31 juillet 2026
What this book calls a language
The list of chapters holds a dead language, an invented one, creoles and a language without writing. That is not eclecticism: it is the argument.
Someone pointed out that my list was not homogeneous. True, and deliberate. A book that had taken only living national languages would have produced a world tour — the same chapter ten times over with different alphabets.
The limit cases do all the work. Latin asks what becomes of a language when nobody receives it as an inheritance. The creoles show a language being born, in front of us, in a generation or two. Esperanto tests the thesis backwards: if languages shape thought, what does a language built to favour nobody shape? Korean, an isolate with no cousins, removes comparison, which is my only method. And sign language removes the page.
Each of these cases breaks one of the assumptions the other nine chapters rest on. Breaking them is how you see what they were resting on.