Marina Yaguello - Imaginary Languages: Myths, Utopias, Fantasies, Illusions, and Linguistic Fictions

Marina Yaguello

translated by Erik Butler

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2022 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Originally published as Les langues imaginaires: Mythes, utopies, fantasmes, chimres et fictions linguistiques Editions du Seuil, 2006

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Yaguello, Marina, author. | Butler, Erik, 1971- translator.

Title: Imaginary languages : myths, utopias, fantasies, illusions, and linguistic fictions / Marina Yaguello ; translated by Erik Butler.

Other titles: Langues imaginaires. English

Description: Cambridge : The MIT Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021030652 | ISBN 9780262046398 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Imaginary languages. | Languages, Artificial. | Glossolalia. | Language and languages in literature. | Language and

languagesOrigin.

Classification: LCC P120.I53 Y3313 2021 | DDC 499/.99dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021030652

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publication supported by a grant from The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven as part of the Urban Haven Project

Imaginary Languages is a new, thoroughly revised and expanded version of a book published in 1984, Les fous du langage: Des langues imaginaires et de leurs inventeurs (translated in 1991 as Lunatic Lovers of Language: Imaginary Languages and Their Inventors). When the original edition went out of print, the title remained unavailable for years. However, the subjectwhich had received little attention when I started my researchcontinued to garner interest among scholars and in the broader public. Notable works that subsequently appeared include La linguistique fantastique (1985), a collection of essays edited by Sylvain Auroux; Umberto Ecos La ricerca della lingua perfetta nella cultura europea (1993), which was based on a seminar at the Collge de France (and translated into English in 1995 as The Search for the Perfect Language); Paolo Albani and Buonarroti Berlinghieros Aga magra difra: Dizionario delle lingue immaginarie (1994); and Aux origines des langues et du langage (2005), a volume edited by Jean-Marie Hombert.

The same period witnessed an unexpected boom in the practice of inventing languages across a wide range of cultural spheres. Spiritualism is evidently experiencing a resurgence, and Pentecostalism is on the rise, with the attendant phenomena of speaking in tongues (glossolalia) or in languages unknown to speakers beforehand (xenoglossia). Largely thanks to the Internet, a great revival of interest has greeted artificial languages meant to facilitate international communication. Nor do enthusiasts and advocates of Esperanto have the last word: inventing languages has become a popular pastime with a market of its own (including specialized software and countless websites) and a dedicated fan basearound forty thousand people in the United States alone. Some of these languagesLojban, for instancehave been designed to illustrate linguistic theories.

In turn, television and film have offered any number of fictions featuring an invented linguistic component. The cult series Star Trek has Klingon; there are rumored to be some quarter of a million speakers who use this language to communicate in secret and separate insiders from outsiders. J. R. R. Tolkiens trilogy The Lord of the Rings was adapted for the screen between 2000 and 2003; the films grant a prominent role to Elvish tongues. And lest we forget, Anthony Burgess made up the language of cavemen for Jean-Jacques Annauds Quest for Fire (1981).

Finally, on more academic terrain (particularly in Russia and in California), theorists interested in the origin of language have turned back to monogenetic schemes of explanation, rejecting the dogmas and preconceptions of the past and enlisting new insights from the fields of genetics and paleontology. In a word, as a new century and a new millennium dawn, logophiliathe love of languagesis alive and well. I was very sorry Id been unable to explore such developments in the original book, so I took advantage of this new edition to add material and modify its organization. Hence the new title.

M. Y., September 30, 2005

Why write one book and not another at a particular time of life? Without any narcissism, Id say that a certain number of questions, encounters, coincidences, and circumstances gave rise to the work at hand. At least in part, I had to write it.

First came the coincidenceswide readings on a range of topics, which hardly seemed destined to yield a book of my own. They included science fiction novels like Ian Watsons The Embedding, which has a plot based on the Chomskyan postulate of a universal structure common to all languages, as well as Romanian author Vladimir Colins Babel, which connects the primal tongue of Bab-ili (or Babylon) and a cosmic language of the future. Other books were J. R. R. Tolkiens The Lord of the Rings, featuring languages constructed along the lines of those depicted in seventeenth-century journeys of imagination, and, of course, George Orwells 1984 and Anthony Burgesss 1985, in which linguistic engineering controls how people think and standardized language is meant to erase social differences.

The last two titles, in particular, brought to mind the well-known arguments advanced by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf about how language shapes thought. I also couldnt help but think of the theories of Nikolai Marr in this context. A book by the Russian semiologist Mikhail Bakhtin that I had translated and almost all that anyone knew about him was that his speculations about the origin of language and desire to eradicate class languages had prevented Soviet linguistics from evolving until 1950the year Stalin declared that the emperor had no clothes.

Marrs linguistic madness recalled another memory: Raymond Queneaus Children of Clay. The protagonist of the novel sets out to compile an encyclopedia of writers given the epithet of literary madmen or reasoning madmen. Passages from their works are embedded throughout the text. I rushed to the Bibliothque Nationale and, to my great surprise, discovered that Queneau was referring to actual books. These mad inventors had really lived; a number of them even claimed to have tracked down the primitive origins of human language. Later, I learned from Paul Braffort, Queneaus collaborator in the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littrature potentielle, or Workshop of Potential Literature) that the author had collected the material for a university thesis that he never completed; the only remaining traces are published in this work of fiction.

Strolling one day among the book sellers in the Latin Quarter, I got my hands on La grammaire logique and Les origines humaines by Jean-Pierre Brissettwo of the finest examples of literary madness to address the origins of language.