Re: History of constructed languages

On Friday, April 1, 2005, at 07:58 , David J. Peterson wrote:

> Ray wrote:
>
> <<
> Yes, certainly - in Dante's 'Divine Comedy' there is a fragment of a
> diabolic language.
> >>
>
> Hey, I'm reading that.  I'm up to Canto 29 of Purgatory.  Where
> is this language?  Did I miss it?
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)
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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".

> Conlanging in some form goes
> way back. I believe I posted some years ago about my discovery
> that the brother of one of the Hellenistic Successors (_diadokhoi_)
Even earlier, there is a fragment of made-up language in one of
Aristophane's comedies (I must look it out).

[snip]

> ...........Jesse brought up the potentially earlier example of
> _Gulliver's Travels_, and IIRC Thomas More's _Utopia_ might contain
> some similarly poorly developed constructed language materials (if
> only lexemes).  But all of these were to the best of my knowledge very
> cursory, and don't represent fictional languages in the sense of
I don't know enough about More & Utopia to comment, 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.

Ray
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Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
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as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]

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