Portal:Constructed languages/Language of the month
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[edit] Archive of Language of the month items
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[edit] November 2005
Ido is a constructed language, arguably the second-most used International Auxiliary Language in the world. It was developed in the early 1900s, and retains a small following today, primarily in Europe. It is largely based on Esperanto, created by L. L. Zamenhof. Ido first appeared in 1907 as a result of a desire to reform perceived flaws in Esperanto that its supporters believed to be a hindrance in its propagation as an easy-to-learn second language. Many other reform projects appeared after Ido: examples such as Occidental and Novial appeared afterwards but have since faded into obscurity. At present Ido, along with Esperanto and Interlingua are the only auxiliary languages with a large body of literature and a relatively large speaker base. The name of the language likely traces its origin to the Ido pronunciation of "I.D." (from "International Delegation", see below) or the word ido, "descendant (of Esperanto)". Find out more...
[edit] December 2005
Quenya is one of the languages spoken by the Elves in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. It was the language developed by those non-Telerin Elves who reached Valinor (the "High Elves") from an earlier language called Common Eldarin. Of the Three Houses of the Elves, the Ñoldor and the Vanyar spoke slightly different, though mutually intelligible, dialects of Quenya (Quenya and Vanyarin Quenya (also Quendya), respectively). The language was also adopted by the Valar, who made some new introductions into it from their own original language, though these are more numerous in the Vanyarin dialect than the Ñoldorin one. This is probably the case because of the enduringly close relationship the Vanyar had with the Valar. The Third House, the Teleri, spoke a different, closely related language, Telerin, although this was by some seen as a dialect of Quenya, which is untrue in a historic perspective but plausible in a linguistic one; the languages do not share a common history, but are very much alike. Find out more...
[edit] January 2006
Ithkuil (Iţkuîl) is an extremely complicated constructed human language created by American linguist John Quijada between 1978 and 2004.
In the author's description of Ithkuil: "A Philosophical Design for a Hypothetical Language", it appears as a cross between an a priori philosophical language and a logical language. The creator attempts to show how human languages could or may function. Ithkuil is designed to convey large amounts of linguistic information using fewer and shorter words than naturally-evolved languages; most sentences in other languages will be shorter when translated into Ithkuil. Find out more...
[edit] February 2006
The Klingon language or Klingonese (tlhIngan Hol in Klingon) is a constructed language (an artistic language created by Marc Okrand for Paramount Pictures and spoken by Klingons in the fictional Star Trek universe). He designed the language with Object Verb Subject (OVS) word order to give an alien feel to the language. Klingon is similar to Native American languages in several aspects. The basic sound (and a very few words) were first devised by James Doohan for Star Trek: The Motion Picture; the film marked the first time the language had been heard on screen, all previous appearances of the Klingons being in English (through the in-universe use of universal translators).
Klingon is sometimes referred to as Klingonese (most notably in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Trouble with Tribbles"), but among the Klingon-speaking community this is often understood to refer to another Klingon language that is described in John M. Ford's Star Trek novels as Klingonaase. Find out more...
[edit] March 2006
Lingua Franca Nova is an auxiliary constructed language created by Dr. C. George Boeree of Shippensburg University, Pennsylvania. It is based on French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. Lingua Franca Nova is usually abbreviated to LFN and has also been referred to as Europijin and Creol. The language is phonetically spelled, using 21 letters of either the Latin or Cyrillic alphabets. The grammar is inspired by the Romance creoles. Like most creoles, LFN has a highly simplified grammar system. However, this system does not mean that one is not able to be as expressive in LFN as one could be in any other language. Find out more...
[edit] April 2006
Brithenig is an invented language, or constructed language ("conlang"). It was created as a hobby in 1996 by Andrew Smith from New Zealand, who also invented the alternate history of Ill Bethisad to "explain" it.
Brithenig was not invented to be used in the real world, like Esperanto, nor to provide detail to a work of fiction, like J.R.R. Tolkien's Elvish tongues or Klingon from the Star Trek scenarios. Rather, Brithenig started as a thought experiment to create a Romance language that might have evolved if Latin had displaced Old Celtic as the spoken language of the people in Great Britain. The result is a sister language to French, Spanish and Italian, albeit a test-tube child, which differs from them by having sound-changes similar to those that affected the Welsh language, and words that are borrowed from Old Celtic and from English throughout its pseudo-history. Find out more...
[edit] May 2006
Lojban (IPA [ˈloʒban], official full name Lojban: a realization of Loglan) is a constructed language which was created by the Logical Language Group in 1987 based on the earlier Loglan, with the intent to make the language more complete, usable, and freely available. It has the ISO 639 language code jbo.
The language itself shares many of the features and goals of Loglan; in particular, Lojban:
- Has a grammar that is based on predicate logic, and is capable of expressing complex logical constructs precisely.
- Has no irregularities or ambiguities in spelling or grammar, so it can be easily parsed by computer.
- Is designed to be as culturally neutral as possible.
- Is simple to learn and use compared to many natural languages.
- Possesses an intricate system for effectively communicating contextual emotion.
While the initial goal of the Loglan project was to investigate the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, the active Lojban community has additional goals for the language. Find out more...
[edit] June 2006
Lingua Ignota (Latin for unknown language) was a language described by Hildegard of Bingen, abbess of Rupertsberg, in the 12th century, apparently for mystical purposes. Hildegard used an alphabet of 23 letters, the litterae ignotae, to go with the language.
Hildegard partially described the language in a work titled Lingua Ignota per simplicem hominem Hildegardem prolata, which survived in two manuscripts, both dating to ca. 1200, the Wiesbaden Codex and a Berlin MS. The text is a glossary of 1011 words in Lingua Ignota, with glosses mostly in Latin, sometimes in German; the words appear to be a priori coinages, mostly nouns with a few adjectives. Grammatically it appears to be a partial relexification of Latin, that is, a language formed by substituting new vocabulary into an existing grammar. Find out more...
[edit] July 2006
Novial [nov-, new + IAL, International Auxiliary Language] is a constructed language devised by Professor Otto Jespersen, a Danish linguist who had previously been involved in the Ido movement. He devised Novial to be an international auxiliary language (IAL), which would facilitate international communication and friendship, without displacing anyone's native language.
It features a vocabulary based largely on the Germanic and Romance languages, and a grammar heavily influenced by English.
The first introduction of Novial was in Jespersen's book An International Language in 1928, with an update in his dictionary, Novial Lexike, published two years later. Further modifications were proposed in the 1930s, but with Jespersen's death in 1943, it became dormant, although in the 1990s, with the revival of interest in artificial language brought on by the Internet, many people rediscovered Novial. Find out more...
[edit] August 2006
Toki Pona is a constructed language which was first published online in mid-2001. It was designed by Canadian translator and linguist Sonja Elen Kisa (b. 1978), of Toronto.
Toki Pona is a minimal language. Like a pidgin, it focuses on simple concepts and elements that are relatively universal among cultures. Kisa designed Toki Pona to express maximal meaning with minimal complexity. The language has 14 phonemes and 118 words. It is not designed as an international auxiliary language but is instead inspired by Taoist philosophy, among other things.
The language is designed to shape the thought processes of its users, in the style of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. This goal, together with Toki Pona's deliberately restricted vocabulary, have led some to feel that the language, whose name literally means "simple language", "good language", or "goodspeak", resembles George Orwell's fictional language Newspeak. Find out more...
[edit] September 2006
Solresol is an artificial language, devised by a Frenchman, François Sudre, beginning in 1817. He published his major book on it, Langue musicale universelle, in 1866, though he had already been publicizing it for some years. Solresol enjoyed a brief spell of popularity, reaching its pinnacle with Boleslas Gajewski's 1902 publication of Grammaire du Solresol.
Solresol words are made up of only seven different syllables. These syllables can be represented in a number of different ways -- as musical notes of different pitch, as spoken syllables (based on solfege, a way of identifying musical notes), with colours, symbols, hand gestures etc. Thus, theoretically Solresol communication can be done through speaking, singing, flags of different color, etc. — even painting. Find out more...
[edit] October 2006
The Verdurian language is a constructed language (or conlang) designed by Mark Rosenfelder. It is the most developed of the languages featured in Rosenfelder's constructed world of Almea and is spoken by the inhabitants of Verduria, a country in that planet. The language's name for itself is soa Sfahe, "the speech". The language has its own alphabet.
The language has a grammar and vocabulary that borrows deliberately from a variety of European languages, particularly French, Russian, Latin, and German. Find out more...
[edit] November 2006
The constructed language Interlingua is an international auxiliary language (IAL) published in 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA). It is the most successful naturalistic constructed language. In appearance, Interlingua combines a Romance vocabulary with a simplified Romance grammar, and can thus be seen as a modernized and simplified Latin (or Vulgar Latin to be more precise). It is sometimes called IALA Interlingua to distinguish it from the other uses of interlingua.
The expansive movements of science, technology, trade, diplomacy, and the arts, combined with the historical dominance of the Greek and Latin languages have resulted in a large common vocabulary among Western languages. Interlingua uses a mostly rigid procedure to extract and standardize the most widespread word (or, occasionally, words) for a concept found in a set of control languages (English, French, Italian and Spanish/Portuguese, with German and Russian as secondary references). The resulting vocabulary corresponds closely with the Neolatin element in the International Scientific Vocabulary. Find out more...
[edit] December 2006
Baronh is an artificial language created by Japanese science fiction author Morioka Hiroyuki and used in Crest of the Stars and Banner of the Stars. The name Baronh means "language of the Abh".
The Baronh language is derived from the ancient Japanese language, spoken till the beginning of the ninth century and recorded in Kojiki, Man'yōshū and other ancient documents. It is not precisely the ancient language itself, but a reconstructed one which is named Takamagahara language after the mythological heaven in Kojiki. In Crest of the Stars, Japanese revolutionists seeking to remove foreign influence from the Japanese language created their own "purified" version, which removed borrowed words and expressions and revived ancient ones. It was these revolutionists who established the colony that created the Abh, giving them their language. Find out more...
[edit] January 2007
Esperanto is the most widely spoken constructed international language. The name derives from Doktoro Esperanto, the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof first published the Unua Libro in 1887. The word itself means 'one who hopes'. Zamenhof's goal was to create an easy and flexible language as a universal second language to foster peace and international understanding.
Although no country has adopted the language officially, it has enjoyed continuous usage by a community estimated at between 100,000 and 2 million speakers. The 2005 edition of the Ethnologue estimates that there are about a thousand native speakers.
Today, Esperanto is employed in world travel, correspondence, cultural exchange, conventions, literature, language instruction, television (Internacia Televido) and radio broadcasting. Some state education systems offer elective courses in Esperanto; there is evidence that learning Esperanto is a useful preparation for later language learning. Find out more...
[edit] February 2007
Wenedyk (in English: Venedic) is a constructed language of the naturalistic kind, created by the Dutch translator Jan van Steenbergen. It is used in the fictional Republic of the Two Crowns (based on the Republic of Two Nations), in the alternate timeline of Ill Bethisad. Officially, Wenedyk is a descendant of Vulgar Latin with a strong Slavic admixture, based on the premise that the Roman Empire incorporated the ancestors of the Poles in their territory. Less officially, it tries to show what Polish would have looked like if it had been a Romance instead of a Slavic language. Find out more...
[edit] March 2007
Láadan is a constructed language created by Suzette Haden Elgin in 1982 to test the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis for women, specifically to determine if Western natural languages were better suited for expressing the views of men than women. The language was included in her Native Tongue science fiction series. Láadan contains a number of words that are used to make unambiguous statements that include how one feels about what one is saying. According to Elgin, this is designed to counter male-centred language's limitations on women, who are forced to respond "I know I said that, but I meant this". Find out more...
[edit] April 2007
Teonaht is a constructed language that has been developed since 1962 by science fiction writer and University of Rochester English professor Sarah Higley, under the pseudonym of Sally Caves. It is spoken in the fantasy setting of the Teonim, a race of polydactyl humans who have a cultural history of worshipping catlike deities.
Teonaht uses the Object Subject Verb (OSV) word order, which is rare in natural languages. An interesting feature of Teonaht is that the end of the sentence is the place of greatest emphasis, as what is mentioned last is uppermost in the mind. The language has a "Law of Detachment" whereby suffixes can be moved to the beginnings of words for emphasis and even attach onto other words such as pronouns.
Teonaht is a highly elaborated language, and many consider it one of the finest examples of an artistic language since the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. It is often cited, like Verdurian, as an example of the genre in articles on the world of Internet-hosted amateur conlanging. Find out more...
