Constructed language


A constructed language is a language for communication between humans but unlike most languages that naturally emerge from human interaction, is intentionally devised by a person or group for a particular purpose. The term constructed language is often shortened to conlang and, as a relatively broad term, it encompasses subcategories including: fictional, artificial, engineered, planned and invented languages. Conlangs may include aspects reminiscent of natural language including phonology, grammar, orthography, and vocabulary. Interlinguistics includes the study of constructed languages.

History

Ancient linguistic experiments

Grammatical speculation dates from classical antiquity; for instance, it appears in Plato's Cratylus in Hermogenes's contention that words are not inherently linked to what they refer to; that people apply "a piece of their own voice to the thing".
Athenaeus tells the story of two figures, Dionysius of Sicily and Alexarchus:
  • Dionysius of Sicily created neologisms like menandros for standard Greek parthenos; menekratēs for standard stulos; and ballantion for standard akon.
  • Alexarchus of Macedon, the brother of King Cassander of Macedon, was the founder of the city of Ouranopolis. Athenaeus recounts a story told by Heraclides of Lembos that Alexarchus "introduced a peculiar vocabulary, referring to a rooster as a 'dawn-crier', a barber as a 'mortal-shaver', a drachma as 'worked silver', and a herald as an aputēs . He once wrote something to the public authorities in Casandreia. As for what this letter says, in my opinion not even the Pythian god could make sense of it."
While the mechanisms of grammar suggested by classical philosophers were designed to explain existing languages, they were not used to construct new grammars. Roughly contemporary to Plato, in his descriptive grammar of Sanskrit, Pāṇini constructed a set of rules for explaining language, so that the text of his grammar may be considered a mixture of natural and constructed language.

Early constructed languages

A legend recorded in the seventh-century Irish work Auraicept na n-Éces claims that Fénius Farsaid visited Shinar after the confusion of tongues, and he and his scholars studied the various languages for ten years, taking the best features of each to create in Bérla tóbaide, which he named Goídelc the Irish language. This appears to be the first mention of the concept of a constructed language in literature.
The earliest non-natural languages were considered less "constructed" than "super-natural", mystical, or divinely inspired. The Lingua Ignota, recorded in the 12th century by St. Hildegard of Bingen, is an example, and apparently the first entirely artificial language. It is a form of private mystical cant. An important example from Middle-Eastern culture is Balaibalan, invented in the 16th century. Kabbalistic grammatical speculation was directed at recovering the original language spoken by Adam and Eve in Paradise, lost in the confusion of tongues. The first Christian project for an ideal language is outlined in Dante Alighieri's De vulgari eloquentia, where he searches for the ideal Italian vernacular suited for literature. Ramon Llull's Ars Magna was a project of a perfect language with which the infidels could be convinced of the truth of the Christian faith. It was basically an application of combinatorics on a given set of concepts. During the Renaissance, Lullian and Kabbalistic ideas were drawn upon in a magical context, resulting in cryptographic applications.

Perfecting language

Renaissance interest in Ancient Egypt, notably the discovery of the Horapollo#Hieroglyphica of Horapollo, and first encounters with the Chinese script directed efforts towards a perfect written language. Johannes Trithemius, in Steganographia and Polygraphia, attempted to show how all languages can be reduced to one. In the 17th century, interest in magical languages was continued by the Rosicrucians and alchemists. Jakob Boehme in 1623 spoke of a "natural language" of the senses.
Musical languages from the Renaissance were often tied up with mysticism, magic and alchemy, sometimes also referred to as the language of the birds. A non-mystic musical language was Solresol.

17th and 18th century: advent of philosophical languages

The 17th century saw the rise of projects for "philosophical" or "a priori" languages, such as:
  • Francis Lodwick's A Common Writing and The Groundwork or Foundation laid for the Framing of a New Perfect Language and a Universal Common Writing
  • Sir Thomas Urquhart's Ekskybalauron and Logopandecteision
  • George Dalgarno's Ars signorum, 1661
  • John Wilkins' An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language, 1668
These early taxonomic constructed languages produced systems of hierarchical classification that were intended to result in both spoken and written expression. Leibniz had a similar purpose for his lingua generalis of 1678, aiming at a lexicon of characters upon which the user might perform calculations that would yield true propositions automatically, as a side-effect developing binary calculus. These projects were not only occupied with reducing or modelling grammar, but also with the arrangement of all human knowledge into "characters" or hierarchies, an idea that with the Enlightenment would ultimately lead to the Encyclopédie. Many of these 17th–18th century languages were pasigraphies, or purely written languages with no spoken form or a spoken form that would vary greatly according to the native language of the reader.
Leibniz and the encyclopedists realized that it is impossible to organize human knowledge unequivocally in a tree diagram, and consequently to construct an a priori language based on such a classification of concepts. Under the entry Charactère, D'Alembert critically reviewed the projects of philosophical languages of the preceding century. After the Encyclopédie, projects for a priori languages moved more and more to the lunatic fringe. Individual authors, typically unaware of the history of the idea, continued to propose taxonomic philosophical languages until the early 20th century, but most recent engineered languages have had more modest goals; some are limited to a specific field, like mathematical formalism or calculus, others are designed for eliminating syntactical ambiguity or maximizing conciseness.

19th and 20th centuries: auxiliary languages

Already in the Encyclopédie attention began to focus on a posteriori auxiliary languages. Joachim Faiguet de Villeneuve in the article on Langue wrote a short proposition of a "laconic" or regularized grammar of French. During the 19th century, a bewildering variety of such International Auxiliary Languages were proposed, so that Louis Couturat and Léopold Leau in Histoire de la langue universelle reviewed 38 projects.
The first of these that made any international impact was Volapük, proposed in 1879 by Johann Martin Schleyer; within a decade, 283 Volapükist clubs were counted all over the globe. However, disagreements between Schleyer and some prominent users of the language led to schism, and by the mid-1890s it fell into obscurity, making way for Esperanto, proposed in 1887 by L. L. Zamenhof, and its descendants. Interlingua, the most recent auxlang to gain a significant number of speakers, emerged in 1951, when the International Auxiliary Language Association published its Interlingua–English Dictionary and an accompanying grammar. The success of Esperanto did not stop others from trying to construct new auxiliary languages, such as Leslie Jones' Eurolengo, which mixes elements of English and Spanish.
Loglan and its descendants constitute a pragmatic return to the aims of the a priori languages, tempered by the requirement of usability of an auxiliary language. Thus far, these modern a priori languages have garnered only small groups of speakers.
Robot Interaction Language is a spoken language that is optimized for communication between machines and humans. The major goals of ROILA are that it should be easily learnable by the human user, and optimized for efficient recognition by computer speech recognition algorithms.

Categorization

By purpose

Most constructed languages can be divided by purpose:
  • Engineered language, further subdivided into logical language, philosophical language and experimental language, devised for experimentation in logic, philosophy, or linguistics
  • International auxiliary language, devised for interlinguistic or international communication
  • Artistic language, devised to create aesthetic pleasure or humorous effect, including sub-categories such as secret languages, joke languages, and mystical languages
The boundaries between these categories are by no means clear, and a language could fall into more than one category. A logical language created for aesthetic reasons would also be classifiable as an artistic language. One created with philosophical motives could also be used as an auxiliary language.

''A priori'' and ''a posteriori''

An a priori constructed language is one with features not based on an existing language, and an a posteriori language is the opposite. This categorization, however, is not absolute, as many constructed languages may be called a priori when considering some linguistic factors, and at the same time a posteriori when considering other factors.
An a priori language has features that are invented or elaborated to work differently or to allude to different purposes. Some a priori languages are designed to be international auxiliary languages that remove what could be considered an unfair learning advantage for native speakers of a source language that would otherwise exist for a posteriori languages. Others, known as philosophical or taxonomic languages, try to categorize their vocabulary, either to express an underlying philosophy or to make it easier to recognize new vocabulary. Finally, many artistic languages, created for either personal use or for use in a fictional medium, employ consciously constructed grammars and vocabularies, and are best understood as a priori. Examples include:
;International auxiliary
;Experimental
;Artistic
;Community
An a posteriori language, according to French linguist Louis Couturat, is any constructed language whose elements are borrowed from or based on existing languages. The term can also be extended to controlled language, and is most commonly used to refer to vocabulary despite other features. Likewise, zonal auxiliary languages are a posteriori by definition.
While most auxiliary languages are a posteriori due to their intended function as a medium of communication, many artistic languages are fully a posteriori in design many for the purposes of alternate history. In distinguishing whether the language is a priori or a posteriori, the prevalence and distribution of respectable traits is often the key.
Examples of a posteriori languages:
;Artistic
;Controlled auxiliary
;International auxiliary
;Zonal auxiliary