On artificial languages: From Logopandecteision to Lolcat
In 1653, a Scottish wag named Sir Thomas Urquhart wrote a book on his plans for the creation of an artificial language by the name of Logopandecteision. The book consists in great parts of a praise of the language's 66 unparalleled excellences, and of rants against those whose neglect and wrongdoings prevent him from publishing this perfected language. Sir Urquhart promises twelve parts of speech: each declinable in eleven cases, four numbers, eleven genders (including god, goddess, man, woman, animal, etc.); and conjugable in eleven tenses, seven moods, and four voices. He even declares that any number may be expressed in this language by a single word, in fact so concisely that the number of sand-grains required to fill Earth and Heaven would be expressible by two letters.
You might have guessed it: The whole project was a joke - sometimes so elaborate as to be taken by his contemporaries as in earnest. It may have been a parody on serious projects like Francis Lodwick's "The Groundwork or Foundation laid (or So Intended) for the Framing of a New Perfect Language and a Universal Common Writing" which appeared one year before. I remember that the creation of "philosophical languages" were en vogue at this time. I remind on "Ars signorum" by George Dalgarno (1661), "Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language" by John Wilkins (1668) and the "Lingua Generalis" by Gottfried Leibniz (1678). Note that the binary calculus was a by-product of the Lingua Generalis.
I understand this will not have been the last attempts to create a language which is not based on an existing language. To enumerate just some examples, there are Solresol (1866), a language which consists of musical notes, Ro (1904), a language using a category system where for example all colors have the form "rofo_",Ladan (1982), a language aimed at expressing the views of women, and Arahau (2006), a compact language where each vowel designates a noun and consonants designate grammatic formants.
Those are "philosophical" or "a priori" languages, which means that their words are not derived from an existing language, they are usually based on philosophical principles. As consequence, they are very difficult to learn. In contrast, there are "a posteriori" languages which have been derived from existing languages and are often designed as international languages. Known examples are Volapk (1880), Esperanto (1887), Latino Sine Flexione (1903) and Interlingua (1951). The idea is to create a language for communication between people from different nations who do not share a common natural language.
(Which does of course not solve the problem, it only shifts it: What shall two people do who don't share an artificial language either? Besides, there have always been natural languages which established as "international languages". In my time, this role is played by Latin, in your time it's English. (Except in France where the international language is French.) Furthermore, I do believe that a constructed language can never reach the depth, richness and vitality of a naturally grown language, not to speak of the thousand little imperfections which make natural languages so lovable. French, for example, has an amusingly complicated way of designating numbers. When French people say "four-twenty-ten-seven" they mean "97" (=4x20+10+7). German, on the other side, contains giant words like "Donaudampschiffartsgesellschaftskapitnsmtze", which comes from the fact that this language is delivered with a word construction kit, and that every German can build new words of arbitrary length just by glueing several words together. Languages are like people : It's the imperfections which make them so lovable. Learning a "perfect" manmade language would make me feel like sleeping with a "perfect" woman manmade of ivory, glass, ebony and gold. Maybe it's perfect - but it's dead...)
A third type of manmade languages are artistic languages like Thomas Moores Utopian Language or Jonathan Swifts Liliputian. Your era's examples are Orwell's Newspeach, Tolkien's Elvish languages or the extraterrestrial language Klingon. A variant of this is Grammelot, not a real language but a gibberish used in many variations by comedians since the time of the Comedia del Arte, sometimes to avoid censure. I understand that it's also used in your time in electrical games (to reduce recording costs), for example Simlish.
A last type of constructed languages are joke languages. Examples are Oou, a language consisting only of vowels which are written as punctuation marks, or Europanto, a language with a hodge-podge vocabulary from many European languages. Maybe we should add the initially mentionned Logopandecteision to this list. And let's not forget one of the most popular joke languages of your era : Lolspeak, the supposed language of fictional speaking felines known as "Lolcats". It seems that what appears like a messy variant of baby talk has actually a grammar. Strange time you are living in...
I hope you appreciated this little excursion through the world of artificial languages. I'm neither a language expert nor a prophesier, so I had to rely a lot on Wikipedia to write this entry. So better verify the parts you intend to put into your linguistics thesis.
Now it's your turn, dear reader: Do you speak any artificial languages? Do you have intelligence of other interesting artificial languages I should have mentionned? Did you notice any errors? And what's your opinion on languages like Esperanto?
In 1653, a Scottish wag named Sir Thomas Urquhart wrote a book on his plans for the creation of an artificial language by the name of Logopandecteision. The book consists in great parts of a praise of the language's 66 unparalleled excellences, and of rants against those whose neglect and wrongdoings prevent him from publishing this perfected language. Sir Urquhart promises twelve parts of speech: each declinable in eleven cases, four numbers, eleven genders (including god, goddess, man, woman, animal, etc.); and conjugable in eleven tenses, seven moods, and four voices. He even declares that any number may be expressed in this language by a single word, in fact so concisely that the number of sand-grains required to fill Earth and Heaven would be expressible by two letters.
You might have guessed it: The whole project was a joke - sometimes so elaborate as to be taken by his contemporaries as in earnest. It may have been a parody on serious projects like Francis Lodwick's "The Groundwork or Foundation laid (or So Intended) for the Framing of a New Perfect Language and a Universal Common Writing" which appeared one year before. I remember that the creation of "philosophical languages" were en vogue at this time. I remind on "Ars signorum" by George Dalgarno (1661), "Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language" by John Wilkins (1668) and the "Lingua Generalis" by Gottfried Leibniz (1678). Note that the binary calculus was a by-product of the Lingua Generalis.
I understand this will not have been the last attempts to create a language which is not based on an existing language. To enumerate just some examples, there are Solresol (1866), a language which consists of musical notes, Ro (1904), a language using a category system where for example all colors have the form "rofo_",Ladan (1982), a language aimed at expressing the views of women, and Arahau (2006), a compact language where each vowel designates a noun and consonants designate grammatic formants.
Those are "philosophical" or "a priori" languages, which means that their words are not derived from an existing language, they are usually based on philosophical principles. As consequence, they are very difficult to learn. In contrast, there are "a posteriori" languages which have been derived from existing languages and are often designed as international languages. Known examples are Volapk (1880), Esperanto (1887), Latino Sine Flexione (1903) and Interlingua (1951). The idea is to create a language for communication between people from different nations who do not share a common natural language.
(Which does of course not solve the problem, it only shifts it: What shall two people do who don't share an artificial language either? Besides, there have always been natural languages which established as "international languages". In my time, this role is played by Latin, in your time it's English. (Except in France where the international language is French.) Furthermore, I do believe that a constructed language can never reach the depth, richness and vitality of a naturally grown language, not to speak of the thousand little imperfections which make natural languages so lovable. French, for example, has an amusingly complicated way of designating numbers. When French people say "four-twenty-ten-seven" they mean "97" (=4x20+10+7). German, on the other side, contains giant words like "Donaudampschiffartsgesellschaftskapitnsmtze", which comes from the fact that this language is delivered with a word construction kit, and that every German can build new words of arbitrary length just by glueing several words together. Languages are like people : It's the imperfections which make them so lovable. Learning a "perfect" manmade language would make me feel like sleeping with a "perfect" woman manmade of ivory, glass, ebony and gold. Maybe it's perfect - but it's dead...)
A third type of manmade languages are artistic languages like Thomas Moores Utopian Language or Jonathan Swifts Liliputian. Your era's examples are Orwell's Newspeach, Tolkien's Elvish languages or the extraterrestrial language Klingon. A variant of this is Grammelot, not a real language but a gibberish used in many variations by comedians since the time of the Comedia del Arte, sometimes to avoid censure. I understand that it's also used in your time in electrical games (to reduce recording costs), for example Simlish.
A last type of constructed languages are joke languages. Examples are Oou, a language consisting only of vowels which are written as punctuation marks, or Europanto, a language with a hodge-podge vocabulary from many European languages. Maybe we should add the initially mentionned Logopandecteision to this list. And let's not forget one of the most popular joke languages of your era : Lolspeak, the supposed language of fictional speaking felines known as "Lolcats". It seems that what appears like a messy variant of baby talk has actually a grammar. Strange time you are living in...
I hope you appreciated this little excursion through the world of artificial languages. I'm neither a language expert nor a prophesier, so I had to rely a lot on Wikipedia to write this entry. So better verify the parts you intend to put into your linguistics thesis.
Now it's your turn, dear reader: Do you speak any artificial languages? Do you have intelligence of other interesting artificial languages I should have mentionned? Did you notice any errors? And what's your opinion on languages like Esperanto?
VIEW 19 of 19 COMMENTS
Pour ce qui est de mon entourage, il vou le dirait, en gnral, ils sont vite sols, oui, mais dans l'autre sens du terme.....
On m'a rarement dit quelque chose d'aussi profond et beau!
Plein de bisous doux pour vous