The legend of the Babylonian pandemonium haunts scientists: they want to invent a unique, concise and convenient language that will be used by all of humanity. These attempts have not yet been crowned with success, however, in addition to the universal language, a large number of other universal ones have been invented.
Artificial languages
Constructed languages are specialized languages in which vocabulary, phonetics, and grammar have been specially designed to fulfill specific purposes. It is purposefulness that distinguishes artificial languages from natural ones. They are sometimes called fake languages. There are more than a thousand such languages, and new ones are constantly being created.
The reasons for creating an artificial language are: facilitating human communication (international auxiliary languages, codes), giving additional realism to fiction, linguistic experiments, ensuring communication in the fictional world, language games and having fun.
Classification of artificial languages
There are the following types of artificial languages:
• Programming languages and computer languages - for automatic processing of information using a computer.
• Information languages - used in various information processing systems.
• Formalized languages of science – intended for the symbolic recording of scientific facts and theories of mathematics, logic, chemistry and other sciences.
• International auxiliary languages (planned) – created from elements of natural languages and offered as an auxiliary means of interethnic communication.
• Languages of non-existent peoples created for fiction or entertainment purposes, for example: Elvish, invented by J. Tolkien, Klingon, invented by Mark Okrand for the fantasy series Star Trek, Na’vi, created for the movie Avatar.
• There are also languages that have been specifically designed to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligence. For example, linkos.
According to the purpose of creation, artificial languages can be divided into the following groups:
• Philosophical and logical – languages that have a clear logical structure of word formation and syntax: Lojban, Tokipona, Ilaksh.
• Auxiliary – designed for practical communication: Esperanto, Interlingua, Inter-Slavic, Lingua Franca Nova, Venusian.
• Artistic, or aesthetic – created for creative and aesthetic pleasure: Quenya and other fictional languages.
• Languages for setting up an experiment, for example, to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that the language spoken by a person limits consciousness, drives it into a certain framework).
By their structure, artificial language projects can be divided into the following groups:
• A priori – based on logical or empirical classifications of concepts: loglan, Lojban, ro, solresol, ifkuil, ilaksh.
• A posteriori – languages built mainly on the basis of international vocabulary: interlingua, occidental.
• Mixed – words and word formation are partly borrowed from non-artificial languages, partly created on the basis of artificially invented words and word-building elements: volapuk, ido, esperanto, neo.
According to the degree of practical use, artificial languages are divided into the following projects:
• Languages that have become widespread: Ido, Interlingua, Esperanto, Inter-Slavic. Such languages, like national ones, are called “socialized”; among the artificial ones they are united under the term “planned languages”.
• Projects of an artificial language that have a number of supporters, for example, Loglan (and its descendant Lojban), Slovio and others.
• Languages that have a single native speaker – the author of the language (for this reason, it is more correct to call them “linguistic projects” rather than languages).
Joint artificial languages
The Talos language, the cultural basis for the virtual state known as Talossa, was created in 1979. However, as interest in the Talos language grew, the development of guidelines and regulations for the language since 1983 has been taken up by the Committee on the Use of the Talos Language, as well as other independent enthusiastic organizations.
The Villnian language is based on Latin, Greek and Scandinavian languages. Its syntax and grammar are reminiscent of Chinese. The basic elements of this artificial language were created by one author, and its vocabulary was expanded by members of the Internet community.
Most artificial languages are created by one person, like Talos. But there are languages that are created by a group of people, for example, Interlingua, developed by the International Auxiliary Language Association, and Lojban, created by the Logical Language Group.
Collaborative development of artificial languages has become common in recent years as artificial language designers began to use Internet-based tools to coordinate design developments. NGL / Tokcir was one of the first internet collaborative designed languages whose developers used a mailing list to discuss and vote on grammatical and lexical design issues.
Later, The Demos IAL Project developed an International Auxiliary Language with similar collaborative methods. The languages Voksigid and Novial 98 were developed using mailing lists, but none of them has been published in final form.
New artificial languages
• Volapyuk
It is an international artificial socialized language, created in 1879 by the German Catholic priest Johann Martin Schleier. A version of the Volapuk is now in use, reformed by Ari de Jong in 1929 and presented to the general public in 1931.
Most of the roots in Volapuk are taken from English and French, but rearranged in accordance with restrictions on the composition of phonemes and the structure of the root, as well as in order to avoid homonymy (coincidence with existing roots).
In addition, Schleier strove to make the Volapyuk lexicon independent, devoid of the imprints of the languages-sources of words. As a result, many roots began to radically, sometimes beyond recognition, differ from their etymons. For example, the English world (“peace”) and speak (“to speak”) became vol and pük, which gave the name to the new language.
• Mezhslavyansky/ Inter-slavic
An auxiliary common Slavic language based on the linguistic material of the Old Slavic and living Slavic languages, intended for communication between their speakers, and, therefore, with its help, one can communicate without using separate Slavic national languages.
The Inter-Slavic language can be classified as a naturalistic artificial language. In fact, this is a modern functional continuation of the Old Slavic language, focused on understanding without prior learning by the native speaker of any of the languages of the Slavic group.
The grammar and vocabulary are based on constructions common to Slavic languages, have a simplified grammar with a minimum of exceptions, which allows a Slavic speaker (Slavophon) to easily master this language.
First of all, it is created to help travelers and people communicate personally and via the Internet without translating text into several languages, which allows a person to speak and write understandably for native speakers of almost any of the living Slavic languages, as well as to better understand texts in other Slavic languages.
• Esperanto
It is the most common planned language, created by the Warsaw linguist and optometrist Lazar (Ludwik) Markovich Zamenhof in 1887, after ten years of work. By 1878, his Lingwe uniwersala project was almost complete. On December 17, Zamenhof with his gymnasium friends celebrated the creation of the language.
Esperanto is intended to serve as a universal international language, the second (after the mother tongue) for every educated person. The use of a neutral (non-ethnic) and easy-to-learn language could bring interlanguage contacts to a qualitatively new level. In addition, Esperanto has great pedagogical (propaedeutic) value, that is, it greatly facilitates the subsequent study of other languages.
On one of the most popular sites for learning Esperanto – lernu.net – as of May 17, 2018, 272,622 participants were registered.
• Blissymbols
Blissymbolica, or bliss, is an international semantic language system consisting of several hundred basic graphic symbols and capable of replacing any natural and artificial language in writing. Each bliss symbol represents a concept; when combined together, bliss symbols can create new symbols that represent new concepts.
Blissymbolica differs from most major world writing systems in that the symbols do not correspond at all to any sounds used in human speech.
Since there was a “tourist boom” in the 1960s, many researchers were looking for new standard symbols that could be used as signs on roads, train stations, airports, etc. -or illegal plagiarism.
• Lingua de planet
It is an artificial language that belongs to the category of planned and a posteriori. The creation process was started in 2006 in St. Petersburg by a group of enthusiasts led by Dmitry Ivanov, and the basic version was published in 2010. The language was based on the most influential languages of the planet at the beginning of the 21st century: English, Arabic, Chinese, German, Russian, French, Hindi, etc.
The idea of the authors was to create a harmonious whole based on the most widespread and influential national languages of the planet. As a consequence of the main idea, both in the dictionary and in the grammar of the language there is a significant number of non-European word roots. According to these characteristics, Leaddepla belongs to the Mirlang class. In general, the language was created so that a significant part of the world’s population could find in it elements of similarity to their native language.
