In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language
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Arika Okrent. (2009). In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language. Random House Publishing Group.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Arika Okrent. 2009. In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language. Random House Publishing Group.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Arika Okrent, In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language. Random House Publishing Group, 2009.
MLA Citation (style guide)Arika Okrent. In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language. Random House Publishing Group, 2009.
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- bioText: Arika Okrent received a joint Ph.D. in the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Psychology’s Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience Program at the University of Chicago. She has also earned her first-level certification in Klingon. She lives in Philadelphia.
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- Here is the captivating story of humankind’s enduring quest to build a better language—and overcome the curse of Babel. Just about everyone has heard of Esperanto, which was nothing less than one man’s attempt to bring about world peace by means of linguistic solidarity. And every Star Trek fan knows about Klingon. But few people have heard of Babm, Blissymbolics, Loglan (not to be confused with Lojban), and the nearly nine hundred other invented languages that represent the hard work, high hopes, and full-blown delusions of so many misguided souls over the centuries. With intelligence and humor, Arika Okrent has written a truly original and enlightening book for all word freaks, grammar geeks, and plain old language lovers.
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- source: Michael Erard, author of Um...: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean
- content: "Hats off to Okrent, who expertly exposes the history, culture, and preoccupations of this insular tribe who live among us. She rescues language inventors, or conlangers, from the oddball bin--utopianists all, they're the first biotechnologists, trying to leapfrog evolution and improve human life. They'll thank her but everyone else will, too, for finally making sense of the conlangers' discontents."
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- source: Will Shortz, Crossword Editor, New York Times
- content: "A lively, informative, insightful examination of artificial languages--who invents them, why, and why most of them fail. I loved this book."
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- source: Publishers Weekly, starred review
- content: "Linguist Okrent explores some of the themes and shortcomings of 900 years worth of artificial languages. ...Okrent gamely translates these languages with unspeakably hilarious results, and riffs on the colorful eccentricities of their megalomaniacal creators. Fortunately, her own prose is a model of clarity and grace; through it, she conveys fascinating insights into why natural language, with its corruptions, ambiguities and arbitrary conventions, trips so fluently off our tongues."
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- source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
- content: "Arika Okrent is a linguist whose fascination with the "faded plastic flowers" in the "lush orchid garden of languages" is recounted to delightful, often comic effect in "In the Land of Invented Languages."...Okrent's style is eminently suited to her approach, which is at once serious and playful, exemplified by her marvelous, snappy opening sentence: "Klingon speakers ... inhabit the lowest possible rung on the geek ladder."
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- source: New York Times
- content: "The author...examines a variety of would-be languages and related philosophical tenets (there are no pure ideas, all signs depend on conventions) in a rigorously linguistical way. And yet her book is a pleasure to read. It shows how language systems connect, or don't connect, with people."
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- source: Denver Post
- content: "Okrent is a professional linguist and relates the place of these artificial languages in the confusion of human languages. She is also a great storyteller, and eccentric characters and dashed dreams are the stuff of this delightful book. "
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Starred review from March 9, 2009
Is there a perfect language? Probably not, according to Arika Okrent.
In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language
Arika Okrent
. Spiegel & Grau
, $24.95 (352p) ISBN 978-0-385-52788-0
Efforts to make language simpler, clearer, less divisive and more truthful have backfired spectacularly, to judge by this delightful tour of linguistic hubris. Linguist Okrent explores some of the themes and shortcomings of 900 years worth of artificial languages. She surveys “philosophical languages” that order all knowledge into self-evident systems that turn out to be bizarrely idiosyncratic; “symbol languages” of supposedly crystalline pictographs that are actually bafflingly opaque; “basic” languages that throw out all the fancy words and complicated idioms; rigorously logical languages so rule-bound that it's impossible to utter a correct sentence; “international languages,” like Esperanto, that unite different cultures into a single idealistic counterculture; and whimsical “constructed languages” that assert the unique culture and worldview of women, Klingons or chipmunks. Okrent gamely translates to and from these languages, with unspeakably hilarious results, and riffs on the colorful eccentricities of their megalomaniacal creators. Fortunately, her own prose is a model of clarity and grace; through it, she conveys fascinating insights into why natural language, with its corruptions, ambiguities and arbitrary conventions, trips so fluently off our tongues.
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May 15, 2009
You could say that a seminal moment in the history of language came in 1984, when Marc Okrand, a linguist, created the Klingon language for a Star Trek movie. The history of invented languages, Okrent tells us, is largely a history of failure because the vast majority of these languages are hopelessly unworkable, silly, or just plain unfathomable. In this hugely entertaining and informative book, Okrent, a linguist (and first-level student of Klingon, one of the more successful invented languages), takes us through this remarkable history. She introduces us to some of the people who made up their own languages, tells us the reasons why they did it, and explores the aftermaths. For example, in the mid-fifties, James Cooke Brown invented a language called Loglan that took its grammatical rules from the rules of logic. It became the basis of a landmark lawsuit (Who owns a language, its inventor or its speakers?). For linguists and language mavens alike, this is a massively enjoyable book, full of dreamers and geniuses who devoted their lives to building a better language and, quite often, failed spectacularly.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)
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