Linguist Noam Chomsky proposed that there exists a deep grammar, or core wiring, of grammaticality in our heads, to which we have no direct access, constrained as we are by layers of superficial language (French, German, English, and so on). This idea would have delighted the lunatic creators of imaginary languages profiled in Marina Yaguello's study Lunatic Lovers of Language. They would have thrilled to the apparent rekindling of a universal language. Accessible (i.e. real) language is a messy and arbitrary thing.
The problem was not always thus, the Bible tells us. Were it not for the ancient sinners, we might all have spoken the perfect original tongue.
This wonderful book is a study of a strange people in love with language, particularly the xenoglossists (speakers of languages never heard) and the glossolalists (speakers of tongues).
But there is more to this study than madness - indeed the references to madness are generally unhelpful, even careless. They are included as references to the dubious and woefully outdated thesis that lunacy is culturally defined. Some of Yaguello's lunatic lovers of language are religiously or philanthropically motivated. Helene Smith, for example, a glossolalist living around the turn of the century, would concentrate until she lost touch with her environment. She would enter a twilight zone through self-hypnosis, and a subsequent flood of words would pour from her mouth - in Martian 'Sanskrit' or later, Ultra Martian. Smith received much attention for her novel languages.
Nicolas Marr, at the male end of the neolinguistic spectrum, received even more. His peculiar - albeit false - linguistic theories carried him to the heights of Marxist academia. Rather than imagine a degenerating babble, Marr saw all languages coming together: He managed to squash the origins of language down to four root syllables: sal, ber, yon, and rosh.
Many people have heard of Lazarus Ludwig Zahmenhof's creation, Esperanto, but Spokit, Spelin, Volapuk, Mundolingue? Add the remarkable number of members of the Esperantides family. The inventors of these largely unspoken tongues are never satisfied. Once a language is finished, it is time to start another - or to fiddle with someone else's. A further motive is ridding language of ambiguity and redundancy. As Yaguello points out, this is a hopeless task. Irrespective of the inventor's ability to persuade others to use his or her language, speakers soon adjust it, exploit it, and riddle it with double entendres. Maybe it's best to recite the Lord's Prayer in Volapuk: O fat obas, kel binos in suls, paisaludomoz nem ola! Komomod monargan ola!
Absent from the discussion are formal and computer languages, which seems surprising. Though far more meaningful and valuable than Esperanto or any related construction, they are probably not born of such different motives, and are thus surely "artificial." Perhaps programming language design will be the new chosen occupation of the people who once invented these other types of unspoken language.
Lunatic Lovers of Language, by Marina Yaguello, translated from the French by Catherine Slater, 1990, $39.50, Fairleigh-Dickinson Press
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