Re: History of constructed languages
| From: | Jeffrey Henning <jeffrey@...> |
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| Date: | Friday, April 1, 2005, 16:25 |
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Here's a list I maintain of conlangs by year:
http://www.langmaker.com/db/mdl_index_year.htm#1100
To report errors, go to that language's page and click the Update This
Information button. (This helps me manage the flow of 100 e-mails a week.)
Besides "Gulliver's Travels" (the Houhynm language isn't on the list), the
earliest use of a conlang in a work of fiction was Barsoomian in 1900:
http://www.langmaker.com/barsoom.htm
The lack of an orthography is troubling (uses English-style spellings) but
Barsoomian with its few dozen words and many names offered as much
verisimilitude as many science fiction books today do. (Which is an
indictment of today's authors, but was admirable for 1900.)
Best regards,
Jeffrey Henning
LangMaker.com Webmaster
http://www.langmaker.com
"At some point in the next century the number of invented languages will
probably overtake the number of surviving natural languages."
- Cullen Murphy in Atlantic Monthly (October, 1995)
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