The Art of Language Invention

I spent a lot of time waiting in doctors offices last week, and I needed something to save me from boredom- and anxiety-induced insanity. What better choice could I have made than The Art of Language Invention by David J. Peterson?

Back when I was a kid, one of my favorite books was Dougal Dixons After Man: a Zoology of the Future. As an exercise in speculative biology, the book is responsible for maybe 90% of my enthusiasm about evolution, anatomy, and animal behavior. The fact that I know anything about those subjects at all is because I was enthusiastic for them, which puts Dixon to blame for most of what I know about the natural world. When I read The Art of Language Invention, the same thing happened with linguistics.

You cant create a good made-up language without knowing about real languages. Through the lens of his invented languages and his experience using them, Peterson educates the reader about the forces that shape the way we speaka practical gift wrapped in shiny packaging. Like all good speculation, The Art of Language Invention educates and inspires as much as it entertains.

And it IS entertaining, if for no other reason than the cat and onion jokes.

Go read it. I expect to see your new language on my desk by Monday.

While very technical, The Art of Language Invention is a really good book on the more advanced concepts of creating a fictional language, and the structure of real-life language.
I will say this – if you don’t know at least a little bit about some basic language principles, like the IPA, syllable structure, and word structure, you might get lost. Even as a big fan of conlanging and language, some bits were very confusing. Read this AFTER you are at least a little bit familiar with basic conlanging stuff.

I came across this title while reviewing a fascinating game in Kickstarter called “Dialect.” When I was a teenager, I discovered Tolkien and, through Tolkien, the idea of constructed languages (“conlanging”). I was hooked, and my ambition was to become a linguist. While those ambitions faded over time, the interests did not, and this book kept me reading from front to back. The author’s sense of humor as well as his enthusiasm for the work is infectious. The details he provides give a fantastic glimpse into the workings of language and writing, as well as a fascinating history of the art form.

If youve ever thought about creating a language, but didnt know where to start, or you were intimidated or overwhelmed by the masses of terminology or denseness of other books, start here. If youve been creating languages for decades and just need a fresh perspective, a good laugh, or some commiseration, check this out. If youre a linguistics student struggling with the basics, and your Intro to Linguistics reading is so dry you cant choke it down, this could easily pass as a funny, entertaining, and fairly complete Linguistics 101 textbook, with some conlanging on the side.

The information provided (that I could get to) is incredible, especially for world building, but the Kindle version is full of formatting errors (or at least my version was). Pages missing, pages repeated, and other oddities throughout the first quarter of the book (I couldn’t get past that for frustration, but I will go back and try again, because the gems in there are awesome). It was incredibly difficult to go through to get to the meat of the book. As a linguist and a polymath, I was champing at the bit to read this one, but the constant errors in pagination made it a slog. I hope the errors get corrected so that I can get to the good stuff, because Mr. Peterson’s prose and knowledge certainly bear looking into.