*My goodness.
*It gets really weird when Internet strangers start sending him eager fan mail.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/12/24/121224fa_fact_foer
(...)
"By the nineteenth century, the dream of constructing a philosophical language capable of expressing universal truths had given way to the equally ambitious desire to unite the world through a single, easy-to-learn, politically neutral, auxiliary language. Solresol, the creation of a French musician named Jean-François Sudre, was among the first of these universal languages to gain popular attention. It had only seven syllables: Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, and Si. Words could be sung, or performed on a violin. Or, since the language could also be translated into the seven colors of the rainbow, sentences could be woven into a textile as a stream of colors.
Esperanto, which was invented in the eighteen-eighties by L. L. Zamenhof, a Jewish doctor from Białystok, was by far the most successful of a hundred or so universal languages invented in the nineteenth century. At its peak, it had as many as two million speakers, and produced its own rich literature, including more than fifteen thousand books.
"Two world wars and the ascent of global English punched an irreparable hole in the Esperantists’ dream of creating a universal language. Like every other attempt to undo the tragedy of Babel, Esperanto was ultimately a failure. And yet, by some estimates, Esperanto still has more speakers than six thousand of the languages spoken around the world today, including approximately a thousand native speakers (among them George Soros) who learned it as their first language.
"John Quijada was born in Los Angeles to first-generation Mexican-Americans and grew up in the white-flight suburb of Whittier, where he attended Richard Nixon’s junior high school. His father, a Yaqui Indian, was a printer who made the sale signs that hung in grocery-store windows. At night, he painted landscapes.
Quijada’s entry into artificial languages was inspired by the utopian politics of Esperanto as well as by the import bin at his local record store, where as a teen-ager, in the nineteen-seventies, he discovered a concept album by the French prog-rock band Magma. All the songs were sung in Kobaïan, a melodic alien language made up by the group’s eccentric lead singer, Christian Vander.
" “For someone to actually get onstage and unapologetically sing these gargantuan, operatic, epic songs, it made me realize, shit . . . I’ve got to do this,” Quijada told me. At fifteen, he created Mbozo, the first of his many invented languages, “a relexified generic Romance/Germanic hybrid with African-like phonology.” Another one, Pskeoj, had a vocabulary that was pounded out randomly on a typewriter.
"Quijada enrolled at California State University, Fullerton, when he was eighteen, planning to become a linguistic anthropologist. “I dreamed of becoming the guy who goes into the Amazon and learns a language that no outsider can speak,” he said. He spent hours in the library poring over descriptions of the world’s most exotic languages, and becoming a connoisseur of strange grammars.
" “I had this realization that every individual language does at least one thing better than every other language,” he said. For example, the Australian Aboriginal language Guugu Yimithirr doesn’t use egocentric coördinates like “left,” “right,” “in front of,” or “behind.” Instead, speakers use only the cardinal directions. They don’t have left and right legs but north and south legs, which become east and west legs upon turning ninety degrees. Among the Wakashan Indians of the Pacific Northwest, a grammatically correct sentence can’t be formed without providing what linguists refer to as “evidentiality,” inflecting the verb to indicate whether you are speaking from direct experience, inference, conjecture, or hearsay.
"Inspired by all the unorthodox grammars he had been studying, Quijada began wondering, “What if there were one single language that combined the coolest features from all the world’s languages?” Back in his room in his parents’ house, he started scribbling notes on an entirely new grammar that would eventually incorporate not only Wakashan evidentiality and Guugu Yimithirr coördinates but also Niger-Kordofanian aspectual systems, the nominal cases of Basque, the fourth-person referent found in several nearly extinct Native American languages, and a dozen other wild ways of forming sentences...."
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/12/24/121224fa_fact_foer#ixzz2ODgAWIUG
