Jul. 8th, 2008

peteryoung: (Default)
I've had an interest in constructed languages for some time. I'm not talking E-Prime or Newspeak or Nadsat or regional dialects, I'm referring to fully explored and constructed creations. Some examples (occasionally updated in this post):

a priori
Aurebesh  |  The Divine Language  |  Klingon  |  Kot  |  Láadan  |  Lincos  |  Mando’a  |  Mirad  |  Na'vi  |  Quenya & Sindarin  |  Ro  |  Solresol  |  Toki Pona  |  Tsolyáni  |  Vampirese  |  Wardwesân

a posteriori
Amellaibian  |  Belter  |  Dothraki & Valyrian  |  Enochian  |  Esperanto  |  Hawaiian Pidgin  |  Ido  |  Interlingua  |  Latino sin Flexione  |  Lingua Ignota  |  Loglan  |  Rocaterranian  |  Sudric

see also
Codex Seraphinianus  |  The Voynich Manuscript  | 

A priori languages are invented from scratch, a posteriori languages are those built on an existing language or combination of languages. Of all the above Toki Pona is one of the most recent, invented by Sonja Elen Kisa, a 28 year-old Toronto translator, to help herself out of depression; also Wardwesân, a massive conlanguage project created by a pseudonymous French author.

It's notable that five of the above a priori languages come from science fiction and fantasy. I've already read Suzette Haden Elgin's radically feminist Native Tongue which first introduced Láadan, and I have somewhere M.A.R. Barker's Man of Gold, set in his world of Tekumel and which features the language Tsolyáni, and is by all accounts a very detailed piece of worldbuilding.

The wiki-site Langmaker, which I only looked at a few times before it disappeared in January 2008, claimed there are 1,902 artificial languages in the world, and I'm sure there are quite a few in online gaming.

Videos:
Are Elvish, Klingon, Dothraki and Na-Vi real languages?
Top 10 Invented Languages

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