Manhattan Publisher William Warder Norton rarely wears a hat, rarely publishes fiction. He wants books which will win scholarly praise. In Lancelot Hogben's Mathematics for the Million he had a best-seller (200,000 copies) which won the praise of such mathematicians as Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell. Last fortnight he published a Hogben-edited book which is equally scholarly and fit for laymen. It seeks to explain the evolution, anatomy, functioning, diseases and future of language.
The Loom of Language (W. W. Norton; $3.75) contains 692 pages of Swiss Philologist Frederick Bodmer's solid lore about meaningful human noise, enlivened by bright pictures and the "irresponsible or facetious remarks" of Editor Hogben, a former colleague of Bodmer at the University of Cape Town. The Loom is lively, but no cinch to read. Hogben recommends an old-fashioned as a preliminary.
Interglossa. A chapter on the evolution of the alphabet opens the book; a section on the need for an international auxiliary language closes it. Author Bodmer reviews the efforts to create such an auxiliary, beginning in 1661, when Aberdeen's George Dalgarno invented his Universal Character and Philosophical Language. He comes down to Basic English and its current competitors (Iret, Swensen, Aiken), in all of which Bodmer sees virtues. But he does not share Winston Churchill's complete enthusiasm for Basic. He favors a synthetic interlanguage rather than a simplified ethnic one. He and Hogben have drafted one which might be called Hogbod: Hogben calls it Interglossa and recently published a Penguin paperbook about it in England.* It has about 3,000 words, largely of Latin and Greek roots, and a simple syntax on the Chinese style. Intelligent high-school graduates, says Bodmer, might learn to write and speak it in far less time than is required to master English, French or German.
But The Loom's great interest for most readers lies not in its highly colored plans or prophecies, but in its homely texture of facts about language. Samples:
¶ "... old-fashioned pedagogues objected to that's me or it's him, because grammarians said that the pronoun after am or is also stands for the subject itself. They overlooked the fact that the authorized version of the Bible (Matthew 16:13) contains the question: 'Whom say ye that I am?' "
¶ "Some pedants who have forgotten their Bible lessons in Sunday school object to night starvation, iceman, sex appeal . . . without realizing that they follow such impressive leadership as the Knight Templar, Gladstone bag . . . Lady Mother. ... What is specially characteristic of Anglo-American is the large and growing group of words which can be verbs, nouns or adjectives. . . ." Water is a good example.
¶ "Anglo-American has its own peculiar roundabout method of interrogation. We no longer say: sayest thou? The modern form of the question is: do you say? . . . In a few years no one will object to did he ought? . . ."