 Most of the languages in this festival are national or ethnic languages like Korean, Russian or Urdu which had no definite beginning and has changed haphazardly over many centuries but there's another kind of language sometimes called an artificial language and the most famous one is Esperanto but I'm actually going to talk about a number of them now even though the word artificial is often used I think the word artificial is unnecessarily pejorative because in fact in some ways all languages are artificial there's nothing that actually says that this theme or this concept has to be called this word or these words have to be constructed in a particular way so really what people refer to as natural languages are just languages whose origin is sort of lost in the mists of time so constructed languages sometimes referred to as common languages because some people like me are a bit lazy are fascinating in their own right and a disclaimer I do speak one particular common Esperanto as my badge here says but it doesn't mean I'm actually going to show why Esperanto is the best possible constructed language but I will be including Esperanto in the talk briefly although I will also be doing a separate session on Esperanto tomorrow I'll talk about the bigger hand Richard is actually going to be doing a session on Esperanto just after this one so apart from sampling 17 different common languages I want to address some questions such as what constructed language is a common language a real language how many common languages are there and when was the first common language invented okay let's go for the last question first when was the first common language invented we actually don't know but a very early one was called I'm sorry I'm sorry was called lingua ignota which literally means in Latin an unknown language it's from the 12th century by an abes called Hildegard von Bingen I believe was actually saying it's a St. Hildegard von Bingen basically on Latin and in itself it's similar to a common in its systemised grammar and I just have five words I don't even have a complete sentence in it and here's how about if I move over here does that make it difficult for you Richard there you go then people can actually see the screen without me being in front of them how's that okay so there's five words in lingua ignota alright why construct a language was another question in some cases it's to try to overcome the curse of this does everyone know what this is the Tower of Babel which is the story from the Hebrew Bible the Old Testament that said that mankind was getting pretty cocky and they thought there's nothing we can't do let's build this tower up to the heavens and God didn't like this so he decided to confound their languages and the tower tumbled down and suddenly everyone discovered they couldn't make themselves understood to other people so that's the curse of the Tower of Babel and many conlangs were created with the idea that if we could just get back to this one perfect language which some people actually believed was a proto-Hebrew in fact some people believed was actually the Hebrew of the Old Testament was the language then everything would be okay many conlangs of the 17th and 18th century were philosophically based to create a perfect medium for discourse for example one with a not a very catchy name real character and philosophical language comes from the name of the treatise by John Wilkins in 1668 an essay towards real character and a philosophical language it was intended mainly for scholars but also for diplomats, travellers, merchants the term real character was a family of symbols corresponding to a classification scheme kind of like Rojay's the source I'm going to continue with Rojay's the source that bad poets use to find a word for a concept that isn't the same word that they've already used once or twice before but in fact Rojay invented the source as a philosophical thing to systematise all possible human thought so in fact if you look at the original Rojay's the source you'll discover at the beginning things are divided into material and immaterial and the material is divided into this and that so it's kind of a taxonomy, a hierarchy of everything that you could possibly want to talk about but people since then have used the source as a way of as an aid to write some people refer to it as a backwards dictionary because you start with the meaning and then you find the words that match it anyway so this was based on a tree of the universe things material and immaterial here's just one part of that tree category 18 beasts which divides into live birthing and egg laying live birthing beasts divide into whole footed, cloven footed and clawed clawed divides into rapacious and non-rapacious rapacious divides into cat kind, roundish headed and dog kind oblong headed and the dog kind divides into European and exotic European divides into terrestrial and amphibious terrestrial divides into greater kind and lesser kind greater kind divides into dog which is docile and wolf which is wild so in this language, this hierarchy of ideas a dog is a docile, oblong headed, rapacious, clawed, live birthing beast okay how does that turn into the language well here are the symbols beast, okay category 18 beast, oblong headed now in fact the language doesn't actually use every single part of the categories because just for the sake of some simplicity anyway greater kind, sorry oblong headed is that addition to the symbol a bit line, sub category 1 greater kind and then you add a little circle to show a minimal opposition so that's how you find the wolf so the trouble is there are obviously many, many ways of categorizing the universe imagine that you were going to create a categorization system do you think you'd do it in exactly the same way as Wilkins? probably not so that's the symbol for wolf and it's interesting that with a bit of a mention I suppose you could say it looks a bit like a wolf how do you speak this language? okay, beast is ze, oblong headed is greater kind is a so zeta is a dog and zitas is a wolf now can you see another disadvantage with this system apart from kind of arbitrariness this is a criticism of this language from someone called Albert Werard words expressing closely related ideas have it almost the same form different perhaps by their last letter only so it would be technically difficult to remember all these minute distinctions and confusion would arise in rapid reading and particularly in conversation but perhaps this wouldn't have bothered Wilkins because the purpose of his language was to be a pure algebra of thought okay, so that leads us to possible purposes of a common language and we've already had to be a perfect language, an algebra of thought another one is to be an international language used by as many people as possible so therefore these are learning outweighs this idea of being perfect it should be good but not so perfect that it becomes unworkable another idea is for it to be a work of art or perhaps for a fictional world and we'll encounter some examples of that later or perhaps an interesting experiment some languages were invented not really to be spoken in conversation but just to see what would happen if people were made to communicate or tried to communicate in a particular kind of way would it affect the actual way that they think and also common names differ in their origin and most books that I've read on this split common names into a priori and a posteriori in other words priority is Wilkins philosophical language so the words for things being no resemblance to any supposed or so-called natural language whereas a posteriori, a posteriori ori languages have grammar and vocabulary derived from ethnic languages you also get mixed, you get some common names which have a bit of both so a priori is Wilkins also related to this distinction and difference of purposes the distinction between ideology and pragmatism an ideological approach says that language should be as perfect as possible the pragmatic approach it says that it should be perfect enough but not at the expense of usability okay, next language is Sol Re Sol which is I find very distinct by a Frenchman François Soudre and the words were made up of one to five syllables or notes for notes of the scale so each may be one of seven basic phonemes which can also be accented or lengthened so parts of speech are derived from verbs by lengthening one of the syllables so you have Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Si so as you can see the name of the language is constructed in Sol Re Sol words beginning with sol have a meaning related to the sound it goes da da da so you can actually play it on the piano you don't have to actually say Sol Re Sol you can just comment if you like so they're related to arts and sciences whereas Sol Sol so that's Sol Sol Redo which means a headache so like our constructed language is with an a priori vocabulary Sol Re Sol was hard to learn an idiosyncratic way of categorizing the universe but perhaps there was another problem and I'll illustrate that with a video of a play and that is that after a while it just becomes a little bit ridiculous maybe it's because they're terribly bad actors but it's perhaps hard to be terribly meaningful when you're da da da da and so on okay universal glott it's an a posteriori language the vocab derived from insisting European languages it was much admired later by language creators but it wasn't particularly successful in its time and here's a sample men signores sende evas un grammatik e un verribil de un nuov glott nomen universal glott probably don't have to actually translate that for you you can kind of get the gist of it you know some eaglish and a bit of romance languages volapuk is particularly important for Esperanto because it was really the first conlang to have taken off and it was the immediate predecessor for Esperanto by a German priest called Johann Martin Schleier and the vocabulary is actually mostly you know he was German it was mostly from English with some German and French so theoretically it was an a posteriori language however because of Schleier's insistence that basic morphemes had to have this pattern consonant, vowel, consonant, for example, vowel and that certain sounds for example the sound of er are eliminated because they would be difficult to pronounce for Asian people, for example many words were unrecognizable so for example vol is world and puke is speck or language so volapuk means world language the grammar is very complex for example every verb can be conjugated in 1584 ways but it actually became quite famous perhaps surprisingly so by the end of the 1880s there were about 200 volapuk societies and clubs around the world and 25 volapuk journals even people who didn't learn it at least knew about it President Cleveland's wife named her dog volapuk for example and the praise was big enough to be mocked in local papers such as the Milwaukee Sentinel a charming young student of Grooke once tried to acquire volapuk but it sounded so bad that a French woman had and she quit it and he was less than a rook and here's a sample if ortev orla in Europe oridev dov pukis medik if you should travel in Europe you will hear many languages here's a video of someone speaking volapuk a bit better than I did complex grammar and other difficulties led to recommendations for its improvement and this is the death knell of conlangs is people saying it's pretty good but it should be improved in this way or that way and so on and the reason why it was it was the death knell for language is that they were all rejected by Martin Schleyer in fact he insisted on retaining total control the result was a splintering into here are just some of the offshoots of volapuk so its popularity declined as a result and also because of the rise of Esperanto by Ludwig Zamenhof in 1887 and my talk tomorrow and Richard's just after this talk will give a bit more detail but I'll summarise here Esperanto it's Esperanto literally in Esperanto means hope one who hopes it was after the pseudonym docker Esperanto that Zamenhof gained so he actually called it lingvo internazia Esperanto is a little bit catchier the vocab which Romance languages, Germanic languages Slavic languages even a bit of Greek the grammar is basically a glutinative like Japanese rather than inflectional so the Esperanto word exter londano exter means outside of land means land and arno means member of so it's someone who belongs to an outside land Japanese I believe I hope there's no one here that speaks Japanese because I'm probably wrong here but I've been told that way means exactly the same thing inflectional languages is one where parts of the word when words change grammatical their grammatical role in a verb to a noun or become pluralised or something like that you change the morphine the root itself such as foot and feet for example in English it would be handy if all you had to do was add an S and then that part of the list would be a glutinative but English and a lot of other languages are inflectional so Arno Archlea and his vocab gave control of Esperanto to its community of speakers he actually supported some suggested changes that decided to submit them to a vote but the result was let's keep the language as it is not necessarily because the language was perfect but because native changes would have been too disruptive at that point yet there have been breakaways most notably sorry most notably Edo from 1907 however even it had breakaways how many speakers of Esperanto is a question that you often hear well it's very hard to say because what do you actually lean by speak and there was a Finnish linguist Jorko Lindstedt gave the following estimates in 1996 based on some surveys that he did in multiple countries there's about a thousand people roughly who actually have Esperanto as their native language so the children of parents whose common language was Esperanto are about 10,000 people who you would say spoke it fluently there are 100,000 who use it actively and I probably put myself in that circle rather than fluently that Richard I think would be in that one of the 10,000 about a million who can use it understand a large amount passively and there are probably around 10 million people who have studied it at one time so the question is which circle do you actually use to answer the question how many speakers of Esperanto are there as a comparison in the year 2000 there are about 100 to 200 speakers of Edo worldwide in their world congresses which apparently they still do have or at least as of a few years ago a very intimate affair Esperanto is one of 71 languages supported by Google Translate and I have a video here which I'm going to actually skip of a broadcast from El Popola Chimillo so it's a Chinese TV program that uses Esperanto Latino Sen Cine Flexione is one of a number of projects to revive Latin that make it simpler so it's Latin without flexions so here's a sample which I'm not going to read out but again like universal you can probably get the gist of it if you know some roots and so on Interlingua is a similar kind of thing not so specifically based in Latin but not by one person but by a committee of people the International Auxiliary Language Association 1951 it's definitely a posteriori language based on similar principles to universal lot and many like it and it actually achieved a moderate degree of success because of its association with scientific research and here's a sample peace common with liberty requires constant devotion and incessant vigilance so you can passively understand it but then that's only half of the language task if you want people to actually write up and speak in it then you need to actually make sure that what you're saying makes sense Logland is a very interesting example by James Cook Brown 1960 who was a sociologist and a science fiction author it was originally designed as a tool for linguistic research investigating the Sapir-Wolf hypothesis which very simply it's the principle of linguistic relativity language precedes thought so it's not as though you have thoughts and then you try and find the words for it but the thoughts that you are capable of depend on the words and the language that you have available so he decided alright let's create a language where there's no possibility for ambiguity as there is in English for example if we say the lady hit the man with an umbrella then what does that mean? the lady had an umbrella and hit the man or the man had the umbrella and the lady hit him there's no way to know just with the language which probably worked out by now means logical language doesn't allow that so there are no words with multiple meanings for example the English word left he was the last one left he left the room he's the one on the left none of that is possible so here's a bit of log land and there's the there's the translation of it and you can see how logical it is in the much former now so you know long time ago three somethings x were small sisters said the door master this apparently comes from Alice through the looking glass I think who began to speak very quick becomingly and were named and here's a list Elsie, Lacey and Tilly at the same time three somethings x who will now be referred to as Sorm I don't know why inhabited the down part of one waterhole so not exactly the perfect language to tell your yes so here's the here's the more natural translation of it not really the kind of language you would really tell children's stories in I don't imagine okay lojban was invented because log land the copyright of log land was held by James Cook Brown people wanted to tinker with it and he wouldn't let them so they said okay we'll create our own so hence lojban those people familiar with software development would refer to this as an open source language so it has a market for figurative speech that's like adding a smiley face icon at the end of your facebook page facebook post I suppose and here's an example true false that's true and you may realise that comes from Esperanto you is a speaker of English language okay and his language unfortunately I don't have a translation for that now he's another one that's similar to that and it's an experimental language called La Dan by Susan Hayden Elgin and it's a feminist language it contains words to make unambiguous statements that include how one feels about what one is saying it's designed to counter the language's limitations on women who are forced to respond I know I said that but I meant this most La Dan sentences have three particles or words or particles the first is the sentence type that's over a statement question or request the second is the tense past present future or hypothetical and the last is evidence for statements or because it was actually perceived we know because it's self-evident it's perceived in a dream assume true because it came from a trusted source because the source is distrusted imagine you're in data hypothetical and the validity is unknown okay so let's construct a sentence in La Dan so let's have a statement in the past involving work one let's see directly so that means the woman worked and I know because I witnessed it if we wanted to make a question we do exactly the same bar erl ha with which means did the woman work and you don't need to add this last particle because it's a question you don't actually know what the source is and here's a request in the present to speak you it's please speak La Dan F so there's the accusative ending there Tokipana I believe you're a bit of a fan of Tokipana Richard well there's only really a tiny bit to speak isn't there by a Canadian translator and linguist a minimalist language focuses on simple concepts that are relatively universal among cultures inspired by Taoist philosophy it's not designed as an international auxiliary language which is probably why a number of Esperantists have also filled around with it tried it out it has 14 phonemes which are listed there and 5 vowels including 5 vowels 123 root words so basically 123 words in the dictionary Toki is language talking to talk, speech to speak communication verbal to chat Pona is good goodness simplicity, simple, positive, benevolent ideal, nice, correct, right and to repair so no diphthongs long vowels consonant pluses or tone the roots are generally from English pigeon, top pizza finish a little and so on including Esperanto and so it's more democratic perhaps than Esperanto but that doesn't necessarily make it easier to pick up if you have to speak one of those languages maybe you're not in that much that's better for you he's a sample a very famous passage anyone want to make a guess it's just about every common language yes and in particular it's the most pre listed boys we really have to think about that 5 minutes left was done to help kids in the Ontario-Britual Children Center having several calls to communicate this is interesting because it's a graphical language a bit like what people think how it was simple, 100 basic symbols can be combined to generate new symbols the symbols don't correspond to sound so it's not a spoken language and here's an example, I want to go to the cinema so I person plus the number one first person want so it's the heart which is feeling fire and the verb indicator above to go the leg and the verb indicator and cinema is a house with pictures that move okay now a few fictional languages before we finish quenya and cindering from Tolkien, from the Middle Earth trilogy The Lord of the Rings from the mid 1950s the interesting thing is these were invented first, long before as you can see he invented it from about 1950 the books came out in the mid mid 1950s so Tolkien actually said that the languages were his secret vice he kept them kind of in secret and he thought well if I write some books then people will think that's the reason it'll have a purpose for the language and here's a little bit I'm sure a lot of people were waiting for me to get on to Klingon by Mark Ocrand and had a definite purpose right from the beginning it was done for the movie Star Trek so not the TV series because even though there were supposed words in Klingon spoken then they weren't real whereas for the movie the producers decided well let's actually hire a linguist and we'll get a real language created so they got him to do it it was designed to sound alien and the vocabulary was centered on spacecraft and warfare so it's perhaps a little bit hard to say darling I love you in Klingon and here's a bit of Klingon speaking about it aggressively now V is from a more recent film Avatar from 2005 2009 but the language had been from 2005 it's designed to be learnable and pronounceable doesn't sound like a real word is it pronounceable anyway by the actors and all elements are from human languages but the combination is unique that is actually the creator of it Paul Fromar speaking now V it's interesting although there's a Klingon word for thank you most Klingon speakers just say much which means good Dothraki any Game of Thrones fans here Dothraki is the language from Game of Thrones by another linguist has a huge audience so perhaps more people have heard Dothraki than a lot of other languages inspired by Russian Armenian, Estonian Inuk, Titut and Swahili whatever you say the names are there it's impossible to say this book in the Land of Invented Languages by Ariha Ocred she thought she'd be able to count how many languages there were she got to 500 for her book and then she just gave up after that I think now she has this web page I think she does actually add to that when she discovers more the language itself is very interesting so Klingons differ according to their purpose their ongoing development their origin their vocabulary and if it's an aposteriori vocabulary it's based on either one language or multiple languages and the complexity is either minimalist or complex and Klingon users differ according to their philosophical approach or pragmatic is a common language unfortunately I'm not going to answer that question because we've run out of time but here that's the the books that I can highly recommend by Ariha Ocred if you want to be a little bit more academic there's this one by Inverto Ekko which I'm about halfway through the search for the perfect language if you're an Esperantoist you might like this one and the search for Chiwi in the search of the world language or inter-liquistics for everyone and inter-liquistics is the word for the study of constructed languages so thank you in various common languages