Re: History of constructed languages

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
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