Utopian language

The Utopian language is the language of the fictional land of Utopia, as described in Thomas More's Utopia. A brief sample of the constructed language is found in an addendum to More's book, written by his friend Peter Giles. Pretending to be factual, the book does not name the creator of the language; both More and Giles have been alternately credited, with Giles often thought to have designed the alphabet.

Grammar

Although some words in Utopian show different forms corresponding to different cases in the Latin translation, there is no evidence of a consistent relationship between form and meaning, as can be seen from the following comparison of the nominal, pronominal, and adjectival case forms:

	Singular	Plural
Nominative	Vtopos, Boccas, bargol, he Ūtopus, dux, ūna, ego
Accusative	hā, chamāan, āgrama, gymnosophon mē, insulam, civitātem, philosophicam	heman, paglōni mea, meliōra
Ablative	chama, gymnosophāon insulā, philosophiā
Dative		bōdamilōmin mortālibus
Genitive		māglōmi, baccan terrārum, omnium

There are only four verbs in the Utopian poem, and these also show no evidence of a correspondence between form and function:

	1st person	3rd person
Present	barchin, dramme impartiō, accipiō
Perfect	labarembacha expressī	polta fēcit

Writing system

Utopian has its own 22-letter alphabet, with letters based on the shapes of the circle, square, and triangle. These correspond almost exactly to the 23-letter Roman alphabet used in the 16th century, lacking only z. The letters f, k, q, and x, though assigned Utopian equivalents, do not occur in the given text. There are several errors in the text.

Examples

The only extant text in Utopian is a quatrain written by Peter Giles in an addendum to Utopia:
It is translated literally into Latin as:
This, in turn, is translated into English as follows:
Armed with these translations, it is possible to deduce the following vocabulary:
In accordance with 16th-century typographical custom, the letters V and u are a casing pair, not distinct letters: V was the capital form and u the lower case. V~u represented a consonant or vowel depending on position, similar to y in modern English. Analysis of the metre of the verse shows that the reader was expected to read Vtopos as 'Utopos', uoluala as 'volvala' and lauoluola as 'lavolvola'.
More's text also contains Utopian "native" terms for Utopian concepts.
Utopian has been assigned the codes and in the ConLang Code Registry.