Pierre Janton, Esperanto Language, Literature, and Community (State University of New York Press, 1993).
Don Harlow maintains a very informative Web book about Esperanto at donh.best.vwh.net/esperanto.php .
On Hebrew, see:
Jack Fellman, The Revival of a Classical Tongue: Eliezer Ben Yehuda and the Modern Hebrew Language (Mouton, 1973).
Shlomo Izre’el, “The Emergence of Spoken Israeli Hebrew,” in Corpus Linguistics and Modern Hebrew: Towards the Compilation of the Corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew (CoSIH), edited by Benjamin H. Hary (Tel Aviv University, 2003).
Charles Bliss and the Language of Symbols
On the rise of English and an analysis of how a language comes to world prominence, see:
David Crystal, English as a Global Language (Cambridge University Press,1997).
Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World(HarperCollins, 2005).
For information about Elias Molee, see:
Marvin Slind, “Elias Molee and ‘Alteutonic’: A Norwegian-Americans ‘Universal Language,’” Norwegian-American Studies (forthcoming).
Molee’s papers are held at the Norwegian-American Historical Association, St. Olaf College.
On the strange, strange life of Edmund Shaftesbury, see:
Janet Six, “Hidden History of Ralston Heights,” Archaeology, May/June 2004.
For some good stories about Ogden, see:
J. R. L. Anderson and P. Sargant Florence, C. K. Ogden: A Collective Memoir (Elek, 1977).
K. E. Garay, “Empires of the Mind? C. K. Ogden, Winston Churchill, and Basic English,” Historical Papers, Communications Historiques (1988), pp. 280–91.
The hieroglyphic example comes from:
Florian Coulmas, The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems (Black-well, 1996).
On how Chinese writing really works, see:
John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (University of Hawaii Press, 1984).
For a good introduction to the linguistics of sign languages, see: Edward S. Klima and Ursula Bellugi, The Signs of Language (Harvard University Press, 1979).
On Gestuno, see:
Bill Moody, “International Sign: A Practitioner’s Perspective,” Journal of Interpretation (2002), pp. 1–47.
If you’d like to see Bliss in action, the 1974 film Mr. Symbol Man, directed by Bruce Moir and Bob Kingsbury, can be ordered from the National Film Board of Canada.
James Cooke Brown and the Language of Logic
On Korzybski, see:
Marvin Gardner, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (Dover Publications, 1957).
Michael Silverstein, “Modern Prophets of Language,” University of Chicago, MS, 1993.
On Whorf, see:
John E. Joseph, “The Immediate Sources of the ‘Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis,’” Historiographia Linguistica 23, no. 3 (1996), pp. 365–404.
Penny Lee, The Whorf Theory Complex: A Critical Reconstruction (John Benjamins, 1996).
John Lucy, Language Diversity and Thought: A Reformulation of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Michael Silverstein, “Whorfianism and the Linguistic Imagination of Nationality,” in Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities, edited by Paul Kroskrity (School of American Research Press, 2000).
For an interesting book about ideas and ownership, see:
Ben Klemens, Math You Can’t Use: Patents, Copyright, and Software (Brookings Institution Press, 2006).
Lojban information, including learning materials and grammars, can be found at www.lojban.org.
The Klingons, the Conlangers, and the Art of Language
The study of native Esperanto speakers referred to in the discussion of irregularity is:
Benjamin K. Bergen, “Nativization Processes in L1 Esperanto,” Journal of Child Language 28 (2001), pp. 575–95.
The story of Sebeok’s analysis of the nuclear waste problem is in Eco’s book. Sebeok’s actual report, “Communication Measures to Bridge Ten Millennia” (1984), can be ordered from the National Technical Information Service (www.ntis.gov ).
Information about Tolkien comes from:
Humphrey Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography (Houghton Mifflin,1977).
Descriptions and histories of many conlangs can be found at www.langmaker.com.
Appendix A: The List of Languages
This list of languages is mostly culled from:
Aleksandr Dulichenko, Mezhdunarodnye vspomogatel’nye iazyki (International Auxiliary Languages) (Valgus, 1990).
This book is at the Library of Congress and a few university libraries.
Dulichenko, in turn, has culled from:
Louis Couturat and Léopold Leau, Histoire de la langue universelle (Hachette, 1903).
At many university libraries.
Ernest Drezen, Historio de la mondolingvo (Ekrelo, 1931).
Very hard to find.
Marcel Monnerot-Dumaine, Précis d’interlinguistique générate et spéciale(Librairie Maloine, 1960).
Held at many university libraries.
Petr Stojan, Bibliografio de internacia lingvo (Universala Esperanto-Asocio, 1929).
Very hard to find.
Appendix B: Language Samples
The language samples were collected from original works, as well as from Dulichenko and from:
Mario Pei, One Language for the World (Biblo and Tannen, 1958).
Acknowledgments
The languages captured my interest; the people behind the languages reeled me in. If someone could figure out how to carve this amazing mountain of raw material into a story, I thought, what a great story it would be. I was foolhardy enough to think I was up to the task.