All right, I'm back in the saddle this week. After the stress of last week's meetings, I took the weekend "off" to do more work on a new writing project. (I only popped into DA for a couple of quick checks. Wow, 300+ deviations in my inbox. I guess everyone else has been busy with art while I've been "working".) Though I didn't know it, and I'm not officially participating, this is apparently National Novel Writing Month [link] (and thanks to my friend Krazysidhe for pointing that out).


Recently I read an interesting non-fiction book that some of you might find amusing: In The Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent. It's a popular account of the history of language invention and the strange birds who pursue such things, in and out of closets. Huh? Well, you know, languages like Klingon (invented for the Star Trek franchise), Elvish (and other languages invented by Tolkein). It's a fascinating book, written in a popular sort of breezy style, that pretty much covers the history of language invention endeavors, all the way back to Hildegaard von Bingen. (Didn't know she was a closet language inventor, did you?) Most of the efforts in the last few centuries were attempts to create a "better" language or a "universal" language -- one that would facilitate better communication for all humanity or more logical communication for science, that sort of thing. The most successful of the genre is Esperanto [link] -- a language pretty much everyone has heard of, invented by a man named Zamenhoff in 1887, and which actually has a living community of speakers worldwide. Recently, of course, there have been more "art languages", such as Tolkein's languages and Klingon, invented not for the betterment of humanity per se, but as objets d'art, which as we here at DA know very well, do make humanity better and the world more wonderful at the same time. (One of my favorite "concept languages" is Laadan, [link] invented by Suzette Haden Elgin.)

Check out the author's web page: [link] which is well worth a little look, including chapter samples and a list of invented languages.

Someday, perhaps, I'll come out of the closet with my own modest efforts. Heh heh. Just joking, I only dabble, I'm not actually a connoisseur or monomaniacal adherent, though I may be a nut.