Re: Question About "Pan Lengua" and "Neo Criollo"

John Quijada wrote at 2004-02-07 13:16:35 (-0500)
 > Over the years I've read a couple of references to the Argentine
 > painter Alejandro Xul Solar, who was active about 1920-1950.  Many
 > of Xul Solar's paintings contain ideographic and alphabetic
 > symbols, even whole phrases, apparently from three conlangs he
 > created during his life.  Two of these conlangs are named "Pan
 > Lengua" and "Neo Criollo."  I'm interested in knowing more about
 > these languages and seeing examples.  Does anyone on the list know
 > anything about Xul Solar's languages?  Langmaker doesn't have any
 > entries, and Google and the other search engines seem to only turn
 > up sites about his paintings, with no mention of his conlangs.
 >
 > --John Quijada

I know very little about this - there's a footnote about him,
mentioning the languages*, in Hurley's translation of Borges's _Tlön,
Uqbar, Orbis Tertius_ (Solar and Borges were lifelong friends).
But today I found in this month's edition of _Words without Borders_
an essay by Cecilia Vicuña , which contains a little more detail:
 http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article.php?lab=XulSolar


*| [...] Xul was a painter and something of a "creative linguist",
 | having created a language he called creol: a "language ... made up
 | of Spanish enriched by neologisms and by monosyllabic English words
 | ... used as adverbs" [...] In another place, JLB also notes another
 | language created by Xul Solar: "A philosophical language after the
 | manner of John Wilkins" [...]
    _Collected Fictions_ Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew
    Hurley.  The passages in quotes are Borges - I've cut the
    bibliographic details, which are rather detailed, but the first is
    from a book of interviews, _Twenty-Four Conversations with Borges_.
    Hurley notes that Borges talks at length about Xul in this volume.
    Whether he says any more about the languages I don't know.