Arika Okrent received a joint Ph.D. in the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Psychology's Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience Program at the University of Chicago. She has also earned her first-level certification in Klingon. She lives in Philadelphia.
"Hats off to Okrent, who expertly exposes the history, culture, and
preoccupations of this insular tribe who live among us. She rescues
language inventors, or conlangers, from the oddball
bin--utopianists all, they're the first biotechnologists, trying to
leapfrog evolution and improve human life. They'll thank her but
everyone else will, too, for finally making sense of the
conlangers' discontents." --Michael Erard, author of" Um... Slips,
Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean"
"A lively, informative, insightful examination of artificial
languages--who invents them, why, and why most of them fail. I
loved this book."--Will Shortz, Crossword Editor, " New York
Times"
"Linguist Okrent explores some of the themes and shortcomings of
900 years worth of artificial languages. ...Okrent gamely
translates these languages with unspeakably hilarious results, and
riffs on the colorful eccentricities of their megalomaniacal
creators. Fortunately, her own prose is a model of clarity and
grace; through it, she conveys fascinating insights into why
natural language, with its corruptions, ambiguities and arbitrary
conventions, trips so fluently off our tongues." -- "Publishers
Weekly," starred review
"Arika Okrent is a linguist whose fascination with the "faded
plastic flowers" in the "lush orchid garden of languages" is
recounted to delightful, often comic effect in "In the Land of
Invented Languages...".Okrent's style is eminently suited to her
approach, which is at once serious and playful, exemplified by her
marvelous, snappy opening sentence: "Klingon speakers ... inhabit
the lowest possible rung on the geek ladder."-- "Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette
"
"The author...examines a variety of would-be languages and related
philosophical tenets (there are no pure ideas, all signs depend on
conventions) in a rigorously linguistical way. And yet her book is
a pleasure to read. It shows how language systems connect, or don't
connect, with people."--"New
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