Re: History of constructed languages

On Tuesday, April 5, 2005, at 02:30 , Sally Caves wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Ray Brown" <ray.brown@...>
[snip]
>> Inferno -
>> Canto VII, line 1: Papè Satàn, papè Satàn aleppe!
>> Canto XXXI, line 67: Raphèl may améch zabì almì!
>>
>> (Note: à = a-grave; è = e-grave; ì = i-grave)
>
> And few can decipher these utterances.
Yes - but they do not agree with one another  :)

> Some say that pape and aleppe are
> distorted Greek--papai, "ye gods"; I'm less certain about aleppe;
_papaî_ is an exclamation in Classical Greek, showing either pain (whether
mental or physical), surprise or scorn. It is found in the works of
Aiskhylos (Aeschylus), Aristophanes, Herodotos and Plato. In Dante's time
it would have been pronounced /pa'pe/ but I doubt very much that the word
had survived in spoken Greek. Whether Dante knew the word or not depends
upon how likely he was to know about the Greek Classics.

As for _aleppe_, those who adopt a Greek decipherment take the word as
_alhpte_ (where h = 'eta') = 'not to laid hold off, incomprehensible, not
to be chosen' [masc. sing. vocative]. There are a few problems with this:
1. the word is pretty rare in Greek;
2. in Dante's time it would have been pronounced /'alipte/, which is at
odds with the medial -e- in Dante's word (Dante would not know about later
reconstructions of pronunciations of different ancient Greek dialects);
3. there is no obvious reason to change -pt- to -pp-.

And at least one commentator has seen these words as distorted French:
"Paix, paix! Satan! Paix, paix! Satan! allez!"

> and other
> commentators have suggested that Nimrod's remarks are a terribly distorted
> (or fake) Hebrew.
Yes, I have seen no even vaguely convincing explanation of Canto XXXI, 67,
  other than that they are a charicature of Hebrew. According to Eco, Dante
appears not have known Hebrew but had a vague idea what it sounded like.

>  But distorted or "pretend" Hebrew is legion throughout
> the middle ages and in Apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, and makes its way
> into
> incantations, conjurations, Christian Cabala,  and so forth.
Yep - if it is distorted anything, then distorted Hebrew seems to me far
more likely than distorted Greek or French.

> Also, look  to Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantegruel for extended passages
> of
> made up languge.
Yes - I'd forgotten about that   :)

> There is also the comic gibberish in Shakespeare's "All's
> Well That Ends Well," Act IV, scene I.  Referred to as "chough's language,
> "
> and used to fool the pompous Parolles.  So while these examples don't
> answer
> Mark's original query in the terms that he set it out, invented language
> is
> all over the place and has ancient origins.
I agree.
>
>> =========================================
>> On Friday, April 1, 2005, at 10:14 , Thomas Wier wrote:
>>
>>> From:    Mark Jones <markjjones@...>
>>>> 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.
>>>
>>> I think it's fair to say that conlanging as a fictional enterprise
>>> is something new in the 20th century.
>>
>> That is not how I understand Umberto Eco's accounts of Gabriel de Foigny'
>> s
>> "La Terre ausrale connue" or Denis Vairasse's "L'Histoire des Sevarambes"
>> .
>
> Agree with Ray.
Thanks   :)

> It depends on what you call "fiction" and whether you limit
> it only to the last two centuries.
That seems very limiting to me and I suspect to you). If Apuleius' "Golden
Ass" is not fiction, I don't know what is! Even earlier we have Petronius'
  "Sauturae" which, tho not preserved in full, is surely a romance or novel
- indeed, it seems that a tradition of writing fictional romances was
already established in Hellenistic Greek.

> If Dante isn't fiction, then you can't
> say that his distorted or fallen language of the Inferno is a "fictional
> language."
Well it's fictional in the sense of being made up.

[snip]
>> Even earlier, there is a fragment of made-up language in one of
>> Aristophane's comedies (I must look it out).
>
> The Birds.  Lots of utterances imitative of birdsong.  The Frogs: the
> famous
> Brek kek kek kek koax koax.
No, no - these are essentially onomatopoeia. I was thinking of a sentence
a slave is supposed to utter in a non-Greek language. I thought it came in
the Archarnians, but I may have dis-remembered.

[snip]
>> I don't know enough about More & Utopia to comment,
>
> The preface provided in the 1516 edition has a quatrain of Utopian with a
> Latin translation and some angular looking characters.  I have examined
> it.
> It's a perfect calque of the Latin translation, so it's clear More wrote
> out
> the Latin first and he (or someone else, perhaps Giles) adapted the
> language
> and the alphabet to it.
I see.

>
>> but certainly in the
>> case of Gulliver's travels, the fragments from Dante & the Aristophanes
>> line, I agree these don't represent fully developed fictional languages.
>> But Foigny certainly got beyond that; he did provide a sort of dictionary
>> and some grammatical rules at least.
>
> In A New Discovery of Terra Incognita Australis.  There are lots of other
> Voyage Accounts with examples of invented languages.  But for any
> invention
> that seems to have some kind of system to it, even if extremely paltry,
> More's Utopia should at least be mentioned.
OK.

Ray
===============================================
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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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