Before Esperanto

Esperanto was not the first constructed language, and it did not appear out of nowhere. For centuries before 1887, scholars, priests and inventors had tried to build better languages, for different reasons and with different methods. Most of those attempts failed to attract speakers, but each left an idea behind. This chapter follows four of them, in order, and then asks what the designers wanted and why their languages did not last.

1. A Private Language: Lingua Ignota

The earliest recorded constructed language is usually said to be the Lingua Ignota ("unknown language"), attributed to the twelfth-century abbess and writer Hildegard of Bingen. It survives as a word list with invented words for ordinary things, and a matching alphabet. Its purpose is uncertain: sources describe it as a private or mystical language, and there is no evidence that it was meant for conversation. It is a good first example of a motive from Chapter 1: art and play (and possibly devotion), rather than communication.

2. Philosophical Languages

In the seventeenth century a different dream appeared: a language that would describe the world correctly, not merely talk about it. In 1668 the English clergyman and scientist John Wilkins published An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language. Its idea was to divide everything that can be named into a hierarchy of categories and to build each word from the position of its thing in that hierarchy. A learner who knew the system could, in principle, work out roughly what a word referred to just by taking it apart. Leibniz, the German philosopher and mathematician, dreamed of something even more ambitious: a universal "alphabet of thought" in which reasoning could be done by calculation.

The principle is easy to show with a toy scheme (invented here only for the exercises; it is not Wilkins's actual notation):

Languages built this way are called a priori languages: their vocabulary is made up from a system, not borrowed from existing languages. Two difficulties show at once. First, every word has to be learned from scratch, because nothing looks familiar. Second, the classification is fixed, so it is only as good as the designer's idea of how the world divides, and that idea has to be right everywhere (the toy scheme above already breaks on a plant that has an animal-like name). Later chapters return to a priori and a posteriori (borrowed) vocabularies in Chapter 10.

3. A Language You Can Sing: Solresol

In the early nineteenth century the French music teacher François Sudre developed Solresol, a language whose whole vocabulary is built from the seven notes of the scale: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si. Words are made of one to a few notes, so the same message could be sung, played on an instrument, whistled, or written with coloured symbols. Sources date its first presentation to the 1820s, and it became known well beyond France in its day, though it appears never to have had fluent speakers.

Solresol is a good example of the design lesson: it was clever and different, but with only seven building blocks, words had to be long or confusingly similar. Related words also sounded alike by design, which meant a single misheard note could change the meaning completely. That is a trade-off every designer faces between a small, elegant sound system and a language that is easy to hear correctly.

4. The First Boom: Volapük

The first constructed language to gather a real international following was Volapük ("world speech"), created by the German priest Johann Martin Schleyer and first described in 1879, with the first book following soon after. For a few years it spread quickly: societies, journals and congresses appeared in several countries, and a congress in 1889 was held in Volapük itself.

Schleyer's design drew its roots mainly from English, with the spellings changed to fit the language, and he gave it a complex system of inflections. Learners found it hard. Schleyer also kept tight control of the language and resisted changes proposed by the movement's members. The result was splits and decline soon after the peak. The language never disappeared entirely, but it stopped being a mass movement within about a decade.

What the Designers Wanted

Across four centuries and very different languages, the same hopes keep returning. They are the questions every later designer has to answer too:

• Neutrality. A language belonging to no nation, so that no group gains an advantage by speaking it.
• Ease. A grammar a learner could finish in months, not years.
• Regularity. No irregular verbs and no exceptions to memorise.
• Precision. In the philosophical tradition, a language in which a word's form shows its meaning.
• Reach. A language many people would actually adopt.

Why These Languages Faded

Hands-On Exercises