A philosophical language is any

constructed language A constructed language (sometimes called a conlang) is a language whose phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, instead of having developed naturally, are consciously devised for some purpose, which may include being devised for a work of fiction. ...

that is constructed from first principles. It is considered a type of

engineered language Engineered languages (often abbreviated to engelangs, or, less commonly, engilangs) are constructed languages devised to test or prove some hypotheses about how languages work or might work. There are at least three subcategories, philosophical ...

. Philosophical languages were popular in Early Modern times, partly motivated by the goal of revising normal language for philosophical (i.e. scientific) purposes. The term ideal language is sometimes used near-synonymously, though more modern philosophical languages such as

Toki Pona Toki Pona (rendered as ''toki pona'' and often translated as 'the language of good'; ; ) is a philosophical artistic constructed language (philosophical artlang) known for its small vocabulary, simplicity, and ease of acquisition. It was create ...

are less likely to involve such an exalted claim of perfection. The axioms and grammars of the languages together differ from commonly spoken languages.

Overview

In most philosophical languages, words are constructed from a limited set of morphemes that are treated as "elemental" or fundamental. "Philosophical language" is sometimes used synonymously with "taxonomic language". Vocabularies of

oligosynthetic language A synthetic language uses inflection or agglutination to express syntactic relationships within a sentence. Inflection is the addition of morphemes to a root word that assigns grammatical property to that word, while agglutination is the combin ...

s are made of compound words, which are coined from a small (theoretically minimal) set of

morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful Constituent (linguistics), constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistics, linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology (linguistics), morphology. In English, morphemes are ...

s. Languages like Toki Pona similarly use a limited set of root words but produce phrases which remain series of distinct words.

History

Work on philosophical languages was pioneered by

Francis Lodwick Francis Lodwick FRS (or Lodowick; 1619–1694) was a pioneer of ''a priori'' languages (what in the seventeenth century was called a ' philosophical language'). Biography Francis Lodwick was a merchant of Flemish origin who lived in London. ...

(''A Common Writing'', 1647; ''The Groundwork or Foundation laid (or So Intended) for the Framing of a New Perfect Language and a Universal Common Writing'', 1652), Sir Thomas Urquhart ('' Logopandecteision'', 1652), George Dalgarno (''Ars signorum'', 1661), and

John Wilkins John Wilkins, (14 February 1614 – 19 November 1672) was an Anglican clergyman, natural philosopher, and author, and was one of the founders of the Royal Society. He was Bishop of Chester from 1668 until his death. Wilkins is one of the fe ...

('' An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language'', 1668). Those were systems of

hierarchical classification Hierarchical classification is a system of grouping things according to a hierarchy. In the field of machine learning, hierarchical classification is sometimes referred to as instance space decomposition, which splits a complete multi-class pro ...

that were intended to result in both spoken and written expression. In 1855, English writer George Edmonds modified Wilkins' system, leaving its taxonomy intact, but changing the grammar, orthography and pronunciation of the language in an effort to make it easier to speak and to read.Edmonds, George. ''A Universal Alphabet, Grammar, and Language''.

Richard Griffin and Company Richard Griffin & Co. was a bookselling, publishing and scientific equipment company owned by Charles Griffin, based in Glasgow, Scotland. In the 19th century it acted as publisher to the University of Glasgow , image = UofG ...

, London and Glasgow, 1855. Gottfried Leibniz created ''

lingua generalis ''Lingua generalis'' was an essay written by Gottfried Leibniz in February, 1678 in which he presented a philosophical language he created, which he named lingua generalis or lingua universalis. Leibniz aimed for his lingua universalis to be adopt ...

'' (or ''lingua universalis'') in 1678, aiming to create a lexicon of characters upon which the user might perform calculations that would yield true propositions automatically; as a side effect he developed

binary calculus A binary number is a number expressed in the base-2 numeral system or binary numeral system, a method of mathematical expression which uses only two symbols: typically "0" (zero) and "1" ( one). The base-2 numeral system is a positional notatio ...

.history-computer.com
/ref> These projects aimed not only to reduce or model grammar, but also to arrange all human knowledge into "characters" or hierarchies. This idea ultimately led to the '' Encyclopédie'', in the

Age of Enlightenment The Age of Enlightenment or the Enlightenment; german: Aufklärung, "Enlightenment"; it, L'Illuminismo, "Enlightenment"; pl, Oświecenie, "Enlightenment"; pt, Iluminismo, "Enlightenment"; es, La Ilustración, "Enlightenment" was an intel ...

. Under the entry ''Charactère'', D'Alembert critically reviewed the projects of philosophical languages of the preceding century. After the ''Encyclopédie'', projects for ''a priori'' languages moved more and more to the fringe. However, from time to time, some authors continued to propose philosophical languages until the 20th century (for example, Ro, aUI) or even in the 21st century (

References

Bibliography

* Umberto Eco, ''

The Search for the Perfect Language ''La ricerca della lingua perfetta nella cultura europea'' (''The Search for the Perfect Language (the Making of Europe)''; trans. James Fentress) is a 1993 book by Umberto Eco about attempts to devise an ideal language. The writing is essayistic ...

'', 1993. * Alan Libert, ''A Priori Artificial Languages''. Munich, Lincom Europa, 2000. {{DEFAULTSORT:Philosophical Language Constructed languages Interlinguistics Language and mysticism

Overview

History

See also

References

Bibliography