Fascinating story. On NPR this morning I heard the tail end of On Point, the brilliantly mediated discussion show, where Tom was talking with a linguist/cognitive neuroscientist, Arika Okrent, about invented languages. She brought up Klingon and Esperanto, two of the more well-known invented languages from recent history. And as interesting as it is to try to understand why people would invent languages I haven't been able to stop thinking about how lovely it is that naturally occurring language is so consistently disjointed, obtuse, illogical and contradictory.
It is obvious why it would be advantageous to devise a flawlessly structured, immutable language but the fact that our very humanness hatched the strange and hopelessly complex communication standards and patterns we use without even thinking about it says more about what it means to be human than could ever be explained by the means allowed by any language.
Oh, and speaking of NPR, at my place of business we just got in an NPR shirt bearing a faded pair of headphones, the National Public Radio logo and then the somewhat snarky phrase "Get Smarter" across the bottom. I think my wardrobe is going to get one t-shirt larger very soon.
brandonpiercegeary
1 comment:
Esperanto. I'd never heard of it until now. I hate it. Ew ew ew ew. I would rather the official language be Mandarin or French or anything else that actually has a soul.
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