Philosophical language

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A philosophical language (also ideal or a priori language) is a special kind of constructed language. Philosophical languages are similar to logical languages in being derived from first principles, but they entail a stronger claim of absolute perfection or trancendent or even mystical truth rather than a pragmatic principles. Philosophical languges were popular in Early Modern times, partly motivated by the goal of recovering the lost Adamic or Divine language.

Pioneered by Francis Lodwick's A Common Writing (1647) and The Groundwork or Foundation laid (or So Intended) for the Framing of a New Perfect Language and a Universal Common Writing (1652), Sir Thomas Urquhart (Logopandecteision, 1652) George Dalgarno (Ars signorum, 1661) and John Wilkins (Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language, 1668) produced systems of hierarchical classification that were intended to result in both spoken and written expression. Gottfried Leibniz with lingua generalis in 1678 pursued a similar end, 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. 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 (e.g. Ro).

Vocabularies of oligosynthetic languages are made of compound words, which are coined from a small (theoretically minimal) set of morphemes. Suzette Haden Elgin's Láadan is designed to lexicalize and grammaticalize the concepts and distinctions important to women, based on muted group theory. Sonja Elen Kisa's Toki Pona is based on minimalistic simplicity, incorporating elements of Taoism.

[edit] References

[edit] See also

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../p/h/i/Philosophical_language.html"
In other languages