Free In the Land of INVENTED LANGUAGES by Arika Okrent Page B

Kimo's consonants were nearly unrecognizable. The Danes have a saying about their peculiar phonology: “
Danskerne taler med kartoffler i munden
” (The Danes speak with potatoes in their mouths). Even the expert Esperantists were having trouble. One of them generously took me aside and said, “Don't worry if you can't understand the Danish guy. I can't either.”
    My final obstacle to Kimo comprehension had to do with the important sense in which he differed from all the other speakers at the congress. They were fluent, but he was rapid-fire fluent. I couldn't keep up with him. He spoke like a native. But this was not as confounding as the fact that he spoke like a native because he was a native. I discovered this when Kimo's son, a nine-year-old with purple hair and a skateboard tucked under his arm, wandered into the room to ask his father a question. The woman in front of me asked the man next to her, “Is his son a native speaker, too?” “Yes, second-generation,” he answered. “Wonderful, no?”
    When I cornered Kimo later in the day to find out everything I could about his no-doubt totally weird and fascinating upbringing, he met my falling-over-myself excitement with a shrug. Born in Copenhagen to a Danish father and a Polish mother who met through Esperanto, he appeared not to appreciate how bizarre it was to be a native speaker of an invented language. Esperanto was the medium of his parents’ relationship and of the entire home life of their family. Before you start getting indignant on his behalf, know that growing up he had plenty of contact with the world outside his home and learned to speak Danish as a native, too. But he considered Esperanto his true mother tongue.
    For Kimo, Esperanto was a completely normal fact of life in the same way that Polish would have been if both of his parents had been Polish.
    Kimo didn't choose to learn Esperanto, nor did his son, but everyone else at the conference did. Somewhere along the way they'd decided it worth their time to learn this Utopian pipe-dream language, and I wanted to understand why. The stated reason in pamphlets and speeches and passionate letters to the editor is too abstract: “Esperanto is a ‘linguistic handshake,’ a neutral ground where people of different nations can communicate as equals.” Nice idea, but people don't speak languages for abstract reasons. The Irish feel a strong emotional attachment to the once-persecuted language of their heritage, but despite mandatory school instruction they don't speak Irish. So goes the story of hundreds of attempts by political and cultural organizations to convince people to speak a language. And the fact that Esperanto is an invented language makes the notion that anyone would speak it even more unlikely. By the time Esperanto came along, a couple centuries’ worth of invented languages had failed to attract more than a handful of speakers. None of them at any point had anywhere close to fifty thousand speakers, the most conservative estimate for Esperanto (the least conservative is two million)—much less any native speakers.
    “Success” is probably not the first word that comes to mind when you think of Esperanto, but in the small, passionate world of invented languages there has never been a bigger one.

Un Nuov Glot
     
    T he nineteenth century saw a complete change in both the purposes and the methods of language invention. The change in method can be clearly seen in the following examples, the first from the first half of the century and the second from the second half:
    Dore mifala dosifare re dosiresi
.
Men senior, I sende evos un grammatik e un verbbibel de un nuov glot nomed universal glot
.
     
    The second example, from Jean Pirro's Universalglot, published in 1868, can be understood by anyone with a passing familiarity with the general shape of European languages. It can be guessedat pretty successfully even if you only know English or French. But how to guess the meaning of the