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Dreaming of a Perfect Language
ResumeFor hundreds of years, intrepid dreamers, visionaries, madmen and women, cranks and idealists have been inventing languages. Some for fun — Klingon. Some for world peace — Esperanto. Some for a good yarn — Tolkien’s “elvish.”
And a whole lot more for all kinds of reasons — Frendo, Glosa, Rikchik, Toki Pona. It is a magnificent, persistent obsession.
This hour, On Point: The history of invented languages, and why it never ends.
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Joining us from Philadelphia is Arika Okrent, author of "In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language." She has a joint Ph.D. from the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Psychology’s Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience Program at the University of Chicago — and she has earned her first-level certification in Klingon.
You can read excerpts from several chapters of the book.
This program aired on June 1, 2009.