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I suppose it was seeing "Klingon" mentioned on the cover that made me take a second look at Arika Okrent's "In the Land of Invented Languages" after first spotting it passing by a part of the library shelves I don't often focus on. After I had begun reading through it, I found there were other interesting things about the book. As with other "bring a small, esoteric subject to a large audience" books I've read, it has a cheerful, chatty, personal viewpoint, in this case on the varied history of trying to invent languages from scratch. After unearthing a language from the 17th century that started by breaking the known universe itself into a hierarchy, the languages focused on all seem to have communities, the better to personalise them, some seemingly familiar like Esperanto and others a bit more obscure like Lojban. The book suggests that a community to join may be more appealing than a tool to use, which seems one of those illuminating things to me.
Along the way, I realised I'd heard of a few of the more obscure points before, such as a "female language" in a science fiction novel I got assigned in university. I had thought that the sexist dystopia in the novel had been laid on kind of thick, but now I can see how it was a tool for advancing the language, presented as a way to overcome in secret. The book also mentions the "General Semantics" of Alfred Korzybski when discussing how the mid-twentieth century saw language as shaping particular realities, and I believe some science fiction from the 1940s or so picked up on the idea in a familiar "one popular theory will explain and solve everything!" way. Beyond the personal reactions, of course, the book was enjoyable, and did in the end get around to Klingon and its community (managing to mention JRR Tolkien's invented languages around the same time). It made me think a bit about "world-building" and the corresponding criticisms about how the worlds built so often seem smaller in scope than the real one.
Along the way, I realised I'd heard of a few of the more obscure points before, such as a "female language" in a science fiction novel I got assigned in university. I had thought that the sexist dystopia in the novel had been laid on kind of thick, but now I can see how it was a tool for advancing the language, presented as a way to overcome in secret. The book also mentions the "General Semantics" of Alfred Korzybski when discussing how the mid-twentieth century saw language as shaping particular realities, and I believe some science fiction from the 1940s or so picked up on the idea in a familiar "one popular theory will explain and solve everything!" way. Beyond the personal reactions, of course, the book was enjoyable, and did in the end get around to Klingon and its community (managing to mention JRR Tolkien's invented languages around the same time). It made me think a bit about "world-building" and the corresponding criticisms about how the worlds built so often seem smaller in scope than the real one.