When he was a student in linguistics and English at the University of California, Berkeley, David Peterson worked on a secret language for two months. It was called “Megdevi”. This was an amalgam of both his own name and Megan, his girlfriend at the time. Once satisfied with his new words and grammar rules, he presented it to her. It was his grand romantic gesture: a private language they could use to communicate only with each other.
“We didn’t use it”, the 33-year-old admits today, 15 years later. While Megan appreciated the effort, she did not want to learn the language. “It was far too much work.” Now married to someone else, he is more agitated about the technical shortcomings of Megdevi, describing it as “an abomination”. He laments: “It tried to be a bunch of different things at once and ended up being nothing.”
Back then he was under the illusion he was the first person to create a language just for himself. “I thought I’d cornered the market and there would be demand for invented languages.” Later, when he searched the internet, he saw there were legions of people just like him, picking holes in grammar rules and admiring the poetry of their new lexicons in chat rooms around the world.