Babel's modern architects

Kisa, who is studying speech language therapy, tried to focus Toki Pona's vocabulary on basic, positive concepts.

"It has sort of a Zen or Taoist nature to it," Kisa said.

Tolkien liked to call invented language his "secret vice." He spent hours at the solitary hobby, designing grammars and modifying words from Latin, Finnish, Welsh and others for his languages.

Eventually, his languages needed tongues to speak them, and those speakers needed a place to live. And thus Middle-earth was born, with Tolkien's languages becoming the Sindarin and Quenya of the elves, the Khuzdul of the dwarves, and the Black Speech of the orcs.

People have been inventing languages since at least the 12th century, when the nun Hildegard of Bingen developed a rudimentary conlang she called Lingua Ignota, Latin for "unknown language."

No one knows its purpose. All that survives is a short passage and a list of 1,012 terms arranged from the highest form, "God," to the lowest, "cricket."

None of the invented languages has had much sticking power except Esperanto, which was created in the late 19th century by Polish doctor Ludovic Zamenhof.

His dream was to give humanity a common international language that would be simple to learn. Esperanto's vocabulary is small, word order does not matter, and there are no irregular verbs.

"Gi estas iom lingvo idealisma," said William B. Harris, director of the central office of the Esperanto League for North America in California. "It's somewhat of an idealistic language."

Today, as many as 2 million people speak Esperanto, which conlangers call an "auxlang," or auxiliary language. Among them are about 1,000 native speakers, who learned the language as children.

Learning is the easy part. Actually creating a language is a task only for the very tenacious. It took Kisa a year to put hers together, and her language was built to be basic.

It is not enough to simply replace existing words with invented ones. To a conlanger, such a construction would be a mere code.

The conlanger considers many factors, starting with the sound of the language.

Linguists call it phonaesthetics; Germans call it Sprachgefühl -- "speech feeling."

Tricky to define, it's that certain quality that makes French the language of love, and German the language that "makes you want to conquer Poland," said John Quijada, a Sacramento website developer and creator of Ithkuil, who attended an invented language conference at UC Berkeley this summer.