Imaginary Languages Myths, Utopias, Fantasies, Illusions, and Linguistic Fictions

An exploration of the practice of inventing languages, from speaking in tongues to utopian schemes of universality to the discoveries of modern linguistics.

In Imaginary Languages, Marina Yaguello explores the history and practice of inventing languages, from religious speaking in tongues to politically utopian schemes of universality to the discoveries of modern linguistics. She looks for imagined languages that are autonomous systems, complete unto themselves and meant for communal use; imaginary, and therefore unlike both natural languages and historically attested languages; and products of an individual effort to lay hold of language. Inventors of languages, Yaguello writes, are madly in love: they love an object that belongs to them only to the extent that they also share it with a community.
 
Yaguello investigates the sources of imaginary languages, in myths, dreams, and utopias. She takes readers on a tour of languages invented in literature from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, including that in More’s Utopia, Leibniz’s “algebra of thought,” and Bulwer-Lytton’s linguistic fiction. She examines the linguistic fantasies (or madness) of Georgian linguist Nikolai Marr and Swiss medium Hélène Smith; and considers the quest for the true philosophical language. Yaguello finds two abiding (and somewhat contradictory) forces: the diversity of linguistic experience, which stands opposed to unifying endeavors, and, on the other hand, features shared by all languages (natural or not) and their users, which justifies the universalist hypothesis.
 
Recent years have seen something of a boom in invented languages, whether artificial languages meant to facilitate international communication or imagined languages constructed as part of science fiction worlds. In Imaginary Languages (an updated and expanded version of the earlier Les Fous du langage, published in English as Lunatic Lovers of Language), Yaguello shows that the invention of language is above all a passionate, dizzying labor of love. 

Marina Yaguello is Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the University of Paris VII.

Preface ix
Foreword: The Love of Language xi
Part I: From Myth to Utopia 1
1 From Austral to Astral Voyages: Foundational Myths 3
2 The Dreamer Dreaming: Profiles in Logophilia 17
3 The Dream of the Dreamer's Rib: Female Bodies, Male Science 29
Part II: In the Course of Time (The Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century) 37
4 The Unfinished Quest: The Search for an Ideal Language in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries 39
5 Science Against Fiction: The March Toward Positive Fact 53
6 Utopia in Action: The Ascent of International Auxiliary Languages 71
7 Myth at the Heart of Science: Modern Linguistic Theories as Reflected in Science Fiction 89
Part III: Two Poles of Linguistic Fantasy 109
8 The Emperor's New Clothes: The Case of Nikolai Marr 111
9 The Queen of the Night: Language and the Unconscious--Spiritualist and Religious Glossolalia 131
Part IV: The Defense and Illustration of Natural Languages 165
10 Sleeping Beauty at Rest: Artificial Languages, Prisons of the Mind 167
11 Opposing Forces 177
Appendix 1: Synoptic Table 183
Appendix 2: Selected Texts 187
Notes 283
Bibliography 307