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The threshold
What this language does
Sixteen rules, no exceptions, and a system of affixes that makes words on demand: from bona (good) come malbona (bad), boneco (goodness), plibonigi (to improve). You produce words you never learned and everyone understands them — no natural language allows that.
The untranslatable
“To crocodile”: to speak your mother tongue in the middle of an Esperanto gathering. It took a constructed language to invent a verb for its own betrayal.
Hello
Saluton
in the accusative: not a word but the end of a sentence (“I wish you a greeting”)
Work in progress
The chapter that puts the book's thesis to the test. If a language shapes thought, what does a language built precisely to favour nobody shape? And can a language with no people and no territory produce literature? (It can — and we shall go and read it.)
Do you know this language?
Each chapter ends with a conversation with someone who lives in the language.
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