Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind (Houghton Mifflin; 2008)

Some of these facts about human language have been recognized for at least two millennia. Plato, for example, worried in his dialogue Cratylus that "the fine fashionable language of modern times has twisted and disguised and entirely altered the original meaning" of words. Wishing for a little more systematicity, he also suggested that "words should as far as possible resemble things .. . if we could always, or almost always, use likenesses, which are perfectly appropriate, this would be the most perfect state of language."

From the time of twelfth-century mystic Hildegard of Bingen, if not earlier, some particularly brave people have tried to do something about the problem and attempted to build more sensible languages from scratch. One of the most valiant efforts was made by English mathematician John Wilkins (1614-1672), who addressed Plato's concern about the systematicity of words. Why, for example, should cats, tigers, lions, leopards, jaguars, and panthers each be named differently, despite their obvious resemblance? In his 1668 work An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, Wilkins sought to create a systematic "non-arbitrary" lexicon, reasoning that words ought to reflect the relations among things. In the process, he made a table of 40 major concepts, ranging from quantities, such as magnitude, space, and measure, to qualities, such as habit and sickness, and then he divided and subdivided each concept to a fine degree. The word de referred to the elements (earth, air, fire, and water), the word deb referred to fire, the first (in Wilkins's scheme) of the elements, deba to a part of fire, namely a flame, deba to a spark, and so forth, such that every word was carefully (and predictably) structured.

Most languages don't bother with this sort of order, incorporating new words catch-as-catch-can. As a consequence, when we English speakers see a rare word, say, ocelot, we have nowhere to start in determining its meaning. Is it a cat? A bird? A small ocean? Unless we speak Nahuatl (a family of native North Mexican languages that includes Aztec), from which the word is derived, we have no clue. Where Wilkins promised systematicity, we have only etymology, the history of a word's origin. An ocelot, as it happens, is a wild feline that gets its name from North Mexico; going further south, pumas are felines from Peru. The word jaguar comes from the Tupi language of Brazil. Meanwhile, the words leopard, tiger, and panther appear in ancient Greek. From the perspective of a child, each word is a fresh learning challenge. Even for adults, words that come up rarely are difficult to remember.

Among all the attempts at a perfect language, only one has really achieved any traction — Esperanto, created by one Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof, born on December 15,1859. Like Noam Chomsky, the father of modern linguistics, Zamenhof was son of a Hebrew scholar. By the time he was a teenager, little Ludovic had picked up French, German, Polish, Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, Latin, and Greek. Driven by his love for language and a belief that a universal language could alleviate many a social ill, Zamenhof aimed to create one that could quickly and easily be acquired by any human being.

Saluton! Cu vi parolas Esperanton? Mia nomo estas Gary.

[Hello. Do you speak Esperanto? My name is Gary.]

Despite Zamenhof's best efforts, Esperanto is used today by only a few million speakers (with varying degrees of expertise), one tenth of 1 percent of the world's population. What makes one language more prevalent than another is mostly a matter of politics, money, and influence. French, once the most commonly spoken language in the West, wasn't displaced by English because English is better, but because Britain and the United States became more powerful and more influential than France. As the Yiddish scholar Max Weinrich put it, "A shprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot" — "The only difference between a language and a dialect is an army and a navy."

With no nation-state invested in the success of Esperanto, it's perhaps not surprising that it has yet to displace English (or French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, or Arabic, to name a few) as the most prevalent language in the world. But it is instructive nonetheless to compare it to human languages that emerged naturally. In some ways, Esperanto is a dream come true. For example, whereas German has a half-dozen different ways to form the plural, Esperanto has only one. Any language student would sigh with relief.

Still, Esperanto gets into some fresh troubles of its own. Because of its strict rules about stress (the penultimate syllable, always), there is no way to distinguish whether the word senteme is made up of sent