Artificial spoken languages

A. Volapük.

1. The first influential artificial language was called Volapük, invented in 1879 by a Bavarian priest. It was based on Romance and Germanic, with 40 percent of the vocabulary English.

2. It had a brief vogue, but it was based on a mistaken sense that the difficulties of old languages were necessary rather than accidents. Volapük was difficult to learn, with a complex series of endings and umlauted vowels. Vola was “world” and pük was “speak.”

Volapük:

The Lord’s Prayer

O Fat obas, kel binol in süls, paisaludomöz nem ola...

“Oh our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…”

B. Esperanto.

1. In 1887, Ludovic Zamenhof, who had been struck by the animosity between cultures speaking Russian, Yiddish, German, and Polish as he was growing up in Bialystok, invented Esperanto, with a mostly Romance and Germanic vocabulary.

2. Esperanto has had some success. There are at least a million speakers, a literature, and translations, including the Bible, the Koran, and Hamlet.

3. Part of this success is the result of Esperanto’s user-friendly structure. It is strictly regular and has only 16 formal rules.

4. Nouns end in o, adjectives in a, adverbs in e, and verb infinitives in i. Thus, varma is “warm,” varmo is “warmth,” and varmi is “to warm up.” Present tense is indicated with the ending -as, past with -is, future with -os, conditional with –us, and imperative with -u. Suffixes create new words: koko is “rooster” and kokino is “hen”; arbo is “tree” and arbaro is “forest.”

5. Esperanto does have a bias toward European languages, such as assuming that a language must have a marker for direct objects or the conditional. Here is a sample, which you might probably be able to make sense of even without familiarity with the language:

Esperanto:

Simpla, fleksebla, praktika solvo de la problemo de universala interkompreno, Esperanto meritas vian seriozan konsideron.

“A simple, flexible, practical solution to the problem of universal understanding, Esperanto deserves your serious consideration.”

C. Solresol.

1. No discussion of artificial languages would be complete without a quick look at Solresol, invented in France in the early 1800s. It was based on musical pitches, which could be sung or whistled or played, as well as spoken. Related sequences of pitches were assigned to related words.

2. DORE was “I”; DOMI was “you”; DOREDO was “time”; DOREMI, “day”; DOREFA, “week”; DORESOL, “month”; DORELA, “year”; DORESI, “century”; MISOL was “good”; SOLMI was “bad.”