Marten van Valckenborch the Elder: The Tower of Babel
Credit: Wikimediacommons.org
In 1880 a Bavarian priest created a language that he hoped the whole world could use. He mixed words from French, German and English and gave his creation the name Volapük, which didn’t do it any favors. Worse, Volapük was hard to use, sprinkled with odd sounds and case endings like Latin.
It made a splash for a few years but was soon pushed aside by another invented language, Esperanto, which had a lyrical name and was much easier to master. A game learner could pick up its rules of usage in an afternoon.
But it didn’t matter. By the time Esperanto got out of the gate, another language was already emerging as an international medium: English. Two thousand years ago, English was the unwritten tongue of Iron Age tribes in Denmark. A thousand years after that, it was living in the shadow of French-speaking overlords on a dampish little island. No one […]
I thought we’d be reading each others’ minds long before then. How cool would that be. But failing that, i think a largely new slang language created online might be the thing. As usual, WSJ thinks too linearly.