result of dispassi- onate scientific research and how much of it developed out of the or- ganization's internal politics. IALA appears to have been a primarily American organization, founded by Americans, incorporated in New York, and with a long sequence of strictly American presidents [com- ment by Esterhill in private communication to Jay Bowks, 2000, posted by Bowks publicly in the "Auxlang" mailing list, Internet (An earlier comment here that it was originally headquartered in Great Britain, would seem to have been in error, though pretty obviously much of IA- LA's productive scientific work was carried on in Great Britain in the 1930's by its scientific secretary, the linguist (and Esperant- ist) Edward Collinson, for whom a special Chair in Esperanto was la- ter founded at the University of Liverpool.)] and several of its ear- ly Directors were speakers of Esperanto (Some of IALA Director Ezra Clark Stillman's Esperanto poetry can be found in the [22, p. 328].) this was during the period when compromise was its goal. But when World War II broke out, the organization was completely centered in New York. This was when it started to work on its own language. Pre- liminary work was done under the directorship of the French linguist Andre Martinet; but most of the substantial linguistic development was carried out in the late 1940's by an Americanized German lin- guist, Dr. Alexander Gode. Gode made no bones about the fact that he personally did not ev- en subscribe to the concept of an international language. Gode, in fact, once stated that he referred to proponents of his Interlingua as an international language as Esperantists, because their world-vi- ew more closely resembled that of the Esperantists than it did his own (In a letter to Esperantist William Auld, originally published in "The International Language Review" and quoted by Auld in [23]). Gode always insisted that his purpose was to produce a definitive Standard Average European vocabulary, based on the common word-stock of the European (i.e. Romance) languages. When Interlingua was finally pub- lished, in 1951, that was essentially what it was - a pan-Romance vo- cabulary with a minimal grammar and an only vaguely defined phonology and syntax. Gode must have been a bit rushed at the end. IALA's Maecenas of several decades, Vanderbilt Morris, died at about that time and left nothing in her will to IALA; it is quite possible that she was not totally pleased at the direction the organization was taking (Ester- hill suggests that this is not the case, but then refers to savings bonds presented to IALA several years earlier but not cashed in until after Vanderbilt Morris's death as proof of a bequest.). IALA folded, and Gode had to get into print quickly or lose his project. Interlingua had a ready-made constituency. Almost thirty years had passed since the creation of Occidental, whose strength in the "naturalistic" world had prevented other "naturalistic" projects from developing their own movements. But Occidental's star had waned since the war. Now, like a bolt from the blue, came this heaven-sent gift: a new constructed language even more "naturalistic" than Occidental. In spite of attempts by diehard supporters of Occidental to stave off the inevitable - e.g., by such tactics as renaming their language In- terlingue - most remaining Occidentalists made the short pilgrimage to the shrine of Interlingua. Interlingua is an even more restricted and restrictive language than Occidental. Its only concession to non-Romance languages is a nod in the direction of English; the other Germanic languages are ig- nored, as are the Slavic languages. Where Wahl attempted to establish a logical, though strictly analytical, system of word-derivation, In- terlingua's is neither: every word must be learned anew. Interlingua has three verb conjugations, and it reintroduces one of the banes of Latin students, the double-stem verb (e.g. "vid|er" - "to see", but "vis|ion" - "sight"). Gode made few, if any, concessions to rational- ity in this regard; irregularities are permissible if they can be justified etymologically. All this is understandable once we recognize that Gode was try- ing to produce not an international language but a language that was intended for strictly passive use by people who already spoke one or more Romance languages. This is emphasized through much of the lan- guage's grammar. How do you pronounce the letter "c" in Interlingua? "As you would in your own language". What about certain syntactical usages? "As in Spanish or French". Nowhere is it suggested that In- terlingua is intended to be an autonomous language such as Volapuek, or Esperanto, or Ido, or even Occidental. It is a crutch-language - intended to solve part of the language problem for certain selected people under certain selected conditions but nowhere granted the breadth of action that belong to Esperanto and, potentially, to Ido or Occidental. Interlingua gained much publicity but few adherents in the Uni- ted States and Western Europe during the 1950's and 1960's. "The Sci- ence News Service", which used to put out "Science Newsletter", ac- quired Gode's services and the rights to Interlingua shortly after IALA folded, and published a short monthly column in the language un- til Gode's death. The only Interlingua magazine I myself ever saw - although, as with Ido, several may still exist - was "Revista di Interlingua", which used to come to the ELNA office and which apparently died with its publisher, Swiss former-Esperantist, former-Idist, former-Occid- entalist, Ric Berger. As with Ido, a rump Interlingua movement still exists today - a "Union Mundial pro Interlingua" operates out of the Netherlands, and an international Interlingua conference held in that country in 1989 attracted about 50 people - but publicity for the language seems to have dried up, though I am assured by a Swedish In- terlingua proponent Kjell Renstroem in a personal communication that the language is still going strong (The letter in question was, how- ever, written in Esperanto.), and activity in several Internet mail- ing lists indicate that it is certainly not dead, though the last Ex- ecutive Director of the recently liquidated Interlingua Institute, described as "the successor organization to IALA", suggests that it is indeed dead: "There was no need (and no use) ever for the `inter- national' languages of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; and today, with the unparalleled ascendency of English, there is no long- er any need for Interlingua" [19, p. 26] and "Interlingua, the only interlanguage every [sic] adopted for use in the sciences, survived little more than a quarter of a century, and there is no reason to believe that it could now be revived" [19, p. 25]. The "quarter of a century" estimate suggests that Esterhill dates Interlingua's death from shortly after its use in the "Multilingual Compendium of Plant Diseases" (1976 and 1977), though his own Interlingua Institute last- ed for almost another quarter of a century, and "Union Mundial pro Interlingua" continues to function even today. Loglan (http://www2.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h0444wow/volagram.eo.html) and Lojban (http://www2.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h0444wow/volagram.eo.html) In the late 1950's a constructed language somewhat out of the mainstream, as we have described it, appeared: James Cooke Brown's Loglan. Loglan is a language that in many ways harks back to the old- er a priori languages, not to the "naturalistic" projects that have characterized language construction in this century. Unlike the other languages discussed here, Loglan does not appear to have been origin- ally intended as an international language, although some of its pro- ponents have touted it as such throughout its lifetime, not except- ing, recently, its inventor. Its original purpose seems to have been to test the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, codified by linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf, in its most extreme and simplistic form states that human be- havior is determined by the structure and lexicon of the language in which the person in question actually thinks. To illustrate: a person whose language contains no word for falsehood cannot tell a lie; he cannot even understand the concept. The idea has been a popular one for many years, especially with science-fiction authors; it formed the basis of John Vance's excellent science-fantasy "The Languages of Pao". Loglan might actually be a good language to test this hypothes- is: it differs considerably from those languages with which we are all familiar. Originally, it was created as a shake-and-bake tongue from the five most spoken languages in the world (Chinese, English, Hindi, Russian, Spanish); the resulting construct was interesting. It was not, however, particularly fruitful: no actual test of the Sapir- Whorf Hypothesis using Loglan was ever carried out, for reasons given below. Furthermore, most modern linguists deny the validity of Sapir- Whorf and would probably be unwilling to fund a major test of the hy- pothesis. Fortunately for Brown and his successors, his solution looking for a problem encountered a problem looking for a solution: the international language problem. A minor Loglan movement, encouraged by a widely read article ab- out the language [24], developed in the 1960's and, to some degree, persists even today. But the language has two major problems. First of all, Loglan is so complex that it is unlikely that it will ever be viable as a spoken language. Since a valid test of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis would involve raising a child, or children, in a strictly Loglan-speaking environment, at least a few Loglan speak- ers able to handle the language as easily as they speak their own na- tive languages are a necessity; but to my knowledge the language has never actually been used for free-wheeling conversation by anyone, including the inventor. A friend of mine Dr. David K.Jordan once ask- ed Brown about this: he is reported to have replied, proudly, that "we once sustained conversation in Loglan for fifteen minutes". The author of the language, scarcely more optimistic, himself writes: "In 1977-1978 the competence of four early [sic] speakers was attested by their ability to sustain daily conversation in Loglan unaided by Eng- lish for 45-minute periods over intervals from two weeks to 30 days... At least two other competent speakers, one self-taught, the other taught by one of the original set, have since been identified; and an unknown number of users have taught the language to themsel- ves" [25, p. 72, footnote 2]. This achievement is somewhat muted, however, by the recognition that "because of the low geographic den- sity of the loglaphone population, no true speech-communities have formed; so there are still no fluent speakers of the language" [25, p. 44], though the experience of at least Esperanto would tend to show that the lack of a geographically oriented speech community will not hinder the development of fluency in an easily learnable langua- ge. Secondly, despite a complete lack of speakers, the Loglan move- ment has already undergone schism, and for much the same reasons as the Volapuek movement in its time. Brown claims copyright authority over the language; a splinter group in Fairfax, Virginia, has develo- ped its own version of the language, called Lojban. Both groups pub- lish newsletters, which at last report appeared almost completely in English. That of Brown's Loglan Institute in Gainesville, Florida, is relatively professional in appearance, but not too thick and general- ly representative only of his own viewpoint; that of Bob LeChevalier in Fairfax is massive, rather amateurish in appearance, represents several different viewpoints (including that of the Esperantists), and usually contains pleas for funding. The recent conclusion of a court trial over the right of the Fairfax group to use the name "Log- lan" - the result was favorable to the Lojbanists - has not, it seems, resulted in any change of name of this latter language, since it now appears to be better known and advertised than the original. Neo In the early 1960's Floyd and Evelyn Hardin of Colorado put out a very interesting mimeographed magazine, "The International Language Review", which was intended as a forum for proponents of the various international language projects. This was really where I had my first introduction to Ido, Occidental, and Interlingua, all of which were well-represented there - better, in fact, than Esperanto, whose pro- ponents deigned to be represented on its pages only occasionally and usually in English (for the benefit of the magazine's almost exclusi- vely English-speaking clientele) rather than in Esperanto. I remember that magazine with very great pleasure, and every now and then I al- most go out into my garage to try to dig up back issues out of old, dust-covered boxes. Almost. I mention this because in 1964 or 1965 a new language was intro- duced in the magazine, which began to show a certain partisanship in its favor. This was Neo, invented by a Arturo Alfandari of Belgium. Neo was born full-blown, complete with beautiful little diction- aries, grammars, and readers bound in red plastic. Alfandari and the Hardins founded an organization, "Friends of Neo", and it looked for a while as though Neo might be a major competitor to the declining Interlingua, if not to Esperanto. But Alfandari died, and Neo died with him. Rumor has it that all those beautiful plastic-bound dictionaries, grammars, and readers rotted away in a warehouse somewhere in Belgium. For which I am genu- inely sorry - for all his work and expense, and for his dream, Alfan- dari deserves a better monument than that. I mention him here only to make sure that he and his dream are remembered for just a little bit longer. And, in a sense, Alfandari's fate, and that of Neo, is really symbolic of the situation in the movement to create an international language since the early 1950's. Klingon (http://www2.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h0444wow/volagram.eo.html) (This section added on 1996.10.17) Despite the fact that the word "Klingon" sounds remarkably like a sometime competitor to "Velcro", it would be hard to find anyone in the Western world today who would not recognize that a Klingon is a member of a race (species) of hereditary warriors - some might jus- tifiably prefer the term "low-browed thugs" - who grace our televisi- on screens in the various "Star Trek" television series and movies. (In 1977, at a meeting of astrophysicists at a well-known Western un- iversity, when one individual quoted an "Astro 10" ("Astronomy for Basket-Weaving Majors") student as saying that he was studying astro- nomy because he "wanted to learn about things in outer space, like Romulans and Klingons", one famous specialist in globular cluster dy- namics stood up and diffidently said: "I hate to display my ignorance in public, but... what are "Romulans" and "Klingons"?") The Klingons first appeared, if I remember correctly, on 1967. 12.01, as a throwaway competitor empire in a single "Star Trek" epi- sode. They seem to have struck fire and were revived for two or three more episodes including the instant classic "The Trouble With Tribb- les". Klingons in the original "Star Trek" were slightly darkened hu- mans with beards who spoke English. But by the time that the first "Star Trek" movie came out, twelve years later, Klingons had evolved the distinctive brow ridges that we know and love, and spoke their own language, complete with subtitles. Hence the popular, if somewhat pejorative, sobriquet "ridgehead" often applied to Klingons by fans. The distinctive Klingon forehead ridges set a trend; most alien races on "Star Trek", e.g. the Kardassians, are today distinguished by si- milar ridges. In what may be a conscious attempt at parody, we have the Minbari of "Babylon 5" - a competing space station where not only English, but a "galactic Esperanto", is spoken - whose major distin- guishing feature is an upstanding bone, like a crown, around the backs of their heads. The original Klingon language consisted of a few ad hoc words invented, it is said, by James Doohan ("Enterprise Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott"). It was a remarkably terse language, at least the dialect spoken by the Klingon navy: the single semisyllable "Chrkt!" according to the subtitles apparently meant something like "Swab the yardarm, keelhaul the mizzenmast, run out the foppish cannon, prepare for boarding, and laggards get salt beef and weevilly tack for a week!" In fact, there were no more than half a dozen or so such syl- lables heard in the entire movie, all in the first scene. Klingons did not reappear in the second movie, though Ricardo Montalban anachronistically refers to their proverbs at one point, but they were apparently quite popular because with the third movie, in which they reappeared in the persons of "Christopher Lloyd", "John LaRocquette", and others, "Paramount" had decided that they needed their very own language, and had hired linguist Marc Okrand to create one for them. Okrand compiled a basic vocabulary for the language, later to be collected as "The Klingon Dictionary", and since that time Klingons in all the "Star Trek" movies and television series have had their own language. That would not rate more of a mention in this chapter, any more than Tenctonese or Jordan's Old Tongue, except that some "Star Trek" fans seem to have actually bought into the myth that Klingon is now being used for international communication, and has a good chance of becoming an international language. "The Klingon Dictionary" has sold about a quarter of a million copies to date, not counting its companion tapes "Conversational Klingon" and "Power Klingon"; however, these seem to be considered more in the nature of curiosities than anything else by most of their owners. One authority is quoted as saying that "all the fluent Klin- gon speakers can comfortably go out to dinner together" [26]. Klingon, intended to be a totally alien language, has a made-up vocabulary along with grammatical features taken from various earthly sources, a few of which resemble those of Esperanto to some degree [27]. Some Klingon aficionados claim that Klingon is, at least theo- retically, easier to learn than Esperanto, though practice and re- sults do not seem to bear this out. Nevertheless, there has even been a certain amount of literary output in the language (by coincidence, I heard my first example of Klingon opera while typing these lines [28]). At least two of Shakespeare's plays have been translated into Klingon by an Australian linguist, part of a presumably ongoing prog- ram inspired by a throwaway line of Christopher Plummer's in "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country". In 1994, a number of newspapers published stories about a project to translate the Bible into Klin- gon; but since that time, so I understand, the primary translators have agreed to disagree over the perennial question of whether to create new words by internal agglutination or to borrow them from Terrestrial languages. Klingon, it appears, is sadly short on words that the "Prince of Peace" might have used, though it would seem to be an ideal language into which to translate "No Time for Sergeants". In addition, it is worth noting that one individual is even raising a son to speak Klingon as one of his two native languages (D'Armond Speers, mentioned by Gavin Edwards [28]. This attempt to raise a na- tive speaker of Klingon apparently fell through shortly after the ar- ticles was written. See Edwards' follow up in [29].). Any enduring success of Klingon would appear to be predicated on the ongoing popularity of the "Star Trek" phenomenon, and what part the Klingons may or may not play in that phenomenon. Interest in Klingon waned somewhat after the termination of the "Next Generation" television series; but with the reassignment of the "Klingon Worf" (Michael Dorn) to the cast of "Deep Space 9" and the role played by the Klingon Empire in the struggle between the Alpha Quadrant politi- cal entities and the Gamma Quadrant Dominion, interest may wax again. Nevertheless, given Klingon's lack of success as an actually spoken language to date, it is unlikely to become a serious contender for the mantle of international language. A Personal Analysis As I explained at the end of the last chapter, there have been at least a thousand different language projects constructed or outli- ned during the past two centuries. This figure is probably conserva- tive. Mario Pei, one of the few American linguists to take an active interest in this entire field, once in a talk to the Esperanto Club of Los Angeles in 1963 said that he would receive for comment - pre- ferably, for approval - an average of one new artificial language project per week. Of these projects, at most a few dozen have been developed in detail. Very few have gone on to generate supporting movements. Of these latter, besides Esperanto with its several million speakers, the only survivors appear to be a small Ido movement, a minuscule In- terlingua movement now in the throes of dying out, perhaps a handful of Volapuek aficionados, and a number of supporters of Loglan or its variant Lojban who apparently do not speak the language. Gary Jen- nings believes that Esperanto's "only current competitor of note is Interlingua", which, however, he has apparently confused with Peano's Latino Sine Flexione. Jennings also points out that this competition occurs "in a fairly limited area", though he does not define what ar- ea this might be - presumably North America and Western Europe. See [30]. The contrast between the situation of Esperanto and that of its predecessors and erstwhile successors is striking. Why has Esperanto succeeded - given that it has succeeded, at least in maintaining its viability - when all other constructed languages have failed? The failure of the a priori languages, from those of the Refor- mation period all the way down through Loglan, is easily explained. The inventors of these languages attempted to create a pattern for human thought. In doing so, they failed to reflect human thought as it is. Loglan, e.g., aims to remove all ambiguity from the language. But human beings thrive on ambiguity. A disambiguated language is not an impossibility: people write computer software in such languages every day. But human beings do not use them to communicate with each other, and never have. Bob LeChevalier's comment in personal communi- cation that his variant of Loglan more closely resembles the computer language Prolog than it does such languages as C or Pascal, does no- thing to increase my faith in his language's eventual success. Loglan and Lojban, to my untutored eye, appear to be based, like Prolog, on a particular variant of symbolic logic known as predicate calculus. A good basic description of predicate calculus can be found in Rudolf Carnap's book "An Introduction to Symbolic Logic and Its Applicati- ons". When I last looked (and got my copy), this book was available in paperback from "Dover". Predicate calculus notwithstanding, howe- ver, Carnap was an Esperanto speaker... With the rise of descriptive linguistics in the 19th century ca- me a new concept in interlinguistics: the language that tried to se- lect and rationalize the common elements of a number of other langua- ges. Schleyer's Volapuek was not the first such language, but it was the first to catch the public imagination. But Volapuek did not carry the process far enough. It took Esperanto to really streamline the rationalization procedure. There can be no question in the mind of anyone who has actually studied Esperanto: it is a work of artistic genius. Not, as is often claimed for it, a "scientifically constructed language" - Zamengof was a schoolboy and later an ophthalmologist, not a scientist - but a work of art. It may well be possible to improve on Esperanto, just as it might be possible to improve on the Mona Lisa; it seems impossible to create a language of the same type that is significantly superior to Esperanto. And, let's face it, most of the so-called "improve- ments" proposed for Esperanto, e.g., by the Idists, are the linguis- tic equivalent of drawing a mustache on La Gioconda. It appears that, even if Zamengof never explicitly stated this, Esperanto was constructed with the dual criteria of facility and ver- satility in mind. Given that in this regard Esperanto is close to be- ing an optimal language, all subsequent language creators either had to admit the inferiority of their products to Esperanto or else base them upon quite a different set of criteria. And so we have the "na- turalistic" languages of the 20th century - those which strive to outdo each other in adherence to pan-Romance norms. Ido was the first rather hesitant move in this direction; Occidental and Interlingua marked its apogee. In retrospect, it appears that Zamengof's criteria were the ones with the greatest chance of success. It is no accident, I suspect, that the three languages which most clearly adhered to them were the three that generated the largest and most successful bodies of speak- ers. Up to now I have spoken mainly of linguistic comparisons. At this point, most critics of Esperanto and other constructed languages stop, certain that such matters as Esperanto's n-ending or Volapuek's umlauted vowels were the cause of their respective failures to be in- stantly accepted as The World Language. In fact, social and political factors have always played a much more important role in the evoluti- on of constructed languages and their supporting movements. Volapuek had some success because, as French gradually lost its privileged place in the international world, the time seemed ripe for the adop- tion of an international language. The Esperanto movement developed around not just the language but also an associated ethic, the "inner idea". Many of Ido's proponents, coming as they did from the Esperan- to movement, shared some of the idealism surrounding that language and injected it into the Ido movement; much of Ido's failure, on the other hand, seems to have been due to the fact that all of its lead- ing proponents came from a rationalist society (the French intellec- tual elite) that was constitutionally incapable of accepting such an ethic. The latter point has also been, to a greater or a lesser deg- ree, true of other subsequent language projects. Zamengof's injection of this idealism into the complex of ideas surrounding his language may be what gave it the impetus it needed to survive and flourish. Conclusion Loglan and Neo are not the only constructed languages to have emerged since the early 1950's; but I know little or nothing about the others. I, like most Esperantists, became convinced very early on that the future lay strictly with Esperanto and not with any of its would-be supplanters, which, for reasons mentioned above, have never gone very far, and very likely never will. Yet I do feel sure that, from time to time, new constructed languages will appear, flourish in a small way for a short time, and then fade away again; the appearan- ce of such new projects as Unitario, Uropi, and Eurolengo, and the recent revival of such earlier projects as Loglan, Romanid, and In- terglossa, suggest that this is the case. And I hope that a new gene- ration of would-be Esperantists will take as much interest in these new irritations as I did in my time. They really are a lot of fun. References 1. http://pantheon.cis.yale.edu/~abergman/cot.txt. 2. http://www.io.org/~jackal/laadan.htm. 3. http://www.cms.dmu.ac.uk/~c2kd/tencton/istls1.1.html. 4. http://www.kli.org/KLIhome.html. 5. Ernst Drezen. Historio de la Mondlingvo. - Jap., Osaka: Pirato, 3a eld., 1969. 6. Pierre Janton. Esperanto. - Ned., Roterdamo: Universala Esperan- to-Asocio, 1987. 7. Mario Pei. One Language for the World. - NY: Devon-Adair, 1958. 8. Andrew Large. The Artificial Language Movement. - UK, Oxford: Ba- sil Blackwell, 1985. 9. Literatura Foiro. - Apr 1977. 10. W.J.Clark. International Language Past Present & Future. - Ldn.: J.M.Dent & Sons Ltd., 2nd ed., 1912. 11. Letter by Ljudovik-Lazar Markovich Zamengof to Nikolajj Afrikano- vich Borovko, 1894. - ftp://ftp.stack.urc.tue.nl/pub/esperanto/e· speranto-texts.dir/borovko1.txt. 12. Naftali-zvi Maimon. La ka\^sita vivo de Zamenhof. - Jap., Tokio: Jap. Esperanto-Instituto, 1975. 13. Edmond Privat. Vivo de Zamenhof (Several editions are available, including an English-language translation.). 14. Ido: The Beginning. - http://www2.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h0444wow/vola· gram.eo.html. 15. Kulisaj manovroj // Gaston Waringhien. 1887 kaj la sekvo. - Ned., Antverpeno: TK-Stafeto, 1980. 16. http://www.angelfire.com/id/Avance/REVUI.html. 17. Edgar de Wahl. Psychologic e sociologic caractere del lingues. - http://members.tripod.de/interlingue/cursu/let.htm. 18. Ulrich Lins. La dan\^gera lingvo. - Rus., Moskvo: Прогресс, 2a eld., 1990. 19. Francis Esterhill. Interlingua - R.I.P. // Verbatim. - Autumn 2000. 20. Edo Bernasconi. Esperanto a\`u Interlingua?. - Suisse, La Chaux- de-Fonds: Kultura Centro Esperantista, 1977. 21. W.J.A.Manders. Vijf Kunsttalen. - Ned., Purmerend: Muuses J., 1947. 22. William Auld (ed.). Esperanta Antologio. - Ned., Roterdamo: UEA, 1984. 23. William Auld. Enkonduko en la Originalan Literaturon de Esperan- to. - Ok. Ger., Sarbrukeno: Artur E.Iltis, 1980. 24. Scientific American. - Jun 1960. 25. James Cooke Brown, Scott Layson Burson, Christopher C.Handley, et al. An Unambiguous Grammar for Loglan, a Speakable Language // La Logli. - Jan 1996. 26. Gavin Edwards. Dejpu'bogh Hov rur Qabllj! // Wired. - Aug 1996. - http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.08/es.languages.html. 27. Glen Proechel. Klingon and Esperanto: The Odd Couple // Esperanto U.S.A. - 1994. - http://donh.best.vwh.net/Languages/klingon.html. 28. "Star Trek: Deep Space 9", episode titled "Looking for Par' Mach In All the Wrong Places". 29. Gavin Edwards. Babble on Revisited // Wired. - Aug 1999. - http:/ /www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.08/mustread.html?pg=8. 30. Gary Jennings. World of Words. - NY: Atheneum, 1984 (orig. 1965). Postnote To a great extent, as indicated in the initial "Warning", the material contained above may be considered polemical by some. Those who would like a somewhat different (and usually more optimistic) vi- ew of the history and fate of constructed languages other than Esper- anto may wish to investigate what on-line materials exist for these. A good place to start is my "Planned Languages Web Page" (http://www. webcom.com/~donh/conlang.html), which contains links to several other sites - from which, as usual, one can progress. While "How to Build a Language" has been treated on the WWW as an independent document for a long time, it is really part of a long- er work titled "The Esperanto Book". Materials about Esperanto on the net are too numerous to list here. A good place to start would be my "Esperanto Access Page" (http://www.webcom.com/~donh/esperanto.html). Another good starting point, if you know some Esperanto, is the "Virtuala Esperanto-Biblio- teko" (http://www.esperanto.net/veb/). Enjoy! Appendix: The Exact Spelling of Some Names Mentioned Andre Martinet Andr\'e Martinet Bialystok Bia\lystok Gyoergyi Selyem Gy\"orgyi Selyem Jan Amos Komensky Jan \'Amos Komensk\'y Jean Francois Sudre Jean Fran\ccois Sudr\'e Kjell Renstroem Kjell Renstr\"om Klara Aleksandrovna Zilbernik Клара Александровна Зильберникъ Laadan L\'aadan Ljudovik Lazar Markovich Zamengof Людовикъ-Лазарь Марковичъ Заменгофъ Nikolajj Afrikanovich Borovko Николай Африкановичъ Боровко Rene Descartes Ren\'e Descartes Volapuek Volap\"uk Don Harlow [http://donh.best.vwh.net/Esperanto/EBook/chap03.html]