In the Land of Invented Languages

probably for religious purposes. Projects aiming to create a Pan-Slavic language (using common Slavic word roots) for the promotion of Slavic ethnic unity had occurred as early as 1666. A simplified version of Latin by someone called “Carpophorophilus” had been published in 1732, and in 1765 Joachim Faiguet, the treasurer of France, published a sketch for a simplified French in Diderot’s Encyclopedie.

But the intellectual climate—the preoccupation with mathematical notation, the quest to discover the true nature of the universe—led most early language inventors away from existing languages. They were after a self- contained, perfectly ordered system, not a stitched-together hybrid. Natural languages had too many problems, so they had to start from scratch.

The next era of language inventors focused on a more practical problem: people who spoke different languages couldn’t understand each other. Quotidian concerns pushed philosophical questions about meaning and concepts into the background. These new inventors also worked in a different intellectual climate, one where the similarities between natural languages had come to the foreground.

In 1786, Sir William Jones, in an address to the Royal Asiatic Society, suggested that Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, and perhaps the Gothic, Celtic, and Persian languages as well, all developed from a common ancestor language, and the field of comparative philology was born. In the following decades, an explosion of scholarly activity confirmed Jones’s suggestion. The development of scientific techniques of comparison made it possible to show how languages as different as Bengali and Lithuanian were related. Those arbitrary differences between languages turned out to be not so arbitrary or different after all. They had sprung from a common well.

These discoveries were not necessarily useful to the man set on inventing a universal language. It is one thing to be able to show that a complicated history of sound changes produced both the Hindi word cakka and the English word “wheel” from the same source (the hypothesized Proto- Indo-European word kweklo: kweklo > cakra > cakka; kweklo > hweogol > wheel), but to call a wheel a kweklo wouldn’t do much to help Hindi or English speakers. The new language inventors weren’t influenced so directly by the findings of the academic linguists.

They were, however, influenced by a general awareness of common word roots and their histories. In its nineteenth-century heyday, the field of comparative philology (as sadly obscure a relic as it sounds today) made its way into popular culture in a wide-spread fashion for historical dictionaries and armchair etymology. Any reasonably educated person could be expected to know a bit about how languages were related to each other. Philology was in the air, and budding language inventors started paying attention to what languages already had in common with one another.

One of the earliest inventors to turn toward natural languages was an American named James Ruggles. In the 1820s, he set out to create yet another Wilkins-type philosophical language but decided it was more practical to base his word roots on Latin rather than “the analysis of ideas.” The Latin roots were already somewhat intrinsically connected to the concepts they represented, he argued, echoing a popular linguistic belief of the time, because the sounds of all languages at one point had their origin in nature.

I found Ruggles’s book, A Universal Language, Formed on Philosophical and Analogical Principles, published in 1829, at a library of pre-twentieth-century American history in Philadelphia. I was surprised to find in it a pretty complete grammar and an extensive dictionary. I had never seen this language mentioned in any bibliography or overview or list of invented languages. No one seemed to know about it. But Ruggles had been one of the first to take a step toward the more naturalistic style of language construction that would become popular fifty years later. However, he still had a foot firmly planted in the previous era.

To his Latin roots he added arbitrary letters representing a range of other functions. For example, the root hom-, “man,” participates in the following words:

 

Pretty much every kind of relation he can think of gets its own ending. There is a system for expressing degrees in adjectives. Here are a few of the twenty-four possibilities:

 

At a certain point, the endings pile on to the point where the Latin roots stop doing you much good at all:

pretzpxn ljbztur frateriorpur

“the price of the book of the brother of mine”

Vadcbhinpixs bixgs timzdxrcd pluvzdur

“We can go out now without fear of rain.”

Sings, pixrt kznhenpiots

“Ladies and Gentlemen, will ye sup with us?”

 

And then things just get crazy:

lxmsgevjltshevjlpshev “179 degrees 59 minutes and 59 seconds of west longitude within one second of reaching 180 degrees west”

pintjltstehjlpstehzponpx “It is fifteen minutes and fifteen seconds after one o’clock p.m.”

 

Ruggles’s move toward practicality did not go far enough. He was still enamored with the idea of systematic, combinatorial completeness, as were most language inventors of his time. But unlike most of his peers, he had a refreshing humility about the prospects for the success of his project. He begins his 1829 book with a dedication to the Congress of the United States in which he expresses the hope that even if they do not find his project “of sufficient weight to be entitled to your legislative notice,” some of them, as individuals at least, might take an interest in looking it over. If they do, he continues, “your voices … will either approve or condemn; and should condemnation, which is not improbable, consign these pages to oblivion or contempt,” he will console himself that his own lack of time, resources, and “abilities for so great an attempt” was the “cause of the unworthiness of the production.”

Congress never did anything with Ruggles’s submission, but he did get a letter from President John Quincy Adams, who said that his “opinion long since formed, unfavorable to all projects of this character has perhaps influenced that formed with regard to yours. From the examination, necessarily superficial, which I have been able to give it, I consider it creditable to your ingenuity.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but still something to be proud of.

Meanwhile, Europe was transforming itself from a loose collection of kingdoms, principalities, and duchies into an angry cluster of nations. After the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, people began to organize themselves around feelings of shared identity and culture (rather than loyalty to local landholders and monarchs) and fight for their interests. Their new political identities were formed not according to the various empires they lived under—Russian, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman—but according to the languages they spoke. As revolutions broke out and tensions increased, language inventors found not only a new strategy for building the structures of their languages but a new reason for building them in the first place.

Trouble in Volapukland