Subject I Go In Looking For A Book About | Subject Of Book I Come Out With |
---|---|
Amusement Parks | Madame Blavatsky |
The Taiping Rebellion | Muzak’s Contributions to World War II |
Niagara Falls | Containerized Cargo |
The Gemini Program | The History of the Accordion |
Oxygen | Alexander von Humboldt |
The Oort Cloud | Comic Strips |
Science Fiction, Criticism | The Cherry Sisters |
The Cherry Sisters | Lawns |
Dictionaries | Languages for Extraterrestrial Squirrels |
The Great Migration | Public Swimming Pools |
The Customs Wall of India | Wood |
Magnetism | The Grand Canyon |
PS: You would be shocked to know how much of this is not joking.
Languages for Extraterrestrial Squirrels?
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Akira Okrent’s In The Land Of Invented Languages — which is about the attempt to come up with new languages. It’s entwined in the ideas of making universal languages, and in organizing thesauruses and dictionaries. And part of the book is about people who create languages for the challenge of it.
One of the examples was creating a language speakable without using a voice box, and the creators developed a race of alien squirrels who’d be the creatures who spoke that. If I remember right, they even speak several families of alien-squirrel languages, with dialects and everything.
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