Pure meaning, pure poetry – this idea seems to worry and spur on people throughout the centuries. It is the driving force behind the invention of languages like Esperanto, Volapük or Blissymbolics. Clemens J. Setz traces the anecdotes behind these constructed languages in The Bees and the Invisible, in keeping with the motto: »Tell the best story you know, as truthfully as possible.‹

And this story features, among others, Charles Bliss and his ideographic language and children with disabilities who are able to express themselves for the first time using Blissymbolics. It tells how Clemens J. Setz studies Volapük one summer long and develops his own language. It deals with probably the only person who ever lived whose mother tongue is Volapük and with the language of Talossa, constructed for the micronation of the same name founded by a teenager in his bedroom in 1979. With Klingon and High Valyrian, a language created for the TV series Game of Thrones. And with Esperanto, the biggest success story in the world of constructed languages, whose speakers were persecuted under Stalin and Hitler and with the aid of which a young, blind Russian became a poet, adventurer and anarchist global scholar. It is always the strange mixing of deep existential crisis and invention of language that Setz detects and that fascinates him – and so this book is also the personal story of the wordsmith Clemens J. Setz.

Till Eulenspiegel