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72-850: Uropi was begun in 1986; since then, it has undergone certain modifications; its vocabulary keeps growing (the French-Uropi dictionary has over 10,000 words). Uropi became known in Europe in the early 1990s. After studying languages at the University of Orléans , then at the Sorbonne and at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, Joël Landais obtained the Agrégation diploma in English. He speaks French, English, Italian, Spanish, German and has

144-400: A hobby , or in connection to worldbuilding . The expression planned language is sometimes used to indicate international auxiliary languages and other languages designed for actual use in human communication. Some prefer it to the adjective artificial , as this term may be perceived as pejorative. Outside Esperanto culture , the term language planning means the prescriptions given to

216-432: A work of fiction . A constructed language may also be referred to as an artificial , planned or invented language , or (in some cases) a fictional language . Planned languages (or engineered languages / engelangs ) are languages that have been purposefully designed; they are the result of deliberate, controlling intervention and are thus of a form of language planning . There are many possible reasons to create

288-582: A "natural language" ( Natursprache ) of the senses. Musical languages from the Renaissance were often tied up with mysticism , magic and alchemy , sometimes also referred to as the language of the birds . A non-mystic musical language was Solresol . The 17th century saw the rise of projects for "philosophical" or "a priori" languages, such as: These early taxonomic conlangs produced systems of hierarchical classification that were intended to result in both spoken and written expression. Leibniz had

360-520: A community of conlangers with its own customs, such as translation challenges and translation relays , and its own terminology. Sarah Higley reports from results of her surveys that the demographics of the Conlang list are primarily men from North America and western Europe, with a smaller number from Oceania, Asia, the Middle East, and South America, with an age range from thirteen to over sixty;

432-448: A constructed language is that if it was constructed to be a natural language for use by fictional foreigners or aliens, as with Dothraki and High Valyrian in the Game of Thrones series, which was adapted from the A Song of Ice and Fire book series, the language should be easily pronounced by actors, and should fit with and incorporate any fragments of the language already invented by

504-501: A constructed language is the telescope rule, which claims that it takes less time to first learn a simple constructed language and then a natural language, than to learn only a natural language. Thus, if someone wants to learn English, some suggest learning Basic English first. Constructed languages like Esperanto and Interlingua are in fact often simpler due to the typical lack of irregular verbs and other grammatical quirks. Some studies have found that learning Esperanto helps in learning

576-429: A constructed language, such as to ease human communication (see international auxiliary language and code ); to give fiction or an associated constructed setting an added layer of realism; for experimentation in the fields of linguistics , cognitive science , and machine learning ; for artistic creation ; for fantasy role-playing games ; and for language games . Some people may also make constructed languages as

648-712: A few". Personal pronouns have three cases : nominative , accusative (also used with all prepositions ) and dative . Possessive adjectives are used for the genitive . As in English, there are three pronouns in the third person singular (masculine: he ; feminine: ce ; neuter : je ) as well as a reflexive pronoun . For example: i = "I" (nominative), ma = "me" (accusative), mo = "to me" (dative), tu, ta, to = "you", etc. List of personal pronouns: i, tu, he, ce, je, nu, vu, lu = "I, you (singular) , he, she, it, we, you (plural & polite form) , they". Reflexive pronoun: sia = "oneself". Uropi verbs have indicative , imperative and conditional moods, as well as

720-595: A first language ". A member of the Klingon Language Institute , d'Armond Speers , attempted to raise his son as a native (bilingual with English) Klingon speaker. As soon as a constructed language has a community of fluent speakers, especially if it has numerous native speakers, it begins to evolve and hence loses its constructed status. For example, Modern Hebrew and its pronunciation norms were developed from existing traditions of Hebrew , such as Mishnaic Hebrew and Biblical Hebrew following

792-422: A general Sephardic pronunciation, rather than engineered from scratch, and has undergone considerable changes since the state of Israel was founded in 1948 (Hetzron 1990:693). However, linguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann argues that Modern Hebrew, which he terms "Israeli", is a Semito-European hybrid based not only on Hebrew but also on Yiddish and other languages spoken by revivalists. Zuckermann therefore endorses

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864-499: A linguist who created multiple well-known constructed languages including the Valyrian languages and Dothraki , advocated a similar opinion, saying that "Theoretically, anyone can publish anything using any language I created, and, in my opinion, neither I nor anyone else should be able to do anything about it." However, Peterson also expressed concern that the respective rights-holders—regardless of whether or not their ownership of

936-498: A natural language to standardize it; in this regard, even a "natural language" may be artificial in some respects, meaning some of its words have been crafted by conscious decision. Prescriptive grammars , which date to ancient times for classical languages such as Latin and Sanskrit , are rule-based codifications of natural languages, such codifications being a middle ground between naïve natural selection and development of language and its explicit construction. The term glossopoeia

1008-540: A non-constructed language later (see propaedeutic value of Esperanto). Codes for constructed languages include the ISO 639-2 " art " for conlangs; however, some constructed languages have their own ISO 639 language codes (e.g. " eo " and " epo " for Esperanto , " jbo " for Lojban , " ia " and " ina " for Interlingua , " tlh " for Klingon , " io " and " ido " for Ido , " lfn " for Lingua Franca Nova , and " tok " for Toki Pona ). One constraint on

1080-409: A particular language family) are a posteriori by definition. While most auxiliary languages are a posteriori due to their intended function as a medium of communication, many artistic languages are fully a posteriori in design—many for the purposes of alternate history . In distinguishing whether the language is a priori or a posteriori , the prevalence and distribution of respectable traits

1152-504: A posteriori auxiliary languages. Joachim Faiguet de Villeneuve in the article on Langue wrote a short proposition of a "laconic" or regularized grammar of French . During the 19th century, a bewildering variety of such International Auxiliary Languages (IALs) were proposed, so that Louis Couturat and Léopold Leau in Histoire de la langue universelle (1903) reviewed 38 projects. The first of these that made any international impact

1224-406: A pragmatic return to the aims of the a priori languages, tempered by the requirement of usability of an auxiliary language. Thus far, these modern a priori languages have garnered only small groups of speakers. Robot Interaction Language (2010) is a spoken language that is optimized for communication between machines and humans. The major goals of ROILA are that it should be easily learnable by

1296-482: 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

1368-510: A priori when considering some linguistic factors, and at the same time a posteriori when considering other factors. An a priori language is any constructed language with some features which are not based on existing languages. Instead these features are invented or elaborated to work differently or to allude to different purposes. Some a priori languages are designed to be international auxiliary languages that remove what could be considered an unfair learning advantage for native speakers of

1440-456: A priori . An a posteriori language (from Latin a posteriori , "from the latter"), according to French linguist Louis Couturat , is any constructed language whose elements are borrowed from or based on existing languages. The term can also be extended to controlled versions of natural languages, and is most commonly used to refer to vocabulary despite other features. Likewise, zonal auxiliary languages (auxiliary languages for speakers of

1512-919: A quarter"; the exception is mij : "half". I find sul’ imaʒe in mi ment, Ki dragone valgan aròn kastele, Gardine wo un find maʒiki frute; Lovi damas in u tor inkarsen, O perlasen in u fost insaren; Wo galan kwalore rait su ber rijis We se de frontias da landi soinis. I find ja, sa klarim in mi ment Be sep, wan i it a led. Be sep, revos ma vekan De maʒiki land i cek in van; U sel se stan za wo stì de kastèl, De gardini bod wen u tapìz cel. Nun feja se vadan tra de plor, Bote, ne kwalore, se stan ner de dor, Id wo de blu rije sì flujan ki rikle Num u banar id vodikrùg je ste; I cek de maʒiki land in van Be sep, revos ma vekan. At seven, when I go to bed, I find such pictures in my head: Castles with dragons prowling round, Gardens where magic fruits are found; University of Orl%C3%A9ans The University of Orléans ( French : Université d'Orléans )

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1584-622: A set of rules for explaining language, so that the text of his grammar may be considered a mixture of natural and constructed language. A legend recorded in the seventh-century Irish work Auraicept na n-Éces claims that Fénius Farsaid visited Shinar after the confusion of tongues , and he and his scholars studied the various languages for ten years, taking the best features of each to create in Bérla tóbaide ("the selected language"), which he named Goídelc —the Irish language. This appears to be

1656-511: A significant number of speakers, emerged in 1951, when the International Auxiliary Language Association published its Interlingua–English Dictionary and an accompanying grammar . The success of Esperanto did not stop others from trying to construct new auxiliary languages, such as Leslie Jones' Eurolengo , which mixes elements of English and Spanish. Loglan (1955) and its descendants constitute

1728-410: A similar purpose for his lingua generalis of 1678, aiming at a lexicon of characters upon which the user might perform calculations that would yield true propositions automatically, as a side-effect developing binary calculus . These projects were not only occupied with reducing or modelling grammar, but also with the arrangement of all human knowledge into "characters" or hierarchies, an idea that with

1800-492: A simple form, a durative (continuous) form and a perfect form. 1: un ; 2: du ; 3: tri ; 4: kwer ; 5: pin ; 6: ses ; 7: sep ; 8: oc ; 9: nev ; 10: des ; 100: sunte ; 1000: tilie . 357: trisunte pindes-sep . Ordinal numbers are formed by adding -i or -j (after a vowel): duj : "second"; trij : "third", kweri : "fourth", pini : "fifth"; the exception is pri : "first". Fractions are formed by adding -t to numbers: u trit : "a third", u kwert : "a fourth,

1872-449: A source language that would otherwise exist for a posteriori languages. Others, known as philosophical or taxonomic languages , try to categorize their vocabulary, either to express an underlying philosophy or to make it easier to recognize new vocabulary. Finally, many artistic languages , created for either personal use or for use in a fictional medium, employ consciously constructed grammars and vocabularies, and are best understood as

1944-425: A very limited declension with only two cases : nominative and genitive in the singular and the plural . Uropi substantives are divided into three groups: those ending in a consonant , those ending in -a and those ending in another vowel . Among those ending in a consonant are all masculine nouns , i.e., nouns denoting men or male animals: man : "man"; kat : "(tom)cat". Those nouns take an -e in

2016-461: A way to recreate a unity between Indo-European languages . With this aim, a great many Uropi roots correspond to common Indo-European roots which have been simplified, in their pronunciation and length (very often Uropi roots have one or two syllables). Thus, mother is mata (from Indo-European: mātēr* ); sun is sol (from Indo-European: sāwel* ). This simplification corresponds to the natural evolution of Indo-European roots which have given birth to

2088-592: A working knowledge of modern Greek and Russian. Today, he teaches English in a Chartres college. Parallel to his training as a linguist, his travels throughout Europe, Senegal, the Maghreb, Egypt, Mexico, former USSR, Vietnam and the West Indies, together with a passion for languages, led him to create Uropi. The Uropi alphabet has 26 letters, the 26 letters of the ISO Basic Latin alphabet minus q, plus

2160-547: Is Balaibalan , invented in the 16th century. Kabbalistic grammatical speculation was directed at recovering the original language spoken by Adam and Eve in Paradise , lost in the confusion of tongues . The first Christian project for an ideal language is outlined in Dante Alighieri 's De vulgari eloquentia , where he searches for the ideal Italian vernacular suited for literature. Ramon Llull 's Ars Magna

2232-585: Is a French university, in the Academy of Orléans and Tours. As of July 2015 it is a member of the regional university association Leonardo da Vinci consolidated University . In 1230, when for a time the doctors of the University of Paris were scattered, a number of the teachers and disciples took refuge in Orléans ; when pope Boniface VIII , in 1298, promulgated the sixth book of the Decretals, he appointed

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2304-1284: Is a misuse of terms to say that we have natural language; languages exist through arbitrary institutions and the conventions of peoples. Voices, as the dialecticians say, don't signify naturally, but capriciously. " Furthermore, fictional or experimental languages can be considered naturalistic if they model real world languages. For example, if a naturalistic conlang is derived a posteriori from another language (real or constructed), it should imitate natural processes of phonological , lexical , and grammatical change. In contrast with languages such as Interlingua, naturalistic fictional languages are not usually intended for easy learning or communication. Thus, naturalistic fictional languages tend to be more difficult and complex. While Interlingua has simpler grammar, syntax, and orthography than its source languages (though more complex and irregular than Esperanto or its descendants), naturalistic fictional languages typically mimic behaviors of natural languages like irregular verbs and nouns, and complicated phonological processes. In terms of purpose, most constructed languages can broadly be divided into: The boundaries between these categories are by no means clear. A constructed language could easily fall into more than one of

2376-559: Is a simplification of Latin from which the inflections have been removed. As with Interlingua, some prefer to describe its development as "planning" rather than "constructing". Some speakers of Esperanto and Esperantidos also avoid the term "artificial language" because they deny that there is anything "unnatural" about the use of their language in human communication. By contrast, some philosophers have argued that all human languages are conventional or artificial. François Rabelais 's fictional giant Pantagruel, for instance, said: " It

2448-579: Is also used to mean language construction, particularly construction of artistic languages . Conlang speakers are rare. For example, the Hungarian census of 2011 found 8,397 speakers of Esperanto , and the census of 2001 found 10 of Romanid , two each of Interlingua and Ido and one each of Idiom Neutral and Mundolinco . The Russian census of 2010 found that in Russia there were about 992 speakers of Esperanto (the 120th most common) and nine of

2520-469: Is contentious. In a 2015 lawsuit, CBS and Paramount Pictures challenged a fan film project called Axanar, stating the project infringed upon their intellectual property, which included the Klingon language , among other creative elements. During the controversy, Marc Okrand, the language's original designer expressed doubt as to whether Paramount's claims of ownership were valid. David J. Peterson ,

2592-551: Is not so artificial as it seems at first sight: It has been observed in natural languages, for example, the French haut (high) comes from the crossing between old Fr. aut (from Latin altus ) and Frankish hōh . Likewise, the English island comes from the crossing of Old English īeġland (from Proto-Germanic *awjōlandą ) and Old French isle (from Latin insula ) . It has also been deliberately used in languages like English to form new words: " portmanteau -words", for instance,

2664-522: Is often the key. Grammatical speculation dates from Classical Antiquity ; for instance, it appears in Plato 's Cratylus in Hermogenes's contention that words are not inherently linked to what they refer to; that people apply "a piece of their own voice ... to the thing". Athenaeus tells the story of two figures: Dionysius of Sicily and Alexarchus : "He [Alexarchus] once wrote something ... to

2736-452: Is sometimes cited; this claims that the language one speaks influences the way one thinks. Thus, a "better" language should allow the speaker to think more clearly or intelligently or to encompass more points of view; this was the intention of Suzette Haden Elgin in creating Láadan , a feminist language embodied in her feminist science fiction series Native Tongue . Constructed languages have been included in standardized tests such as

2808-672: The Hieroglyphica of Horapollo , and first encounters with the Chinese script directed efforts towards a perfect written language. Johannes Trithemius , in Steganographia and Polygraphia , attempted to show how all languages can be reduced to one. In the 17th century, interest in magical languages was continued by the Rosicrucians and alchemists (like John Dee and his Enochian ). Jakob Boehme in 1623 spoke of

2880-547: The Enlightenment would ultimately lead to the Encyclopédie . Many of these 17th–18th centuries conlangs were pasigraphies , or purely written languages with no spoken form or a spoken form that would vary greatly according to the native language of the reader. Leibniz and the encyclopedists realized that it is impossible to organize human knowledge unequivocally in a tree diagram, and consequently to construct an

2952-674: The Esperantido Ido . The terms "planned", "constructed", "invented", "fictional", and "artificial" are used differently in some traditions. For example, few speakers of Interlingua consider their language artificial, since they assert that it has no invented content: Interlingua's vocabulary is taken from a small set of natural languages, and its grammar is based closely on these source languages, even including some degree of irregularity; its proponents prefer to describe its vocabulary and grammar as standardized rather than artificial or constructed. Similarly, Latino sine flexione (LsF)

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3024-723: The SAT , where they were used to test the applicant's ability to infer and apply grammatical rules. By the same token, a constructed language might also be used to restrict thought, as in George Orwell 's Newspeak , or to simplify thought, as in Toki Pona . However, linguists such as Steven Pinker argue that ideas exist independently of language. For example, in the book The Language Instinct , Pinker states that children spontaneously re-invent slang and even grammar with each generation. These linguists argue that attempts to control

3096-429: The 1970s through the 1990s, such as Glossopoeic Quarterly , Taboo Jadoo , and The Journal of Planned Languages . The Conlang Mailing List was founded in 1991, and later split off an AUXLANG mailing list dedicated to international auxiliary languages. In the early to mid-1990s a few conlang-related zines were published as email or websites, such as Vortpunoj and Model Languages . The Conlang mailing list has developed

3168-467: The 20th century. A Princess of Mars (1912) by Edgar Rice Burroughs was possibly the first fiction of that century to feature a constructed language. J. R. R. Tolkien developed families of related fictional languages and discussed artistic languages publicly, giving a lecture entitled " A Secret Vice " in 1931 at a congress. (Orwell's Newspeak is considered a satire of an international auxiliary language rather than an artistic language proper.) By

3240-529: The Rings ( Elvish ), Stargate SG-1 , Atlantis: The Lost Empire , Ar Tonelico ( Hymmnos ), Game of Thrones ( Dothraki language and Valyrian languages ), The Expanse , Avatar , Dune , and the Myst series of computer adventure games. The matter of whether or not a constructed language can be owned or protected by intellectual property laws, or if it would even be possible to enforce those laws,

3312-584: The above categories. A logical language created for aesthetic reasons would also be classifiable as an artistic language; one created with philosophical motives could include being used as an auxiliary language. There are no rules, either inherent in the process of language construction or externally imposed, that would limit a constructed language to fitting only one of the above categories. A constructed language can have native speakers if young children learn it from parents who speak it fluently. According to Ethnologue , there are "200–2000 who speak Esperanto as

3384-516: The beginning of the first decade of the 21st century, it had become common for science fiction and fantasy works set in other worlds to feature constructed languages, or more commonly, an extremely limited but defined vocabulary which suggests the existence of a complete language, or whatever portions of the language are needed for the story. Constructed languages are a regular part of the genre, appearing in Star Wars , Star Trek , The Lord of

3456-429: The book's author, and preferably also fit with any personal names of fictional speakers of the language. An a priori (from Latin a priori , "from the former") constructed language is one whose features (including vocabulary, grammar, etc.) are not based on an existing language, and an a posteriori language is the opposite. This categorization, however, is not absolute, as many constructed languages may be called

3528-642: The doctors of Bologna and the doctors of Orléans to comment upon it. St. Yves (1253–1303) studied civil law at Orléans, and Pope Clement V also studied there law and letters; by a papal bull published at Lyon, 27 January 1306, he endowed the Orléans institutes with the title and privileges of a university. Twelve later popes granted the new university many privileges. In the 14th century it had as many as five thousand students from France, Germany, Lorraine , Burgundy , Champagne , Picardy , Normandy , Touraine , Guyenne and Scotland. The current university

3600-423: The early 20th century (e.g. Ro ), but most recent engineered languages have had more modest goals; some are limited to a specific field, like mathematical formalism or calculus (e.g. Lincos and programming languages ), others are designed for eliminating syntactical ambiguity (e.g., Loglan and Lojban ) or maximizing conciseness (e.g., Ithkuil ). Already in the Encyclopédie attention began to focus on

3672-438: The ending -ì for the past are always stressed; when two or more suffixes are combined, the stress always falls on the penultimate suffix (the last but one). The stress is marked with a written accent (à è ì ò ù) on the stressed vowel when it falls on the last syllable. For example: kotèl, perì, fotò, menù = "knife, carried, photo, menu". Uropi roots can be divided into three categories: First and foremost Uropi claims to be

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3744-600: The famous London "smog" comes from the crossing of '"smoke" and "fog". Let us also mention the words ' franglais (Fr = français + anglais ), denglisch (Ger. = Deutsch + Englisch ), spanglish (US = Spanish + English). These "hybrid" words only account for 3% of Uropi vocabulary. Uropi also uses many words which are already "international", like taksì, skol (school), bus, art, matc (match), polìz (police), simfonij (symphony), and tabàk (tobacco). As many other conlangs , Uropi uses many compounds , either combining two roots, or using prefixes and suffixes . Among

3816-462: The first mention of the concept of a constructed language in literature. The earliest non-natural languages were considered less "constructed" than "super-natural", mystical, or divinely inspired. The Lingua Ignota , recorded in the 12th century by St. Hildegard of Bingen , is an example, and apparently the first entirely artificial language. It is a form of private mystical cant (see also Enochian ). An important example from Middle-Eastern culture

3888-653: The former, there are the following examples: lucitòr , "lighthouse", from luc , "light" and tor , "tower"; or, with sopo , "to sleep", sopisàk , "sleeping-bag", or sopivagòn , "sleeper" (train). There are also numerous examples of compounds built with prefixes or suffixes: for example with davo , "to give", disdavo , "to distribute", can be formed; with tel , "goal, purpose", atelo , "end up in, come to", can be formed; with breko , "to break", and us , "out", usbreko , "to break out", can be formed; with apel , "apple", aplar , "apple tree", and aplaria , "apple orchard", can be formed. In most cases, those compounds reveal

3960-860: The human user, and optimized for efficient recognition by computer speech recognition algorithms. Artists may use language as a source of creativity in art, poetry, or calligraphy, or as a metaphor to address themes as cultural diversity and the vulnerability of the individual in a globalized world. Some people prefer however to take pleasure in constructing, crafting a language by a conscious decision for reasons of literary enjoyment or aesthetic reasons without any claim of usefulness. Such artistic languages begin to appear in Early Modern literature (in Pantagruel , and in Utopian contexts), but they only seem to gain notability as serious projects beginning in

4032-410: The legal consensus on ownership of languages remains uncertain. The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre claims ownership of Palawa kani , an attempted composite reconstruction of up to a dozen extinct Tasmanian indigenous languages, and has asked Misplaced Pages to remove its page on the project. However, there is no current legal backing for the claim. Various papers on constructed languages were published from

4104-613: The letter ʒ, which comes from the International Phonetic Alphabet . Each letter corresponds to a sound and each sound to a letter. All consonants are pronounced as in English except The vowels a, e, i, o, u are pronounced as in Italian or Spanish: casa, solo, vino, luna, pepe . Stress normally falls on the main root . For example, in apkebo = to behead, the stress falls on keb = head. However some suffixes (such as -èl indicating an instrument) and

4176-437: The most easily recognizable term for speakers of the greatest number of Indo-European languages. Thus, in liamo , to love, the li- comes from Germanic and Slavic languages (cf German lieben and Russian liubit ), and the -am , from Latin languages ( amo, amare, amar ); or in mand , hand, the ma- comes from Latin languages and the -and, from Germanic languages (cf Latin manus and German hand ) This process

4248-459: The noun they qualify. Some are "pure" adjectives: bun : "good"; glen : "green", kurti : "short", others are derived from nouns. In this case, their form is identical to that of the genitive singular: mani : "manly, man's"; ʒinu : feminine, "woman's". A few quantitative indefinite adjectives which are also pronouns take an -e in the plural: mol, mole = "much, many", poj, poje = "little, few", tal, tale = "every, all", ek, eke = "some,

4320-717: The number of women participating has increased over time. More recently founded online communities include the Zompist Bulletin Board (ZBB; since 2001) and the Conlanger Bulletin Board. Discussion on these forums includes presentation of members' conlangs and feedback from other members, discussion of natural languages, whether particular conlang features have natural language precedents, and how interesting features of natural languages can be repurposed for conlangs, posting of interesting short texts as translation challenges, and meta-discussion about

4392-491: The other substantives are neuter: they can equally end with a consonant or with an -a : for example, tab : "table", ment : "mind", or teatra : "theatre", centra : "centre". They correspond to the neuter personal pronoun je = "it". The nouns ending with another vowel are essentially "international" words like taksì, eurò, menù . They take an -s in the plural, but no specific mark in the genitive. As in English, qualifying adjectives are invariable. They are placed before

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4464-450: The philosophy of conlanging, conlangers' purposes, and whether conlanging is an art or a hobby. Another 2001 survey by Patrick Jarrett showed an average age of 30.65, with the average time since starting to invent languages 11.83 years. A more recent thread on the ZBB showed that many conlangers spend a relatively small amount of time on any one conlang, moving from one project to another; about

4536-447: The plural; the genitive singular is marked with an -i , and the genitive plural with -is : man, mane, mani, manis = "man, men, man's, men's". All feminine nouns, i.e., nouns denoting women or female animals end in -a : ʒina : "woman"; kata : "(she)cat". These nouns take an -s in the plural. The -a becomes -u in the genitive singular, -us in the genitive plural: gala, galas, galu, galus = "hen, hens, hen's, hens'". All

4608-538: The public authorities in Casandreia ... As for what this letter says, in my opinion not even the Pythian god could make sense of it." While the mechanisms of grammar suggested by classical philosophers were designed to explain existing languages ( Latin , Greek , and Sanskrit ), they were not used to construct new grammars. Roughly contemporary to Plato, in his descriptive grammar of Sanskrit, Pāṇini constructed

4680-463: The range of human thought through the reform of language would fail, as concepts like "freedom" will reappear in new words if the old words vanish. Proponents claim a particular language makes it easier to express and understand concepts in one area, and more difficult in others. An example can be taken from the way various programming languages make it easier to write certain kinds of programs and harder to write others. Another reason cited for using

4752-488: The rights is legitimate—would be likely to sue individuals who publish material in said languages, especially if the author might profit from said material. Furthermore, comprehensive learning material for such constructed languages as High Valyrian and Klingon has been published and made freely accessible on the language-learning platform Duolingo —but those courses are licensed by the respective copyright holders. Because only a few such disputes have occurred thus far,

4824-451: The roots and thus the meaning of the compound. However, some of those compounds, even if they follow the etymology of equivalent words in living European languages, have a more obscure, rather metaphorical meaning. Thus, ruspeko , literally "to look back", means "to respect"; or incepo , literally "to seize, to grasp inside", means "to understand" (reminiscent of "to grasp (a concept)"). Like some modern Indo-European languages , Uropi has

4896-652: The translation of the Hebrew Bible into what he calls "Israeli". Esperanto as a living spoken language has evolved significantly from the prescriptive blueprint published in 1887, so that modern editions of the Fundamenta Krestomatio , a 1903 collection of early texts in the language, require many footnotes on the syntactic and lexical differences between early and modern Esperanto. Proponents of constructed languages often have many reasons for using them. The famous but disputed Sapir–Whorf hypothesis

4968-402: The words which are used today in modern I-E languages. Thus mata corresponds to Hindi mata, sol to Spanish, Portuguese, Galician, Icelandic, and Scandinavian sol . When there is no common Indo-European root or when there are several roots to express the same reality in various languages, Uropi may use "hybrid" words, crossing two different roots taken from different languages so as to create

5040-464: Was Volapük , proposed in 1879 by Johann Martin Schleyer ; within a decade, 283 Volapükist clubs were counted all over the globe. However, disagreements between Schleyer and some prominent users of the language led to schism, and by the mid-1890s it fell into obscurity, making way for Esperanto , proposed in 1887 by L. L. Zamenhof , and its descendants . Interlingua , the most recent auxlang to gain

5112-578: Was a project of a perfect language with which the infidels could be convinced of the truth of the Christian faith. It was basically an application of combinatorics on a given set of concepts. During the Renaissance , Lullian and Kabbalistic ideas were drawn upon in a magical context, resulting in cryptographic applications. Renaissance interest in Ancient Egypt , notably the discovery of

5184-503: Was founded in 1960, after its medieval predecessor was closed down in 1793 and merged into the University of France in 1808. The university is organised into three Teaching and Research divisions (UFR): In addition, it has: Conlangs A constructed language (shortened to conlang ) is a language whose phonology , grammar , orthography , and vocabulary , instead of having developed naturally , are consciously devised for some purpose, which may include being devised for

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