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Re: History of constructed languages

From:Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>
Date:Monday, April 4, 2005, 6:56
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) ========================================= 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 =============================================== 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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