Marina Yaguello is Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the University of Paris VII.
"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
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