In the Land of Invented Languages
So what’s so funny about these repeated failures? It’s their creators. All geeks, as we would call them today, they hold the strong belief that logic can win it all. So they try crazy schemes, including trying to create a universal classification of all the concepts in the universe. If you thought that was difficult to do for plants and animals, it turns out that language is particularly ill-suited to this exercise. Who says that editing and printing are part of “corporeal actions”? Others tried to create language by using affixes (the opposite of prefixes), thereby creating monstrously long words that seem impossible to pronounce or remember.
And those creators that actually were successful, such as with Esperanto and a funny and brilliant sign-based language called Blissymbolics, refused to admit that their new, pristine, logical creations could actually be modified by its speakers. It turns out that speakers of any languages (and for the sign-based language I should say users rather than speakers, since most were non-verbal, severely handicapped children and adults) like to make jokes and create shortcuts, hence the complexity and lack of logic of other, real languages.
Languages, it turns out, are too much fun to be left to geeks and gramarians.
Another good book for language nerds (like this one) — perhaps best read in small doses.
It was interesting to see the mention of Esperanto here. Your readers may gain from this the idea that Esperanto is something historical or experimental or even a failure. In fact this planned second language is spoken by a growing population of people across the world. Take a look at http://www.esperanto.net
“And those creators that actually were successful, such as with Esperanto [...] refused to admit that their [...] creations could actually be modified by its speakers”
Wrong.
Zamenhof, the initiator of Esperanto, never refused that. On the contrary, he himself proposed a certain number of possible modifications, that were rejected by the early community of speakers.
He explicitly said that the language could be modified, if needed, by an Academy.
What is protected in Esperanto by this “Academy” (not by Z.) is the kernel of the language, named “La Fundamento”. Compare that to the basic grammar of English.
The success of Esperanto is due to the fact that it functions like any “natural” language. It is flexible enough to allow creative people to express themselves as well as in any natural language.
I lately read a text in which the author coined the word “monderna ekonomio”. (=modern/world/money economy).
“Monderna” is not an existing word. It was build from “moderna”(=modern), “mondo” (=world), and “mono” (=money).
Yes you could do things like that in Esperanto. This is not considered as a fundamental modification of the language.
There are many words like that, that are valid only in some limited context, where their meaning is (almost always) obvious.
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ЄЭ Remuŝ (Belgio)- perSkajpe: RemushBE