Philosophical language

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A philosophical language (also ideal or a priori language) is any constructed language that is constructed from first principles, like a logical language, but entails a stronger claim of absolute perfection or transcendent or even mystical truth rather than pragmatic principles. Philosophical languages were popular in Early Modern times, partly motivated by the goal of recovering the lost Adamic or Divine language.

In a philosophical language, words are constructed from a limited set of morphemes that are treated as "elemental" or fundamental. "Philosophical language" is more or less synonymous with "taxonomic language". 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.

A priori languages are constructed languages where the vocabulary is invented directly, rather than being derived from other existing languages (as with Esperanto or Interlingua).

Philosphical languages are almost all a priori languages, but not all a priori languages are philosophical. For example, J. R. R. Tolkien's Quenya and Sindarin, and Marc Okrand's Klingon, are both a priori but not philosophical: they are meant to seem like natural languages, even though they have no relation to any natural languages.

[edit] History

Work on philosophical languages was pioneered by Francis Lodwick (A Common Writing, 1647; 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). Those were systems of hierarchical classification that were intended to result in both spoken and written expression. In 1855, English writer George Edmonds modified Wilkins' system, leaving its taxonomy intact, but changing the grammar, orthography and pronunciation of the language in an effort to make it easier to speak and to read.^[1]

Gottfried Leibniz created lingua generalis in 1678, aiming to create a lexicon of characters upon which the user might perform calculations that would yield true propositions automatically; as a side-effect he developed binary calculus.

These projects aimed not only to reduce or model grammar, but also to the arrange all human knowledge into "characters" or hierarchies. This idea ultimately led to the Encyclopédie, in the Age of Enlightenment. Leibniz and the encyclopedists realized that it is impossible to organize human knowledge unequivocally as a tree, and so impossible 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 (For example, Ro).