[HerenIstarion]

I think the following may be found of interest:

Personally I am a believer in an 'artificial' language, at any rate for Europe - a believer, that is, in its desirability, as the one thing antecedently necessary for uniting Europe, before it is swallowed by non-Europe; as well as for many other good reasons - a believer in its possibility because the history of the world seems to exhibit, as far as I know it, both an increase in human control of (or influence upon) the uncontrollable, and a progressive widening of the range of more or less uniform languages. Also I particularly like Esperanto, not least because it is the creation ultimately of one man, not a philologist, and is therefore something like a 'human language bereft of the inconveniences due to too many successive cooks' - which is as good a description of the ideal artificial language (in a particular sense) as I can give.

The linguistic faculty - for making so-called articulate noises -is sufficiently latent in all for them (caught young as they always are) to learn, more or less, at least one language with merely or mainly practical object. It is more highly developed in others, and may lead not only to polyglots but to poets; to savourers of linguistic flavours, to learners and users of tongues, who take pleasure in the exercise. And it is allied to a higher art of which I am speaking, and which perhaps I had better now define. An art for which life is not long enough, indeed: the construction of imaginary languages in full or outline for amusement, for the pleasure of the constructor or even conceivably of any critic that might occur. For though I have made much of the secrecy of the practice of this art, it is an inessential, and an accidental product of circumstances. Individualistic as are the makers, seeking a personal expression and satisfaction, they are artists and incomplete without an audience. Though like this or any other society of philologists they may be aware that their goods have not a wide popular appeal or a market, they would not be averse to a competent and unbiassed hearing in camera.

This idea of using the linguistic faculty for amusement is however deeply interesting to me. I may be like an opium-smoker seeking a moral or medical or artistic defence for his habit. I don't think so. The instinct for 'linguistic invention' - the fitting of notion to oral symbol, and pleasure in contemplating the new relation established, is rational, and not perverted. In these invented languages the pleasure is more keen than it can be even in learning a new language - keen though it is to some people in that case -because more personal and fresh, more open to experiment of trial and error. And it is capable of developing into an art, with refinement of the construction of the symbol, and with greater nicety in the choice of notional-range

all the quotes from J.R.R.T.'s "Secret Vice"