I didn’t know about the tests until Mark told me. I had been casually studying the Klingon dictionary, intending to familiarize myself with the grammar from a clinical distance. But the idea of a test stirred something in me. A feeling every school-loving egghead who ever got a secret thrill from a spelling quiz knows. I was going to take that test and pass it. To get ready, I began the KLI’s online postal course. I completed the first lesson and e-mailed it in. It came back with the words that sealed my fate: “Perfect—first time I’ve seen someone get every question right. Keep it up!” I felt the drug of overachievement rush through my veins. I didn’t want to pass that test anymore. I wanted to ace it.
A History of Failure
I did take the test, and (I’m rather proud to say) I did ace it. That achievement, however, is not the beginning of the story I wish to tell with this book, but the end of it. The true significance of what I saw and participated in at the conference, the lessons the Klingon phenomenon can teach us about how language does and doesn’t work (trust me on this), can be fully appreciated only in the context of the long, strange history of language invention, a history that encompasses more than nine hundred languages created over the last nine hundred years, a history of human ambition, ingenuity, and struggle that, in a way, culminates with Klingon. You can get a brief overview of this history in appendix A, where I have provided a list of five hundred of these languages.
The earliest documented invented language is the Lingua Ignota of Hildegard von Bingen, a twelfth-century German nun. Scholars have long puzzled over the purpose of this language, presented in a manuscript as a list of about a thousand words, with Latin and German translations.