by 2. Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany and Japan - Randall Hansen
3. Cognitive Exploration of Language and Linguistics – René Dirven and Marjolijn Verspoor (Eds.)
4. Age of Static: How TV Explains Modern Britain – Phil Harrison
5. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating our Species and Making us Smarter – Joseph Henrich
6. Heroic Failure and the British - Stephanie Barczewski
7. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain - Maryanne Wolf
8. Language Soup: A Taste of How Diverse People Around the World Communicate - Kathryn A. T. Knox
9. A Place for everything: The curious History of Alphabetical order – Judith Flanders
10. Contrastive Analysis - Carl James
11. Impossible Languages- Andrea Moro
12. Languages in the World: How History, Culture and Politics Shape Language – Jukie tetel Andresen and Phillip M. Carter
13. HHhH - Laurent Binet (Translated from the French by Sam Taylor)
14. Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offense – Jonathan Culpeper
15. Ethosyntax: Explorations in Grammar and Culture – N. J. Enfield (Ed.)
16. Second Language Speech Fluency: From Research to Practice – Parvaneh Tavakoli & Clare Wright.
17. At Day's Close: Night in Times Past – A. Roger Ekirch
18. Language Shock: Understanding the Culture of Conversation – Michael Agar
19. Possessives in English: An Exploration in Cognitive Grammar - John R. Taylor
20. I saw the Dog: How Language Works – Alexandra Aikhenvald.
21. The German War: A Nation under Arms, 1939 – 1945 – Nicholas Stargardt
22. Civilizations – Laurent Binet
23. Adjective Classes: A Cross-linguistic Typology - R. M. W. Dixon & A. Aikhenvald (Eds.)
24. Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time – Johanna Nichols
25. How to behave badly in Elizabethan England - Ruth Goodman
26. In the Land of Invented Languages: Adventures in Linguistic Creativity, Madness and Genius – Arika Okrent
342 pp.
I read Umberto Eco’s book ‘The search for the perfect language’ a good few years back and was much taken with the idea of created languages. Okrent’s book is a highly readable, entertaining, and informative. She gives a good background to the ways in which various idealists, lunatics, self-promoters, misfits, oddballs, and well-intentioned obsessives have sought to bring perfection, order and logic to language. From the philosophick languages of the European Enlightenment which sought to impose a Linnean categorization to language and vocabulary, through the idealism behind Esperanto and Volapuk, to the invented sci-fi/fantasy languages of Klingon and Tolkein, the ways in which people have risen to the task (and usually fallen) are detailed with kindness, humanity and generosity. (Even though some of the language inventors were pretty unpleasant people.)
Underlying the whole is the understanding that language can’t be ‘perfected’. The seeming inconsistencies and illogicalities serve a purpose, making language flexible enough to deal with novel situations, the will ‘o the wisp train of thought, and the varying levels of granularity needed to actually communicate, whilst being robust enough to allow meanings to be understood consistently and accurately when needs be.
From my readings in languages far removed from the familiar ‘big’ languages, it is clear that one of the irresolvable issues of creating a new language is deciding on what to do and what not to do. If one decides to include evidential markers (as many languages of Amazonia do) then you have to reject the non-evidential marking found in European languages. Languages like Russian and Japanese manage fine without definite and indefinite articles (the & a). What is your ideal language gonna do? Are you going to have a singular/plural distinction like English or a classifier system like Mandarin Chinese? Every time you select one feature you have to unselect another one. And don’t even get me started on the interactional components. How are you going to encode something like ‘Well, you know, I mean, the thing is…’?
Still, an interesting way to think about language and languages and just enjoy the baroque extravagance that is human language. The author wears her scholarship lightly and is a good writer to boot.
