Everything about Philosophical Language totally explained
A
philosophical language (also
ideal or
a priori language) is any
constructed language that's constructed from
first principles, like a
logical language, but entails a stronger claim of absolute perfection or transcendent or even mystical truth rather than pragmatic principles. Philosophical languages were popular in
Early Modern times, partly motivated by the goal of recovering the lost
Adamic or
Divine language.
In a philosophical language, words are constructed from a limited set of morphemes that are treated as "elemental" or fundamental. "Philosophical language" is more or less synonymous with "taxonomic language". Vocabularies of
oligosynthetic languages are made of
compound words, which are coined from a small (theoretically minimal) set of
morphemes.
Suzette Haden Elgin's
Láadan is designed to lexicalize and grammaticalize the concepts and distinctions important to women, based on
muted group theory.
Sonja Elen Kisa's
Toki Pona is based on
minimalistic simplicity, incorporating elements of
Taoism.
A priori languages are constructed languages where the vocabulary is invented directly, rather than being derived from other existing languages (as with
Esperanto or
Interlingua).
Philosophical languages are almost all
a priori languages, but not all a priori languages are philosophical. For example,
J. R. R. Tolkien's
Quenya and
Sindarin, and
Marc Okrand's
Klingon, are both a priori but not philosophical: they're meant to seem like natural languages, even though they've no relation to any natural languages.
History
Work on philosophical languages was pioneered by
Francis Lodwick (
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 (
Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language,
1668). Those were systems of hierarchical classification 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.
Gottfried Leibniz created
lingua generalis 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.
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. Leibniz and the encyclopedists realized that it's impossible to organize human knowledge unequivocally as a tree, and so impossible to construct an
a priori language based on such a classification of concepts. 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 lunatic fringe. Individual authors, typically unaware of the history of the idea, continued to propose taxonomic philosophical languages until the early
20th century (For example,
Ro) and
21th century (
Ithkuil,
Arahau).
Further Information
Get more info on 'Philosophical Language'.
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