Free In the Land of INVENTED LANGUAGES by Arika Okrent

there, of course, especially after the work of Leibniz came into fashion among scholars in the 1760s. French was fine for communication purposes, but it was no perfect mathematical system. A coupleof projects attempted to make French a bit more orderly, while others continued the tradition of starting from scratch with letters, numbers, and symbols in the quest for that perfect system. One of these, the Pasigraphie of Joseph de Maimieux, gained a bit of success—for a few years around 1800, it was taught in schools in France and Germany, and Napoleon was reported to have admired it. But probably only in theory. Had he actually tried to use it, his assessment may have been different. He would have found himself lost in a thicket of tables, sub-tables, columns, and lines, all serving to carve up the world of experience into arbitrary categories, all filled with odd-looking symbols that were hard to distinguish from each other.
    Maimieux, like most language inventors at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was still using a method that was now old and tired and, after two hundred years, had never resulted in a language that people wanted to use. When he died in 1820, no doubt dismayed that his brief brush with success had remained so brief, he might have comforted himself with the thought that he had tried to do something that was simply impossible. If the establishment of an international network of teaching programs was not enough, if the endorsement of an emperor was not enough, then nothing was enough. No one would ever be able to get people to use an invented language.
    But if he could have seen not even very far into the future, to the end of the nineteenth century, he would have been amazed. Not only would he have seen fierce new enthusiasm and optimism for the prospects of a universal language, he would have seen people, thousands of people, speaking to each other, writing to each other, and most of all arguing with each other in invented languages. The arguments were over which version of which language was the one best suited to be the universal language. Hundredsof projects and revisions of projects appeared during this time. In the end, none of them would become the universal language. But one of them, perhaps even more surprisingly, would become a living language.
    Kim Henriksen is way cooler than you'd expect an accordion-playing Esperantist to be. Tall, lean, and muscular, with creative facial hair and a European-cowboy style, he looks younger than he is. In Esperantoland, he is something of a rock star. Through the 1980s, his band Amplifiki played international youth congresses all over Europe, releasing hits like “Tute ne gravas” (No Big Deal) and “Sola” (Alone). The band's name came from an old Esperanto dictionary word for “amplify,” but a prurient mind might read it as
am-pli-fiki
(love-more-fucking). He later formed the Danish/Bosnian/Polish group Esperanto Desperado, which came out with party starters like “Skavirino” (Ska Woman) and “La anaso kaj la simio” (The Duck and the Monkey). I wasn't prepared to encounter anyone like him when I set out on my first trip to Esperantoland.
    “Esperantoland” sounds a lot sillier in English than it does in Esperanto. There is no land of Esperanto, of course, though not for lack of trying on the part of the Esperantists. In 1908 the tiny neutral state of Moresnet, the orphan of a border dispute between the Netherlands and Prussia, rose up to declare itself the first free Esperanto state of Amikejo (Friendship Place). More than 3 percent of the four thousand inhabitants had learned the language (a higher percentage of Esperanto speakers has never been achieved in any other country), and their flag, stamps, coins, and an anthem were ready to go. But in the increasingly tense and nationalistic atmosphere of prewar Europe, there was no placefor a friendship place, and Esperanto never got its piece of terra firma. Instead, the proponents of