Contributors wanted f or book on "Invented Languages"

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:18 AM -0400 7/22/05, James A. Landau wrote:
>A source you probably have not suspected is the US Army, or more exactly
>whoever it is who creates the standardized tests given all new
>soldiers.  When I
>was drafted (August 1969) one of the numerous multiple-choice tests I took
>during my first week in the Army was called IIRC "the Army Language Aptitude
>Test".
>
>For this test there was an invented language with a vocabulary of, I can't
>recall exactly but at most a few dozen words, but with an elaborate grammar of
>the inflectional type---I recall it as somebody's rather sadistic combination
>of the more annoying features of Russian and Latin grammars.  The
>multiple-choice questions were all in this invented language.
>
>Jack Vance wrote a science fiction novel "The Languages of Pao" ABOUT the
>deliberate invention of languages.  I don't recall that any samples
>were given of
>the invented languages, but the plot turned on the existence of these new
>languages.
>
>Some science fiction writers have had fun, after specifying the languages
>used in the worlds they create, creating a few words or even sentences in this
>language.  None that I am aware of have gone nearly as far as Tolkien, though.
>The examples I am thinking of are Heinlein's "Glory Road" and a short story by
>C. M. Kornbluth whose title I cannot remember but which I think was in his
>collection "A Mile Beyond the Moon".  Marion Zimmer Bradley in her Darkover
>stories has a few short examples of the language spoken on Darkover,
>but it is not
>an invented language but rather a variation of Spanish.
>
>        - Jim Landau

Also:
Didn't Suzette Haden Elgin (who is a linguist with a PhD from U. C.
San Diego and a much-published author of both linguistics texts and
science fiction novels) construct a few languages along the way?

Larry