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Re: History of constructed languages

From:Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>
Date:Friday, April 1, 2005, 6:52
On Thursday, March 31, 2005, at 05:08 , JS Bangs wrote:

>> Mark Jones wrote:
[snip]
>>> Anyway, I'm far from an expert, and I'd like to know what the first >>> constructed language for media use might've been. I'm not talking here >>> about >>> Esperanto or Volapuek etc., but a fictional languages for use in >>> fiction.
[snip]
> There are previous examples, but they're much less developed. I'm > pretty sure that there are fragments of language that appear in > _Gulliver's Travels_ by Swift,
Absolutely correct.
> but I doubt that there is much of a grammar behind them. > > I wonder if non-English literatures provide any other examples.
Yes, certainly - in Dante's 'Divine Comedy' there is a fragment of a diabolic language. Fictional languages occur in "La Terre australe connue" (1676) by Gabriel de Foigny, and in "L'Histoire des Sevrarambes" (1677 - 1679) by Denis Vairasse. I know little about the latter, but de Foigny's language certainly had a developed grammar. I know it only from the description given by Umberto Eco in "Serendepities: Language and Lunacy" - I believe better descriptions come in his "Search for a Perfect Language" which, alas, I have not read. I think you need to track down the latter book at least :) Ray =============================================== http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown ray.brown@freeuk.com =============================================== Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight, which is not so much a twilight of the gods as of the reason." [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]

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David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...>