Artificial Language

We can divide Esperanto literature into four historical periods. The first (1887–1920) was characterised by the important role of translations. The second period (1921–1945) was marked by the development of poetry and also, to some extent, of prose and drama. The third period (1946–1974), while beset with difficulties, continued the development started in the second period and made some new innovations, especially in poetry. The fourth period (since 1975) has so far been a period in which the novel and experimental poetry have flourished. Unlike the earlier periods, the fourth period is no longer dominated by a small group of authors and influential literary magazines: Esperanto literature is now more diverse and fragmented, leaving space for different schools and linguistic styles.

Note that this abstract contains some linguistic errors (I believe that it was written by someone other than me):

It is possible to classify Artificial Languages as well as Natural Languages into three main types, according to the forms of comparative adjectives. Artificial Languages can form the comparatives using only a synthetic strategy, or only an analytic strategy, or both of them accordingly. Artificial Languages that use only a syntetic strategy can be classified further according to the rules in choosing one strategy or the other. Some evidence shows that a large proportion of Artificial Languages have both analytic and synthetic comparatives, as in some natural languages. The formation of comparatives results to be an interesting area of morphology, where there is room for choice, also for Artificial Languages.

Artificial languages -- languages which have been consciously designed -- have been created for more than 900 years, although the number of them has increased considerably in recent decades, and by the early 21st century the total figure probably was in the thousands. There have been several goals behind their creation; the traditional one (which applies to some of the best-known artificial languages, including Esperanto) is to make international communication easier. Some other well-known artificial languages, such as Klingon, have been designed in connection with works of fiction. Still others are simply personal projects.
A traditional way of classifying artificial languages involves the extent to which they make use of material from natural languages. Those artificial languages which are created mainly by taking material from one or more natural languages are called a posteriori languages (which again include well-known languages such as Esperanto), while those which do not use natural languages as sources are a priori languages (although many a posteriori languages have a limited amount of a priori material, and some a priori languages have a small number of a posteriori components). Between these two extremes are the mixed languages, which have large amounts of both a priori and a posteriori material.
Artificial languages can also be classified typologically (as natural languages are) and by how and how much they have been used. Many linguists seem to be biased against research on artificial languages, although some major linguists of the past have been interested in them.

Words for berries in natural languages are of several types: semantically transparent compounds, e.g. English blueberry, somewhat semantically opaque compounds, e.g. English cranberry and raspberry, where it is not clear what the semantic contribution of the first component is (if there is any), and non-compounds, e.g. French fraise 'strawberry'. In addition, the set of fruits which are labelled as berries can differ in different languages. Given this variation, it would be interesting to look at such words in artificial (or constructed) languages, i.e. languages which have been consciously created. The most successful artificial language is Esperanto, but there have been more than a thousand others. This paper will look at terms for berries in various types of artificial languages: a posteriori artificial languages (e.g. Esperanto), which use one or more natural languages as sources, a priori languages (e.g. Ro), which do not do this, and mixed languages (e.g. Volapük), which occupy a middle ground between the first two types. A posteriori languages can be further classified according to which languages they are based on. Questions to be investigated include whether terms for berries are compounds, and if so, whether they are fully transparent, which sources these terms are taken from (in the case of a posteriori languages drawing on more than one languages), the ways in which they are similar in form (in the case of some a priori languages), and which fruits are treated as berries. From this work one might uncover general trends in the development of the vocabularies of artificial languages.

A majority of linguistic research concentrates on the conceptual exchange of information, and as a result the emotional aspects of language are found to be superfluous when observing the characteristics of communication. However, the prosody (or melody) within language becomes increasingly more necessary when observed as poetry or music, and one of the key aims of the present paper is to address the shared characteristics exhibited by the means of communication that exist between primitive language and music.

Among the hundreds of artificial languages put forth as possible
international auxiliary languages, relatively few (e.g. Esperanto, Interlingua) have seen a substantial amount of actual use. Given this, one might think that the study of such languages might have little to offer pragmaticists, and indeed there has been very little pragmatic work on them. However, I would argue that the pragmatic investigation of artificial languages can provide useful insights and information.
Most designers of artificial languages are not professional linguists.
Although they usually say little or nothing about the pragmatics of their languages, what they do say can reveal popular ideas about pragmatics, which may otherwise be difficult to discover. I shall present and discuss relevant remarks by some artificial language designers. I shall also look at several pragmatic features of artificial languages. Although the amount of textual material available in most artificial languages is limited, what exists can be subjected to pragmatic analysis. Perhaps most intriguing are the a priori artificial languages (e.g. aUI), attempts to
build a language without borrowing anything from natural languages, as, on the surface, these languages can appear quite odd. I shall present some texts from several artificial languages with a view to seeing whether even apparently exotic artificial languages have the same pragmatic properties as natural languages. Such work can be seen as contributing to the study of cross-linguistic pragmatics

This article examines the Netherlandish chapter of the Renaissance fascination with pictograms, or beeldletteren, as a key aspect of the scientific enterprise to decode, represent and master the Book of Nature.  What did Van Hoogstraten mean when he wrote that painting speaks ‘hieroglyphically’? Clearly, he should not be interpreted according to the twentieth-century trend of highlighting the ‘textual’ nature of artistic utterances, but rather an opposite approach: the idea that communication through images is more fundamental than that through alphabetic signs. When Renaissance writers on the visual arts used the formula ut pictura poesis, they elaborated upon Aristotle’s assumption that ‘the mind never thinks without images’.  Pictography was just one expression of a more general desire to sidestep the contingency of alphabetic signs and arrive at pure communication of knowledge. Although Plato had rejected the idea of a natural language ‘in which the shapes and sounds of letters indicated the essential nature of things’, Dutch scholars forgot his conclusions and focused on isolated statements that suggested idea of a language that directly mirrored reality.  To quote Descartes, they aimed at the identification of ‘simple ideas that (...) form the basis of all the things that man can think (...) [these] would help the judgement to represent things so distinctly that it would be impossible to be mistaken about them, whereas the words that we actually use have mostly confused meanings’.  Thus, just like Dutch painters saw their art as a ‘mirror of nature’,  so Descartes envisioned a specular doctrine of knowledge and language denoting individual things ‘similar to a picture or mirror that represents with absolute precision the image of the universe and its parts’. 
As we shall see, ideas of pictography touched on a wide range of speculations about the essence and origin of language, remote civilisations, memory, logic, and finally the study of the natural world and how it could be ‘read’ by scientists. Combining different strands of scholarship with the skills of painters and engravers, pictography was a consummate effort to arrive at encyclopaedic knowledge joining art, language, history, geography, and philosophy, which, like many of the century’s other encyclopaedic projects, did not fulfil its scientific promises but had striking spin-offs especially from an artistic point of view. Studying this phenomenon by zooming in on the Netherlands is somewhat problematic, as it had a broad European scope linking scholars and artists in the Low Countries to their counterparts in Rome, the German states, and England. Nevertheless, the Netherlands was fertile ground not only for a sophisticated visual culture but also for innovative linguistics and alternative interpretations of divine revelation, which were interwoven with the revolution of knowledge that pictography promised.
Without aspiring to be comprehensive or incontrovertible, I will focus on four interrelated aspects. The first is the hieroglyphic argument. Archaeological remains and documents suggested that pictograms were revelatory of lost, ancient, or geographically remote ‘hidden knowledge’. Second, when joined to ideas about non-European languages this historical research inspired a linguistic argument. Ideas about a primitive vocabulary from which the modern languages were spurious offshoots were widely popular in the Netherlands; in a related context, the notion of Real Characters – signs that stand in direct relation to the things they represent – explored the art-theoretical commonplace that drawing and writing were fundamentally identical activities. The third argument is the encyclopaedic one. Ideas about the ‘alphabet of nature’, or the visible world as a text in which God addresses humankind, inspired the organisation of encyclopaedic collections according to a similar alphabetic structure. The fourth argument, finally, is logical. Crucial here is the importance of images in the tradition of mnemonic logic, as well as the idea that the creative process resides in the combination of primitive concepts.

The main objective of the present dissertation was to evaluate the applicability of the theory and practice developed within the methodological framework of the so-called Ethnolinguistic School of Lublin to the linguistic analysis of artificial languages and to present the limitations of such an approach.
The following research conclusions were formulated:
1. Artificial languages are not a homogeneous group, and their various characteristics necessitate different perspectives in the application of the Lublin paradigm.
2. The binary division between artificial and natural languages is disproved; a scale of naturalness/artificiality is proposed.
3. The language which may be treated as natural within the Ethnolinguistic School of Lublin is undoubtedly Esperanto.
4. Any study of artificial languages within this paradigm needs to take into account a transfer from other languages known to the respondents as well as cultural influences.
The existence of a linguistic worldview typical of Esperanto and presented consistently in the following areas was proved:
• cultural concepts related to the Movement
• stereotype of an Esperantist.

Введение в изучение языков для специальных целей (ЯСЦ): Ученное пособие. Второе издание, дополненное и переработанное. Санкт-Петербург. СПбГУ РИО. Филологический факультет, 2011. - 60 с. ISBN-13: 978-5-8465-1115-6

В пособии рассматриваются обшили методологические основания работы с языком для специальных целей.

Предназначено для студентов, магистрантов, аспирантов, изучающих курсы "Язык деловой литературы", "Язык для специальных целей", "Терминология".

"The present dissertation investigates the abilities of adult monolingual and bilingual speakers to implement statistical and prosodic cues in speech segmentation. Three are the aims of the present dissertation: (1) to examine whether bilingual speakers deploy the prosodic and statistical segmentation strategies that characterize their two languages, (2) to investigate the role that statistical and prosodic cues play in adult speech segmentation, and (3) to explore whether adult speakers make use of two types of cues that have been proposed as potentially allowing infants to determine the basic word order patter (OV/VO, head-initial or head-final) of the language under acquisition: the frequency distribution of functors and content words in natural languages (frequency-based cue) and the relative prominence within phonological phrases (prosodic cue).
Three artificial language learning experiments were conducted, in which the segmentation preferences of ambiguous artificial languages that contain these frequency-based and prosodic cues by adult monolingual and bilingual speakers were examined.
The results of the experiments showed that (1) bilingual speakers are able to implement the frequency-based segmentation strategies that characterize their two languages, though acquisition of the L2’s segmentation strategy appears to be constrained, (2) statistical and prosodic cues seem to be outranked by acoustic-phonetic cues, supporting thus a hierarchical account of segmentation cues in which statistical and prosodic cues are the least weighed by adult speakers, (3) frequent-initial segmentation might be the universally preferred segmentation strategy, (4) frequency-based segmentation strategies are available segmentation cues to adult speakers.
"

Σύμφωνα με την κρατούσα αντίληψη, η Λατινική είναι μια νεκρή γλώσσα. Σκοπός μας είναι να καταδείξουμε το αντίθετο. Ξεκινώντας από τη σχέση της με τις υπόλοιπες γλώσσες της ιταλικής χερσονήσου, τις προσλήψεις της από τις Ινδοευρωπαϊκές γλώσσες, και την εξέλιξή της από την αρχαϊκή στην κλασική Λατινική, φτάνουμε στη δημώδη έκφανσή της, από την οποία προέρχονται οι σύγχρονες Ρωμανικές γλώσσες, οι οποίες είναι επίσημες ή ημιεπίσημες περίπου σε 70 χώρες, με πάνω από 600 εκατομμύρια φυσικούς ομιλητές. Επιπλέον, κατά καιρούς κατασκευάστηκαν τεχνητές γλώσσες, βασισμένες οι περισσότερες στα Λατινικά ή τις Ρωμανικές γλώσσες, με στόχο να είναι κατανοητές παγκοσμίως. Υπολογίζεται ότι τις χρησιμοποιούν περίπου τρία εκατομμύρια άνθρωποι. Γλώσσα της επιστήμης τουλάχιστον μέχρι και τον 19ο αιώνα, τα Νέο-Λατινικά, ακόμα και σήμερα, παρέχουν ορολογίες σε αρκετούς επιστημονικούς κλάδους και αναβιώνουν, με την εισαγωγή νεολογισμών, χάρη σε φιλολόγους και φιλομαθείς σε εκδοτικές, έντυπες, ραδιοφωνικές, μουσικές, διαδικτυακές, τεχνολογικές και άλλες εκφάνσεις.

A preview of the first chapter from my forthcoming book "The Elvish Writing Systems of J.R.R. Tolkien", covering Tolkien's history in writing systems, the origins of Sindarin and Quenya, the Tengwar, Cirth and Sarati, a history of Arda and Middle-earth, aesthetics of the written word and prerequisites for learning Elvish.

Although hundreds of artificial languages designed for international use have been created in the last few centuries (the best known of which is Esperanto), Korea has largely remained outside of this sphere of activity: most such languages were created in Europe or North America, and few of them make use of words from Korean. This is in spite of the fact that there is a reasonably active Esperanto movement in Korea. In this paper I shall examine the situation of artificial auxiliary languages in Korea and focus on the only major Korean artificial language, Unish, which was designed by some members of Sejong University, Seoul. Some properties of Unish will be examined in order to determine whether they can be attributed to the Korean linguistic context. I shall also look at the extent to which Korean vocabulary and grammar have been used in the construction of artificial auxiliary languages created in other countries.

Esperanto is a planned international auxiliary language, constructed by L.L. Zamenhof and published in 1887. It develops, however, in a speech community and its features allow for classifying it as nearing natural languages in many respects. This paper aims to assess Esperanto in terms of a variety of criteria and to demonstrate that it can be treated as natural.

Contrasts in 20th century classification theory relate to a transition from a universe of“knowledge” system towards one of “concepts.” Initiatives to develop a Simple Knowledge Organization System based on classification schemes and taxonomies within the framework of the SW are attempts to bridge the gap. Current KOSs seem to reinforce “syntactics” at the expense of semantics. We claim that all structure is syntactic but knowledge structures need to have a semantic component as well. Therefore we consider classifications as artificial languages. The UDC constitutes a natural language-independent notation system that allows for mediating
between concepts and knowledge systems. We discuss an elementary theory of knowledge organization based on the structure of knowledge rather than on the content of documents. Semantics becomes not a matter of synonymous concepts, but rather of coordinating knowledge structures. The interactions between these systems represent interactions between different universes of knowledge or concepts.

Morphology is the study of how meaningful components of form are combined to make complex words. Understanding how such complex words can be 'broken apart'into their morphological constituents is the problem of morpheme segmentation. While words that have similar meanings tend to share similar forms (eg, run and running), many morphemes do not have transparently shared meanings. For example, canning and running are only abstractly related in meaning through the progressive morpheme–ing.

Dunn et al. (2011) employ computational phylogenetic methods to test whether certain pairs of languages features are universally related in that they co-develop over time (Greenbergian implicational universals). They nd little evidence for universal word-order correlations, contrary to both generative and functional accounts of language. Other commentaries in this issue point to potential problems with the approach employed by Dunn and colleagues (e.g. Croft et al, this issue). Some of these are inherent to quantitative typology: in particular, sparsity of available data and uncertainty about language history. There are, however alternative methods for creating new data to test universal biases for certain word orders. Here we discuss two methods that we take to be of particular promise: Articial Language Learning, which has been used to study language acquisition, and Iterative Articial Language Learning, which extends the former method to the study of language change over generations. We discuss recent work within these two paradigms that suggests language learners exhibit universal biases that might cause universals like those discussed by Dunn et al. to emerge over time.