The most influential conlanger working today is David J. Peterson. Born in Long Beach, California, Peterson started to create languages in 2000, while he was a sophomore at U.C. Berkeley. His early projects were amusing experiments: X, a language that could only be written; Sheli, which included only sounds that he liked and was initially unpronounceable; and Zhyler, which he created because he enjoyed Turkish and which, in honor of the Heinz Company, had fifty-seven noun cases. In 2005, he graduated with a master’s degree in linguistics from U.C. San Diego. Two years later, he co-founded the Language Creation Society with nine other conlangers.
Peterson’s big break came in 2009, when HBO reached out to the Language Creation Society with a strange request. They were creating a television show (which would turn out to be “Game of Thrones”) and wanted someone to develop a language (which would emerge as Dothraki). Nothing like this had ever happened before, so the society organized a competition that would be judged by the show’s producers. After signing a nondisclosure agreement, applicants were invited to send in a phonetic breakdown of Dothraki, a romanized transcription system, six to eight lines of translated text, and any additional notes or translations.
The groundbreaking work that led to the homunculus was a major advance in our understanding of the structure and function of the brain, and the homunculus itself revolutionised the art of medical illustration. Yet modern research suggests that the homunculus is far more complex than originally thought, and some argue that it is incorrect and needs to be radically revised.
Plenty of novels and memoirs deal with anorexia, but few speak from a male point of view. Women are three times more likely to be anorexic than men, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, but the shelf of anorexia novels and memoirs would suggest an even greater gap. John Schumacher, a librarian and writer who has built a career of inspiring kids to love reading, puts Jake on that shelf in “Louder Than Hunger.” Schumacher, who goes by John Schu (because children call him Mr. Schu), has produced a harrowing and life-affirming novel-in-verse for young people.
At one level, this novel is an exciting adventure story that takes place in present day Australia. It has all the required elements: a chase, dangers overcome or avoided, the weak outwitting the strong, good triumphing over evil. Very satisfying stuff.
At another level, Donna M Cameron has taken this novel further by using it to give voice to those who warn of the dire consequences of our pollution of the planet. ‘Humans are bloody stupid,’ says Nia. ‘There’s people around the world already suffering, climate refugees already on the move. It’s easy to be positive if you’re ignorant and privileged.’ She foresees a future replete with ‘Super-storms, megafires… Killer virus, system collapse, hungry people with guns.’
Structured in short, chronologically ordered chapters, “The Freaks Came Out to Write” unfolds like the kind of epic, many-roomed party that invokes the spirit of other parties and their immortal ghosts. Romano escorts the reader from room to room, where a set of relevant players hold forth on the subject at hand. Here are Michael Smith and Lucian K. Truscott IV, hashing out how a line about the “forces of faggotry” made it into the latter’s firsthand account of the 1969 Stonewall protests. Over there, Vivian Gornick, Ellen Willis, and Susan Brownmiller discuss the double bind of writing about women’s issues for a paper that afforded them, in Gornick’s words, “the most astonishing amount of space and time,” despite a workplace blighted by what the critic Laurie Stone elsewhere calls “ordinary, old-school, male fuckheads.” The sort of men who would publish a letter like the one written by James Wolcott, who would later become a staff writer, belittling her 1971 piece “On Goosing,” about being sexually accosted in public. “God help us if she ever gets raped,” Wolcott wrote. “We will be buried under an avalanche of rhetoric.”
The book’s hero turns out to be the elderly, unassuming Mr Ngatari, the “wizard” of Bogor who holds the secret to successfully propagating the plant, and therefore securing its future. Pathless Forest closes with Thorogood and Filipino colleagues poring over his cryptic instructions, and praying over their own grafted vine. Whether or not a foul-smelling, magnificent Rafflesia eventually blooms, this is a gripping, Technicolor account of why their efforts matter.
On your way out the door this morning, you grabbed your Mexican-made jacket, your Italian watch, and your Brazilian coffee and headed for your Japanese vehicle while thinking Chinese take-out might be good tonight. It will, but first: “Language City” by Ross Perlin. You’re obviously a person of the world. Why not read like one?