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Loading... In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets,…by Arika Okrent
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Recommended by Language Hat at TheMillions.com."I’ve never had much interest in artificial languages, but this completely won me over. Arika Okrent writes well and tells a great story, but she also has a PhD in linguistics, which makes all the difference; any good journalist could spin a lively tale out of some of this material (people who spend their lives creating and trying to publicize languages tend to be pretty colorful), but it takes a linguist to see what’s going on with the languages and be able to point out where they succeed and where they fail. Okrent has written a gripping account of some amazing people and some fascinating changes in the European cultural environment."   lacurieuse | Dec 3, 2009 |  A great and entertaining book, and a easy read too. Okrent has so much love to her subject and it shows. Even people who only have a passing interest in linguistics should read this book. Its not just for language-nerds, as it contains many interesting stories about the people behind the languages and also discussions of different strategies that creators of synthetic languages have used. Best book I have read this year. (  ) danielbeattie | Nov 7, 2009 | I enjoyed this book immensely despite my already being familiar with much of its contents. It is an easily digestible introduction and overview of invented languages and their inventors, be they a priori, a posteriori or mixed languages. If Eco's The Search for the Perfect Language is too formidable for you, or you would like a warm-up first, this is a perfect book for you. While it does touch on much of what Eco does not--Esperanto, Klingon, Lojban, etc.--and leaves out some of what Eco does--it barely mentions the search for the Adamaic language--many of the same folks and languages do show up; for instance, Wilkins. (  ) mlindner | Sep 27, 2009 | "In the Land of Invented Languages" was written for the average reader but shows a solid foundation in linguistics often missing in popular books on language. (Indeed, Okrent's explanation of the relationship between the writing systems of Mandarin, Cantonese, and Japanese is one of the clearest I've seen in any linguistics text.) Add to that a fascinating group of stories spanning several hundred years and this book gets a rare 5-star rating from me. ( ) Katya0133 | Sep 17, 2009 | Arika Okrent treats what could be a dry subject with a healthy dose of good humor. She takes the reader on a whirlwind tour through a few of the artificial language movements of recent history. But rather than give a textbook chronology of who-wrote-what, she interviewed friends and family of the language inventors to give us more intimate portraits of some fantastic personalities. Best of all, she has listed 500 of the known invented languages with dates in Appendix A and then samples of translations from a few of the languages in Appendix B. I do wish there were specific footnotes or endnotes within her chapters instead of just a "further reading" list at the end, but apparently publishers think readers can't handle that anymore. Okrent, however, knew better than to patronize her readers. Her book is a witty, clever introduction to "the faded plastic flowers, the artificial languages." ( ) epist | Sep 13, 2009 |  no reviews | add a review
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(retrieved from Amazon Tue, 05 Jan 2010 17:36:22 -0500)
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