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Imaginary Languages by Marina Yaguello
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Imaginary Languages

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Imaginary Languages by Marina Yaguello
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Apr 19, 2022 | ISBN 9780262046398

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Praise

“Expanding on a study published in France in 1984, a noted linguist surveys the history of language invention, an enterprise undertaken by centuries of “lunatic lovers of language,” for reasons philosophical, political, artistic, and arcane. Yaguello recounts the utopian impulses behind projects like Esperanto and Volapük; speculative fiction’s explorations of linguistic theory; and the search, rooted in Judeo-Christian mythology, for an original, universal tongue. The mind-bending nature of the book’s subject, which offers seemingly infinite paths of inquiry, could overwhelm, but Yaguello relates the material with gusto, offering an idiosyncratic, illuminating perspective on the development of Western thought.”
the New Yorker

Table Of Contents

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

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