You may ask - why speak in invented languages, because no one understands them? That's the point! Suppose you need to talk about something very important on the phone (or, more recently, on Skype), and you definitely don’t want your competitors to overhear you, much less the intelligence services. No, they will eavesdrop, but they probably won’t understand a word. All you need is for your partner at the other end of the line (on the other side of the monitor) to also know this language. Plus, learning any new language is a great workout for the brain. And for this you don’t need to go to language courses - just patience and the Internet - thanks to the Omniglot website.

The Utopian Language of Thomas More

I hope from your history lessons you remember who Thomas More was? A professor, writer, lawyer, diplomat and politician who lived at the turn of the 15th-16th centuries and disliked English society so much that he came up with a country of prosperity long before Marx-Engels-Lenin, and called it “Utopia”, which also means “the best place.” " and "missing place". The voluminous work was published in 1516 and was written in Latin. However, Thomas More envisioned a new language, unlike anything before, as fundamental to the new ideal society.

Tolkien's Tengwar (Elvish) language

Well, don't tell me that you've never been thrilled with Liv Tyler speaking Sindarin Tengwar fluently. This is the language of Valarin, Telerin, Sindarin, a bunch of other places, and even the Dark Language of Mordor. When you master the language perfectly and you have “our Charm” in your hands, that is, the Ring of Omnipotence, do not rush to destroy it. It might come in handy.

Kirt - Tolkien's dwarven language

And, if we started talking about Middle-earth, then we must not forget about the numerous people of gnomes. The population of Moria successfully integrated the Kirt alphabet (or Kertas Daeron) into their Khuzdul language, because... well, you know, dwarves don’t write - they carve words in stone. In principle, there is an assumption that Tolkien almost exactly “rolled” the kirth from the Celtic runes. So, at the same time, learn the language that is still spoken in some places in Ireland.

Futurama Alien Language

If you think that the strange icons that appear in many Futurama episodes are just a set of symbols that came into the head of Matt Groeneng, then you are very mistaken. Just as, until recently, we were mistaken. Cartoon aliens even have punctuation marks. This means that this language is the future :)

Klingon language from Star Trek

How can you make a list of fictional languages ​​and not mention Klingon? This language has gained such popularity that there are a certain number of people in the world who speak it fluently. Moreover, they translate into Klingon Shakespeare, and even the Bible. The only inconvenience with Klingon is that, most likely, in the “cunning schools” all over the Earth, just in case, they are already teaching it.

Aurek Besh - the language of the Jedi

Despite the fact that Aurek Besh first appeared only in the film Return of the Jedi, I can assume that the Jedi have been speaking it for many centuries.

Kryptonian - Superman's language

Kryptonian (or Kryptonese) is spoken, not surprisingly, on Krypton, Clark Kent's home planet. If you decide to learn this language, do not forget about Superman's curse, and also think about the fact that when you end your post on Facebook (VKontakte, Twitter, etc.) with a double exclamation mark, you are actually writing the letter “a”.

Language of the Ancients from Stargate

If you believe the SG-1 series, then this is the language the Ancients wrote and spoke - the people who created (including) earthly civilization millions of years ago. Although, it should be noted that the appearance of this font, we actually owe to an old Czech poster, on the basis of which it was created by artist Boyd Godfrey for the pilot episode of Stargate Atlantis.

Dragon runes

The language of dragons is considered the most ancient of all that existed on Earth. Dragons are generally taciturn creatures, but if they began to speak, they expressed themselves exclusively in this language. People in the Middle Ages often used Draconic as a universal language of magic. Now it’s difficult to check exactly how it sounds. And all thanks to Saint George, who destroyed, they say, the last living dragon on the planet.

Matoran - LEGO bionic language

Did you know that Lego has its own language? Well, at least it was used in the Bionicle series. If your children know it (and they do!), there is a reason to learn Matoran in order to understand what secret notes your offspring exchange.

You may ask why! There are many reasons, for example, you need to talk about something very important on the phone (or via Skype), and you definitely don’t want your competitors to overhear you, and even more so the intelligence services. That is, they will be able to eavesdrop, but they are unlikely to understand.

Another reason is that learning any new language is a great workout for the brain.

1. Klingon language from Star Trek

Perhaps it should be put in first place. This language has gained such popularity that there are a certain number of people in the world who speak it fluently. Moreover, Shakespeare and even the Bible are translated into Klingon.

Thomas More - professor, writer, lawyer, diplomat and politician, who lived at the turn of the 15th-16th centuries and disliked English society so much that he came up with a country of prosperity long before Marx-Engels-Lenin, and called it “Utopia”, which means both "best place" and "missing place". The voluminous work was published in 1516 and was written in Latin. However, Thomas More envisioned a new language, unlike anything before, as fundamental to the new ideal society.

3. Tolkien's Tengvar (Elvish) language
This is the language of Valarin, Telerin, Sindarin, a bunch of other places, and even the Dark Language of Mordor. When you master the language perfectly and you have the “Charm” in your hands, that is, the Ring of Omnipotence, do not rush to destroy it. It might come in handy.

And, if we started talking about Middle-earth, then we must not forget about the numerous people of gnomes. The population of Moria successfully integrated the Kirt alphabet (or Kertas Daeron) into their Khuzdul language, because... well, you know, dwarves don’t write - they carve words in stone. In principle, there is an assumption that Tolkien almost exactly “rolled” the kirth from the Celtic runes. So, at the same time, learn the language that is still spoken in some places in Ireland.

If you think that the strange icons that appear in many Futurama episodes are just a set of symbols that came into the head of Matt Groeneng, then you are very mistaken. Cartoon aliens even have punctuation marks.

Despite the fact that Aurek Besh first appeared only in the film "Return of the Jedi", I can assume that the Jedi have been speaking it for many centuries.

Kryptonian (or Kryptonese) is spoken, not surprisingly, on Krypton, Clark Kent's home planet. If you decide to learn this language, don't forget about Superman's curse.

8. Language of the Ancients from Stargate
If you believe the SG-1 series, then this is the language the Ancients wrote and spoke – the people who created (including) earthly civilization millions of years ago. Although, it should be noted that we actually owe the appearance of this font to an old Czech poster, on the basis of which it was created by artist Boyd Godfrey for the pilot episode of Stargate Atlantis.

The language of dragons is considered the most ancient of all that existed on Earth. Dragons are generally taciturn creatures, but if they began to speak, they expressed themselves exclusively in this language. People in the Middle Ages often used Draconic as a universal language of magic. Now it’s difficult to check exactly how it sounds. And all thanks to Saint George, who destroyed, they say, the last living dragon on the planet.

Did you know that Lego has its own language? Well, at least it was used in the Bionicle series.

Daedric can be easily learned by those who still play role-playing games. In particular, Elder Scrolls.

Professor Tolkien knew a lot about non-existent universes. “It’s easy to invent a green sun,” he said, “it’s more difficult to create a world in which it would be natural.” For him, a philologist, a specialist in Old Germanic and Old English literature, the main element of such naturalness was, of course, the languages ​​of the peoples and creatures living in the fictional world. It was the construction of artificial languages ​​that was the real passion of the ancestor of fantasy, and over his long life Tolkien invented several dozen of them. He saw the heroes and events described in his famous books as simply the background against which languages ​​exist and develop. “It is more likely that ‘stories’ were composed in order to create a world for languages, rather than vice versa,” the writer explained. “In my case, the name comes first, and then the story.” I would actually prefer to write in Elvish.” A great variety of fictitious languages, “artlangs”, have been invented in literature and cinema. Professional linguists also took part in the creation of some, but few can boast of such meticulous elaboration as Tolkien’s. The professor developed extremely detailed grammar and writing, and most importantly, history: unlike most other artificial languages, we know about Tolkien’s how they changed over time.

Our expert is Alexander Piperski, Candidate of Philological Sciences, Associate Professor at the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian State University for the Humanities, author of the book “Constructing Languages: From Esperanto to Dothraki”, which is being prepared for publication by the Alpina Non-Fiction publishing house.

Sindarin

John Tolkien, "The Lord of the Rings"

Slender linguistic diversity is perhaps the main secret of the amazing authenticity of the world described by Tolkien. The author invented at least fifteen Elvish languages ​​alone, and after his death an almost finished draft of the book “Lammas” was published, stylized as the scientific work of a linguist from Middle-earth. A fictional author, discussing the dialects of his fictional world, attributes their origin to Valarin, the language of local deities, and divides them into three broad families. Oromean includes Avarin, Quenya, Telerin, Sindarin and other languages ​​of the Elves, as well as Rohan and most of the languages ​​of men. The Aulean family includes Khuzdul and other languages ​​of the gnomes, and the Melkian family includes the “black speech” of orcs and other evil creatures. Tolkien's most famous languages ​​were Elvish Sindarin and Quenya, which reflected his passion for the languages ​​of northern Europe. Morphology - the structure of words - for Quenya was borrowed from Finnish. The phonology of Sindarin - the structure of the sound structure - inherits from Welsh. Alexander Piperski:— Tolkien borrowed a lot from natural languages. Thus, the proto-Elven plural ending -ī fell away during the development of Sindarin, causing the alternation of vowels at the base of the word: brannon (“lord”) and brennyn (“gentlemen”), urug (“orc”) and yryg (“orcs”). This is how the irregular forms of the English plural arose: man (“man”) and men (“men”) - comes from the Proto-Germanic *mann- and *manni-. Foot (“leg”) and feet (“legs”) - from *fōt- and *fōti-. This alternation is even more common in Welsh.

Dothraki

George R.R. Martin and David Peterson, Game of Thrones

The fantasy world of the A Song of Ice and Fire novel series is thought out in almost as much detail as Tolkien's. Languages ​​are also mentioned, and for effect the characters speak a few words, either in the rough language of the Dothraki horsemen or in "high" or "low" Valyrian, reminiscent of the classical and vernacular versions of Latin or Arabic. But when it came to filming the Game of Thrones series, HBO turned to the Society for the Creation of Languages, and the competition for the development of Valyrian and Dothraki was won by the young linguist David Peterson.

Peterson did not have much source material: no more than thirty Dothraki words can be found in Martin’s books, and a significant part of them are proper names. This gave the linguist a lot of scope for imagination. And he began with the very word “Dothraki” (dothraki), raising it to the verb dothralat, “to ride.” Already from it the word dothrak, “horseman” is formed, the plural of which is dothraki. Alexander Piperski:— The grammar of the Dothraki language turned out to be quite simple, although not without its sophisticated features. For example, nouns are divided into two broad classes: animate and inanimate, and information about animateness is unpredictable. In general, large and active living things and phenomena, as well as active parts of the body, will be animate, and other concepts will be inanimate, but there are many exceptions. As in the Russian language, the declension of nouns depends on animation. Thus, in Dothraki, inanimate nouns do not change in number, but animate ones do. The inanimate word yetto can be translated as "frog" or "frogs", but shiro is only "scorpion" because it has a separate plural form - shirosi, "scorpions".

Newspeak

George Orwell, "1984"

The language of the fictional totalitarian state of Oceania is heavily modified and “coarsened” English, emphasizing the heavy atmosphere of dystopia. In Newspeak there remains an extremely meager set of adjectives, which generally happens with natural languages. For example, in Igbo, which is spoken by about 20 million people in Nigeria, there are only eight adjectives: big, small, old, new, dark, light, good and bad. By the way, in Newspeak such a combination is impossible. Many antonymous pairs in it are formed using the negative prefix un- (“not”). The writer gives examples of the words good (“good”) and ungood (“bad”, “not good”). In addition, Newspeak borrowed its love of abbreviations and complex words from the Soviet-era language. For us, who confidently use words like “foreman” (work manager) or “head teacher” (head of education), this love is easy to understand. Alexander Piperski:— The main feature of Orwellian Newspeak is, of course, its vocabulary. It consists of three layers, dictionaries A, B and C. Dictionary A includes the most common, everyday words, the number of which is reduced to a minimum. Dictionary C contains special technical terms. The most interesting thing is Dictionary B. It contains complex words specially constructed for political needs: for example, goodthink (“good thinking”) and its derivatives. Dictionary B is difficult to translate into ordinary language - “old tongue”. For example, the phrase Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc (“Old Thinkers do not gut Ingsoc”) means “Those whose ideas were formed before the Revolution do not wholeheartedly perceive the principles of English socialism.”

Klingon

Gene Roddenberry and Marc Okrand, Star Trek

David Peterson's direct predecessor can be called Marc Okrand, the creator of the Vulcan and Klingon languages ​​for the Star Trek series. It is worth saying that the humanoid, but extremely warlike inhabitants of the planet Klingon received a very suitable language: at the same time similar to the earthly and unusually terrifying. This is one of the most sophisticated artificial languages, it is supported by the Microsoft Bing translation system, and the Klingon Language Institute, which has united enthusiasts, publishes classic literature in translations into this artlang. However, Mark Okrand, in the preface to the authoritative “Klingon Dictionary,” writes that the Klingons themselves, although they are proud of their language, prefer English to communicate with strangers. Alexander Piperski:— The Klingon language is especially famous for its phonetics. It contains two dozen consonants, and it seems that this is not a lot - but among them there are very rare sounds, for example tlh (a voiceless, pronounced “tl”) and Q (pronounced very deep in the mouth “kh”). But even more unusual for earthly languages ​​is the word order in Klingon sentences: object - predicate - subject. For example, the phrase “puq legh yaS” is translated as “the officer sees the child,” and “yaS legh puq” is “the child sees the officer.” Of all the possible orders of subject, predicate and object, this is the second rarest. In the World Atlas of Language Structures, it is represented in only 11 languages ​​out of 1,377 in the sample, seven of which are common in South America.

Na'vi

James Cameron and Paul Frommer, Avatar

Linguist Paul Frommer was brought in to work on Avatar before the script was completed. So the blue-skinned, three-meter tall humanoids of the planet Pandora, who appeared on the screens four years later, were already speaking with might and main in their own language, numbering about a thousand words. Unlike Russian, the Na'vi language has an agglutinative structure: in our country, the ending in the word “wide” already contains information about gender and number, but in Na’vi (as well as Tatar, Japanese and other agglutinative languages) for each detail you will need to use a separate element (formant), as if saying “wide - one - she.”

But the order of words in Na’vi sentences is familiar to us: subject, predicate, object. The number system invented for this language is very unusual. In addition to singular and plural - as in Russian - as well as dual - as in Old Russian - there is also a triple number, as in some languages ​​of Oceania. Nantang ("viperwolf") becomes menantang ("two viperwolves"), pxenantang ("three viperwolves") and only then into aynantang ("many viperwolves").

Alexander Piperski:— The Na'vi language uses a three-part sentence construction: the subject (subject) of a transitive verb is indicated in one way, the object (object) in another, and the subject of an intransitive verb in a third. For example, the sentence Nantang-ìl frìp tute-t (“The snakewolf bites the man”): here the subject of the transitive verb (“snakewolf”) has the exponent -ìl, and the object of the transitive verb (“man”) attaches the exponent -t. In the sentence Nantang-Ø hahaw - "The viper-wolf is sleeping" - the subject of the intransitive verb is marked with the zero ending -Ø. In Russian, the subject of transitive and intransitive verbs is marked the same way, and “snakewolf” has the same form in both Russian sentences. Languages ​​with a tripartite construction are rare, but they exist: this is how, for example, the North American Indian language Nez Perce is structured.

Constructed languages- specialized languages ​​in which vocabulary, phonetics and grammar have been specially developed to implement specific purposes. Exactly focus distinguishes artificial languages ​​from natural ones. Sometimes these languages ​​are called fake, made-up languages. invented language, see example of use in the article). There are already more than a thousand such languages, and new ones are constantly being created.

Nikolai Lobachevsky gave a remarkably clear assessment artificial languages: “To what do science, the glory of modern times, the triumph of the human mind, owe their brilliant successes? Without a doubt, to your artificial language!

The reasons for creating an artificial language are: facilitating human communication (international auxiliary languages, codes), giving fiction additional realism, linguistic experiments, ensuring communication in a fictional world, language games.

Expression "artificial language" sometimes used to mean planned languages and other languages ​​developed for human communication. Sometimes they prefer to call such languages ​​“planned”, since the word “artificial” has a disparaging connotation in some languages.

Outside the Esperantist community, a "planned language" means a set of rules applied to natural language with the purpose of unifying it (standardizing it). In this sense, even natural languages ​​can be artificial in some respects. Prescriptive grammars, described in ancient times for classical languages ​​such as Latin and Sanskrit, are based on the rules of codification of natural languages. Such sets of rules are somewhere between the natural development of a language and its construction through formal description. The term "glossopoeia" refers to the construction of languages ​​for some artistic purpose, and also refers to these languages ​​themselves.

Review

The idea of ​​​​creating a new language of international communication arose in the 17th-18th centuries as a result of the gradual decrease in the role of Latin in the world. Initially, these were predominantly projects of a rational language, independent of the logical errors of living languages, and based on the logical classification of concepts. Later, projects based on models and materials from living languages ​​appeared. The first such project was the universalglot, published by Jean Pirro in 1868 in Paris. Pirro's project, which anticipated many details of later projects, went unnoticed by the public.

The next international language project was Volapük, created in 1880 by the German linguist I. Schleyer. It caused quite a stir in society.

The most famous artificial language was Esperanto (Ludwik Zamenhof, 1887) - the only artificial language that became widespread and united quite a few supporters of an international language.

The most famous artificial languages ​​are:

• basic english
• Esperanto
• Makaton
• Volapuk
• interlingua
• Latin-blue-flexione
• lingua de planeta
• loglan
• Lojban
• Na'vi
• novial
• occidental
• solresol
• ifkuil
• Klingon language
• Elvish languages

The number of speakers of artificial languages ​​can only be estimated approximately, due to the fact that there is no systematic record of speakers. According to the Ethnologist reference book, there are "200-2000 people who speak Esperanto from birth."

As soon as an artificial language has speakers who are fluent in the language, especially if there are many such speakers, the language begins to develop and, therefore, loses its status as an artificial language. For example, Modern Hebrew was based on Biblical Hebrew rather than created from scratch, and has undergone significant changes since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. However, linguist Gilad Zuckerman argues that modern Hebrew, which he calls "Israeli", is a Semitic-European hybrid and is based not only on Hebrew, but also on Yiddish and other languages ​​spoken by followers of the religious movement. rebirth. Therefore, Zuckerman favors the translation of the Hebrew Bible into what he calls "Israeli." Esperanto as a modern spoken language differs significantly from the original version published in 1887, so that modern editions Fundamenta Krestomatio 1903 requires many footnotes on syntactic and lexical differences between early and modern Esperanto.

Proponents of artificial languages ​​have many reasons for using them. The well-known but controversial Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that the structure of language influences the way we think. Thus, a “better” language should allow the person who speaks it to think more clearly and intelligently; this hypothesis was tested by Suzette Hayden Elgin when creating the feminist language Laadan, which appeared in her novel Native Tongue. Manufactured language can also be used to limit thoughts, like Newspeak in George Orwell's novel, or to simplify, like Tokipona. In contrast, some linguists, such as Steven Pinker, argue that the language we speak is “instinct.” Thus, each generation of children invents slang and even grammar. If this is true, then it will not be possible to control the range of human thought through the transformation of language, and concepts such as "freedom" will appear in the form of new words as old ones disappear.

Proponents of artificial languages ​​also believe that a particular language is easier to express and understand concepts in one area, but more difficult in other areas. For example, different computer languages ​​make it easier to write only certain types of programs.

Another reason for using an artificial language could be the telescope rule, which states that it takes less time to first learn a simple artificial language and then a natural language than to learn only a natural language. For example, if someone wants to learn English, then they can start by learning Basic English. Man-made languages ​​such as Esperanto and Interlingua are simpler due to the lack of irregular verbs and some grammatical rules. Numerous studies have shown that children who first learned Esperanto and then another language achieved better language proficiency than those who did not first learn Esperanto.

The ISO 639-2 standard contains the code "art" to represent artificial languages. However, some artificial languages ​​have their own ISO 639 codes (for example, "eo" and "epo" for Esperanto, "jbo" for Lojban, "ia" and "ina" for Interlingual, "tlh" for Klingon, and "io" and "ido" for Ido).

Classification

The following types of artificial languages ​​are distinguished:

• Programming languages ​​and computer languages ​​are languages ​​for automatic processing of information using a computer.
• Information languages ​​are languages ​​used in various information processing systems.
• Formalized linguistics are languages ​​intended for symbolic recording of scientific facts and theories of mathematics, logic, chemistry and other sciences.
• International auxiliary languages ​​(planned) - languages ​​created from elements of natural languages ​​and offered as an auxiliary means of interethnic communication.
• Languages ​​of non-existent peoples created for fictional or entertainment purposes, for example: Elvish language, invented by J. Tolkien, Klingon language, invented by Marc Okrand for a science fiction series "Star Trek", a Na'vi language created for the film Avatar.
• There are also languages ​​that were specifically developed 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- languages ​​that have a clear logical structure of word formation and syntax: Lojban, Tokipona, Ifkuil, Ilaksh.
• Supporting languages- intended for practical communication: Esperanto, Interlingua, Slovio, Slovyanski.
• Artistic or aesthetic languages- created for creative and aesthetic pleasure: Quenya.
• Languages ​​for setting up an experiment, for example, to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that the language a person speaks limits consciousness, drives it into a certain framework).

According to their structure, artificial language projects can be divided into the following groups:

• A priori languages- based on logical or empirical classifications of concepts: loglan, lojban, rho, solresol, ifkuil, ilaksh.
• A posteriori languages- languages ​​built primarily on the basis of international vocabulary: Interlingua, Occidental
• Mixed languages- words and word formation are partly borrowed from non-artificial languages, partly created on the basis of artificially invented words and word-formation elements: Volapuk, Ido, Esperanto, Neo.

According to the degree of practical use, artificial languages ​​are divided into the following projects:

• Languages ​​that are widely used: Ido, Interlingua, Esperanto. Such languages, like national languages, are called “socialized”; among artificial ones they are combined under the term planned languages.
• Artificial language projects that have a number of supporters, for example, Loglan (and its descendant Lojban), Slovio and others.
• Languages ​​that have a single speaker - the author of the language (for this reason it is more correct to call them “linguistic projects” rather than languages).

Ancient linguistic experiments

The first mentions of artificial language in the period of antiquity appeared, for example, in Plato's Cratylus in Hermogenes' statement that words are not inherently related to what they refer to; what people use " part of your own voice... to the subject" Athenaeus of Naucratis, in the third book of the Deipnosophistae, tells the story of two men: Dionysius of Sicily and Alexarchus. Dionysius from Sicily created such neologisms as menandros"virgin" (from menei"waiting" and andra"husband"), menekrates"pillar" (from menei, “stays in one place” and kratei, "strong"), and ballantion"spear" (from balletai enantion"thrown against someone"). By the way, the usual Greek words for these three are parthenos, stulos And akon. Alexarchus the Great (brother of King Cassander) was the founder of the city of Ouranoupolis. Afinitus recalls a story where Alexarchus “proposed a strange vocabulary, calling the rooster “the crower of the dawn,” the barber “the mortal razor” ... and the herald aputēs[from ēputa, “loud-voiced”]. While the mechanisms of grammar proposed by classical philosophers were developed to explain existing languages ​​(Latin, Greek, Sanskrit), they were not used to create new grammar. Panini, who supposedly lived at the same time as Plato, in his descriptive grammar of Sanskrit created a set of rules to explain the language, so the text of his work can be considered a mixture of natural and artificial language.

Early artificial languages

The earliest artificial languages ​​were considered "supernatural", mystical, or divinely inspired. The Lingua Ignota language, recorded in the 12th century by St. Hildegard of Bingen, became the first completely artificial language. This language is one of the forms of a private mystical language. An example from Middle Eastern culture is the Baleibelen language, invented in the 16th century.

Improving the language

Johannes Trithemius, in his work Steganography, tried to show how all languages ​​can be reduced to one. In the 17th century, interest in magical languages ​​was continued by the Rosicrucian Order and the alchemists (like John Dee and his Enochian language). Jacob Boehme in 1623 spoke of the “natural language” (Natursprache) of the senses.

The musical languages ​​of the Renaissance were associated with mysticism, magic and alchemy and were sometimes also called the language of birds. The Solresol Project of 1817 used the concept of "musical languages" in a more pragmatic context: the words of the language were based on the names of seven musical notes, used in various combinations.

17th and 18th centuries: the emergence of universal languages

In the 17th century such “universal” or “a priori” languages ​​appeared as:

• A Common Writing(1647) by Francis Lodwick;
• Ekskybalauron(1651) and Logopandecteision(1652) by Thomas Urquhart;
• Ars signorum George Dalgarno, 1661;
• Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language John Wilkins, 1668;

These early taxonomic artificial languages ​​were dedicated to creating a system of hierarchical classification of language. Leibniz used a similar idea for his 1678 Generalis language. The authors of these languages ​​were not only busy abbreviating or modeling grammar, but also compiling a hierarchical system of human knowledge, which later led to the French Encyclopedia. Many of the artificial languages ​​of the 17th and 18th centuries were pasigraphic or purely written languages ​​that had no oral form.

Leibniz and the compilers of the Encyclopedia realized that it was impossible to definitely fit all human knowledge into the “Procrustean bed” of a tree diagram, and, therefore, to build an a priori language based on such a classification of concepts. D'Alembert criticized the projects of universal languages ​​of the previous century. Individual authors, usually unaware of the history of the idea, continued to propose taxonomic universal languages ​​until the early 20th century (for example, the language of Rho), but the most recent languages ​​were limited to a specific area, such as mathematical formalism or computing (for example, Linkos and languages programming), others were designed to resolve syntactic ambiguity (eg Loglan and Lojban).

19th and 20th centuries: auxiliary languages

Interest in a posteriori auxiliary languages ​​arose with the creation of the French Encyclopedia. During the 19th century, a large number of international auxiliary languages ​​emerged; Louis Couture and Leopold Law in their essay Histoire de la langue universelle (1903) examined 38 projects.

The first international language was Volapuk, created by Johann Martin Schleyer in 1879. However, disagreements between Schleyer and some famous users of the language led to a decline in the popularity of Volapük in the mid-1890s, and this gave rise to Esperanto, created in 1887 by Ludwik Zamenhof. Interlingua originated in 1951 when the International Assistive Language Association (IALA) published its Interlingua-English dictionary and accompanying grammar. The success of Esperanto has not prevented the emergence of new auxiliary languages, such as Leslie Jones's Eurolengo, which contains elements of English and Spanish.

The 2010 Robot Interaction Language (ROILA) is the first language for communication between humans and robots. The main ideas of the ROILA language are that it should be easy for humans to learn and effectively recognized by computer speech recognition algorithms.

Artistic languages

Artistic languages ​​created for aesthetic pleasure begin to appear in early modern literature (in Gargantua and Pantagruel, in utopian motifs), but only become known as serious projects at the beginning of the 20th century. A Princess of Mars by Edgar Burroughs was perhaps the first science fiction novel to use artificial language. John Tolkien was the first scholar to discuss artistic languages ​​publicly, giving a lecture entitled "A Secret Vice" at a convention in 1931.

By the beginning of the first decade of the 21st century, artistic languages ​​have become quite common in science fiction and fantasy works, which often use an extremely limited but defined vocabulary, indicating the existence of a full-fledged artificial language. Artistic languages ​​appear, for example, in Star Wars, Star Trek, The Lord of the Rings (Elvish), Stargate, Atlantis: The Lost World, Game of Thrones (Dothraki and Valyrian), Avatar, and the computer adventure games Dune and Myst.

Modern artificial language communities

From the 1970s to the 1990s, various journals about artificial languages ​​were published, for example: Glossopoeic Quarterly, Taboo Jadoo And The Journal of Planned Languages. The artificial languages ​​mailing list (Conlang) was founded in 1991, and later the AUXLANG mailing list dedicated to international auxiliary languages ​​was spun off. In the first half of the 1990s, several journals dedicated to artificial languages ​​were published in the form of emails, several journals were published on websites, we are talking about journals such as: Vortpunoj and Model Languages(Model Languages). Sarah Higley's survey results indicate that members of the artificial language mailing list are primarily male from North America and Western Europe, with smaller numbers from Oceania, Asia, the Middle East, and South America, and range in age from thirteen to sixty; the number of women participating increases over time. More recently founded communities include the Zompist Bulletin Board(ZBB; since 2001) and the Conlanger Bulletin Board. On the forums there is communication between participants, discussion of natural languages, participants decide whether certain artificial languages ​​have the functions of natural languages, and what interesting functions of natural languages ​​can be used in relation to artificial languages, short texts that are interesting from the point of view of translation are posted on these forums, There are also discussions about the philosophy of artificial languages ​​and the goals of the participants in these communities. ZBB data showed that a large number of participants spend relatively little time on one artificial language and move from one project to another, spending about four months learning one language.

Collaborative artificial languages

The Thalosian language, the cultural basis for the virtual state known as Thalossa, was created in 1979. However, as interest in the Talosian language grew, the development of guidelines and rules for this language since 1983 was undertaken by the Committee for the Use of the Talosian Language, as well as other independent organizations of enthusiasts. The Villnian language draws on Latin, Greek and Scandinavian. Its syntax and grammar resemble 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 the Talos language. But there are languages ​​that are created by a group of people, such as 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 have begun to use Internet tools to coordinate design efforts. 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 using similar collaborative methods. The Voksigid and Novial 98 languages ​​were developed through mailing lists, but neither was published in its final form.

Several artistic languages ​​have been developed on various language Wikis, usually with discussion and voting on phonology and grammatical rules. An interesting variation on language development is the corpus approach, such as Kalusa (mid 2006), where participants simply read a corpus of existing sentences and add their own, perhaps maintaining existing trends or adding new words and constructions. The Kalusa engine allows visitors to rate offers as acceptable or unacceptable. In the corpus approach, there are no explicit references to grammatical rules or explicit definitions of words; the meaning of words is inferred from their use in different sentences of the corpus by different readers and participants, and grammatical rules can be inferred from the sentence structures that were rated most highly by participants and other visitors.

The language was created by Canadian Sonia Lang and claims to be the simplest artificial language. There are only about 120 roots in his vocabulary.

Constructed languages ​​are those languages ​​in which vocabulary, phonetics and grammar have been developed for specific purposes. These are not real languages ​​invented by one person. Today there are already more than a thousand of them, and new ones are constantly being created. The reasons for creating an artificial language are: facilitating human communication, giving realism to fiction and fictional worlds in cinema, linguistic experiments, language games, the development of the Internet and the creation of languages ​​understandable to all peoples of the planet.

1. Grammelot. A style of language used in the theater of humor and satire. This is a kind of gibberish with onomatopoeic elements along with pantomime and mimicry. The grammelot was popularized by the Italian playwright Dario Fo.
2. Esperanto. The most widespread artificial language in the world. Today it is spoken fluently by more than 100,000 people. It was invented by Czech ophthalmologist Lazar Zamenhof in 1887. Esperanto has a simple grammar. Its alphabet has 28 letters and is based on Latin. Most of the vocabulary is taken from Romance and Germanic languages. There are also many international words in Esperanto that are understandable without translation. 250 newspapers and magazines are published in Esperanto, 4 radio stations broadcast, and there are articles on Wikipedia.
3. Vendergood. It was developed by teenage prodigy William James Sidis based on Romance languages. Sidis knew about 40 languages ​​and translated fluently from one to another. Sidis created Vendergood in a book entitled The Book of Vendergood, which he wrote at the age of 8. The language is built on Latin and Greek vocabulary and grammar, and also contains elements of German, French and other Romance languages.
4. Aui. Created by John Weilgart. It is based on the philosophical concept of the formation of all concepts from a small number of elementary concepts, and the elementary concept of language. Its very name translates as “language of space.” Each sound in aui is associated with the concept it denotes. All vocabulary is built by combining basic concepts.
5. Nadsat. A fictional language spoken by teenagers in Anthony Burgess's novel A Clockwork Orange. In Nadsat, part of the vocabulary is English, part is fictitious, created by the author based on the Russian language. Most often, Russian equivalents are written in Latin and have some distortion. The grammar system is based on the English language. In addition, there is slang from French and German, Malay and Gypsy, Cockney, and words invented by Burgess himself.
6. Leetspeak. Used in online games, chats, SMS and other electronic communication channels. The language was created as a cipher that could be read by users who knew the key to it. In the litspeak, numbers and symbols replace letters. They also make intentional mistakes, there are phonetic variations of words and neologisms.
7. Talossan. An artificial language created in 1980 by the 14-year-old founder of the virtual microstate of Talossa, Robert Ben-Madison. Talossan is built on the basis of the Romance languages.
8. Klingon. Linguist Marc Okrand invented Klingon at the request of Paramount Pictures for the series and then the films of the Star Trek cinematic universe. It is spoken by aliens. In addition to them, the language was adopted by numerous fans of the series. Currently, in the United States there is a Klingon Language Institute, which publishes periodicals and translations of literary classics in Klingon.
9. Tokipona. The language was created by Canadian Sonia Lang and claims to be the simplest artificial language. There are only about 120 roots in his vocabulary. The names of animals and plants are missing. But in the unofficial dictionary there are designations for countries, nations, languages ​​that are written with a capital letter. Everything in Toki Pona is simplified: vocabulary, phonology, grammar and syntax.
10. Na'vi. This fictional language was developed by linguist Paul Frommer for the James Cameron Productions for the film Avatar. According to the scenario, native speakers of the Na’vi language are the inhabitants of the planet Pandora. Today there are more than 1000 words in his dictionary. Work on the Na'vi language continues. By the way, in its grammatical and lexical structure, Na’vi is reminiscent of Papuan and Australian languages.