The science of language — its structure, its history, its social life, and its relationship to thought. From the oldest surviving grammar to the newest theories of meaning.
The Linguistics Department is the Universitas Scholarium’s faculty of language as an object of science — the study of its structure, its history, its social life, and its relation to mind. Its scope reaches from the ancient grammatical traditions of several civilisations to the modern constructed languages. The faculty are arranged by tradition. Its classical grammarians — including Sībawayhi, who codified Arabic, Xǔ Shèn and Yáng Xióng of the Chinese tradition, and Aristarchus of Samothrace of the Greek — founded the systematic study of language in their cultures. Jacob Grimm brought the comparative method and the laws of sound change; Lord Monboddo speculated on language’s origins. A distinctive wing on constructed languages seats L.L. Zamenhof, creator of Esperanto, and the inventors of other planned and fictional tongues. Each is an AI simulacrum that reasons in its progenitor’s linguistic tradition.
Ancient & Classical Grammar
The grammarians who first wrote a language down as a system — in Sanskrit, Greek, Chinese, Latin and Arabic, independently and within a few centuries of one another.
Asṭādhyāyī · Sanskrit Grammar · Zero Morpheme · Generative Rules · The Oldest Linguistic Science
Ancient Indian grammarian whose Asṭādhyāyī (Eight Chapters) is the most complete and rigorous descriptive grammar of any language until the twentieth century. Its nearly 4,000 sūtras describe Sanskrit phonology and morphology with a precision that anticipates modern formal linguistics, including the concept of zero morpheme and rule-ordering. He is the founding figure of linguistic science. Cross-posted from Universitas.
Can help you study: The Asṭādhyāyī and its method, Sanskrit grammar, zero morpheme, generative rule-ordering, and the history of linguistic science from its Indian origins.
→ Converse with Pāṇini
Textual Criticism · Homeric Philology · Alexandrian Scholarship · The Aristarchian Signs
Aristarchus was head of the Library of Alexandria and the greatest textual critic of antiquity. He established the standard text of Homer by comparing manuscripts, marking suspect lines with the obelos and genuine readings with the diple — the first systematic apparatus of textual criticism. His commentaries set the standard for scholarly commentary for five centuries. The word “Aristarchan” passed into Greek as a term for the most rigorous scholarly judgment.
Can help you with: Textual criticism, the Homeric text and its transmission, Alexandrian scholarship, the history of editorial signs and conventions, how to evaluate variant readings, and the philological tradition from Alexandria to modern critical editions.
→ Converse with Aristarchus of Samothrace
Fāngyán · Chinese Dialectology · Lexical Geography · Dialect Survey
Yáng Xióng compiled the Fāngyán — the first systematic dialect dictionary in any language. He collected vocabulary from across the Han Empire, noted regional variation, and identified which words were shared vs. local. His method anticipates modern dialectology by two thousand years.
Can help you with: The history of Chinese dialectology, the Fāngyán methodology, dialect geography and lexical variation, early Chinese scholarship, and Han dynasty intellectual culture.
→ Converse with Yáng Xióng
Shuōwén Jiězì · Chinese Character Analysis · Radical System · Lexicography
Xǔ Shèn compiled the Shuōwén Jiězì — the first systematic analysis of Chinese characters, organised by 540 semantic radicals. He analysed each character’s components, explained its meaning, and gave its pronunciation. The radical system he established still organises Chinese dictionaries today.
Can help you with: Chinese character structure and etymology, the radical system and its logic, the six categories of character formation, classical Chinese lexicography, and the history of Chinese writing.
→ Converse with Xǔ Shèn
Classical Exegesis · Han Confucian Scholarship · Philological Commentary · The Three Rites · Text and Tradition
The greatest commentator of the Eastern Han, whose annotations on the three ritual classics and other core texts became the authoritative scholarly tradition. His philological method — careful attention to the words of ancient texts, their meanings, and their relationship to practice — defines Chinese scholarly linguistics. Cross-posted from the Taixue.
Can help you study: Han Confucian philology, classical commentary and exegesis, the three ritual classics, and the Chinese scholarly tradition of learning through close engagement with canonical texts.
→ Converse with Zheng Xuan
Ars Minor · Ars Maior · The Eight Parts of Speech · Barbarism and Solecism · Tropes and Figures
The master who reduced a language to questions a child could answer aloud. The Ars Minor is a catechism: what part of speech is this, how many kinds are there, what are they, decline it. No explanation, no theory, no prose — only the interrogation and the expected reply, drilled until the answer arrives before the thought does. That form outlived the empire, and a schoolbook was still called a donat a thousand years later.
Can help you study: The catechetical form as a teaching technology: why question-and-answer produces recall that exposition does not, and what it sacrifices. Working through the eight parts of speech as he set them. Why a grammar with no theory in it proved more durable than the theoretical ones. And the honest limit — a pupil who can answer every question in the Ars Minor has been trained rather than taught.
→ Converse with Aelius Donatus Simulacrum
Institutiones Grammaticae · De Constructione · Latin Syntax · Attestation from the Auctores · Greek Comparison
Donatus gives the boy the parts of speech, and that is right for a boy — but a part of speech is not a thing standing alone, it is a thing that joins, and the whole difficulty of Latin lies in the joining. So the Institutiones grammaticae runs to eighteen books: sixteen establishing the parts exhaustively from the letter upward, with no rule admitted that is not attested from an author, and then two on constructio — which is what the sixteen were for. He taught Latin in Constantinople, in the Greek capital, and where Latin puzzled him he looked at Greek, because Apollonius had already solved it there. Nine hundred manuscripts survive; every medieval school that got past Donatus came to him.
Can help you study: Syntax as the real difficulty of a language, and word-classes as the preparation for it — the last two books of the Institutiones, which became the seed of speculative grammar. No rule without a citation: attestation from the auctores as a method rather than a decoration. Latin explained through Greek, and what a bilingual grammarian sees that a monolingual one cannot. And the honest limit — exhaustiveness is not the same as explanation.
→ Converse with Priscian of Caesarea Simulacrum
Arabic Grammar · al-Kitāb · Phonetics · Grammar as Behaviour
Sībawayhi’s al-Kitāb is the founding monument of Arabic linguistics — the most comprehensive grammatical description of any language before the modern era. Written in Basra in the eighth century, it describes Arabic morphology and syntax with a precision that modern grammarians still consult. He understood grammar as a description of what speakers actually do, not a prescription for what they should do.
Can help you with: Classical Arabic grammar, the linguistic traditions of Basra and Kufa, Arabic morphology and syntax, descriptive vs. prescriptive grammar, the history of Arabic scholarship, and how the most complete ancient grammatical description was built.
→ Converse with Sībawayhi
Historical & Comparative Linguistics
Language as something with a history that can be reconstructed — sound laws, language families, and the argument about what a comparison can prove.
Origin of Language · Scottish Enlightenment · Language as Acquired Art
Scottish judge and philosopher who argued that language is not natural to man but an acquired art — that society existed before speech, and that the capacity for language had to be developed over generations. He was ridiculed for suggesting humans were related to apes. Darwin, reading him decades later, did not laugh.
Can help you study: The origin of language, the Scottish Enlightenment, language as acquired art, the relationship between language and society, and the pre-Darwinian argument for human-primate connection.
→ Converse with Lord Monboddo
Historical Linguistics · Grimm’s Law · Germanic Languages · Fairy Tales
Grimm formulated the first law of historical phonology: the systematic consonant shifts distinguishing Germanic languages from the rest of Indo-European. Every Proto-Indo-European /p/ became /f/ in Germanic; every /t/ became /þ/. This demonstrated that language change is lawful, not random, and opened historical-comparative linguistics. He also compiled the Deutsches Wörterbuch and, with his brother Wilhelm, documented fairy tales as linguistic and cultural evidence.
Can help you with: Grimm’s Law and its implications, the historical-comparative method, Proto-Indo-European reconstruction, the history of Germanic languages, the relationship between folklore and linguistic evidence, and the founding of historical linguistics.
→ Converse with Jacob Grimm
Linguistic Psychology · Folk Psychology · Humboldt’s Legacy · Comparative Mythology · Cross-posted from the HWJ
Philologist and philosopher of language who developed Wilhelm von Humboldt’s ideas into a systematic linguistic psychology, arguing that grammar reflects the inner form of a culture’s thought. With Moritz Lazarus he founded Völkerpsychologie (folk psychology) and the journal that disseminated it. Cross-posted from the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums.
Can help you study: Linguistic psychology and Humboldt’s legacy, the inner form of language, Völkerpsychologie, and the relationship between language, culture, and thought.
→ Converse with Heymann Steinthal
Mǎshì Wéntōng · First Chinese Grammar · East-West Synthesis
Chinese diplomat and linguist who wrote the Mǎshì Wéntōng (1898) — the first grammar of Chinese. He applied Western analytical categories without destroying what was distinctive about Chinese, proving that Chinese has systematic grammatical structure despite lacking inflection.
Can help you study: Chinese grammar, the Mǎshì Wéntōng, East-West linguistic synthesis, the grammatical analysis of isolating languages, and the challenge of describing a language across traditions.
→ Converse with Mǎ Jiànzhōng (馬建忠)
Cultural Relativism · Descriptive Linguistics · Indigenous Languages · Anti-Racism
Boas established that every human language is equally complex and worthy of description — there are no primitive languages, only under-described ones. His documentation of indigenous North American languages created the corpus from which twentieth-century linguistic theory would be built. He also used linguistic evidence against scientific racism, demonstrating that language families do not correspond to racial categories.
Can help you with: Indigenous North American languages, descriptive linguistics methodology, the linguistic case against scientific racism, the Boasian tradition and its influence on Sapir and Whorf, and the ethics of language documentation.
→ Converse with Franz Boas
Linguistic Progress · Efficiency · English Grammar · Language Does Not Decay
Jespersen argued that language changes for the better — a radical position when most philologists believed change was decay. His Progress in Language showed that English analytic grammar was more efficient than Latin synthetic grammar. His seven-volume Modern English Grammar remains the most comprehensive historical grammar of English ever written. He also invented the Jespersen cycle explaining the history of negation.
Can help you with: The history of English grammar, the theory of linguistic progress, the Jespersen cycle and negation, the relationship between analytic and synthetic grammar, and the defence of descriptivism against prescriptivism.
→ Converse with Otto Jespersen
Modern Chinese Linguistics · Phonology · Tone · Fieldwork
Chinese-American linguist who combined rigorous phonological theory with extensive fieldwork across Chinese dialects. He demonstrated that tone is not melody but phonological structure, and his dialect recordings remain an irreplaceable resource for Chinese linguistics.
Can help you study: Chinese phonology, tone as structure, dialect fieldwork, modern Chinese linguistics, the Gwoyeu Romatzyh romanisation system, and the relationship between fieldwork and theory.
→ Converse with Yuen Ren Chao (趙元任)
Structural & Phonological Theory
The turn to system: language described as a structure of contrasts rather than a collection of words with histories.
Sign · Signifier · Signified · Synchrony vs Diachrony · Langue vs Parole · Structural Linguistics
Swiss linguist whose posthumously compiled Cours de linguistique générale founded structural linguistics and, through it, twentieth-century semiotics, structuralism, and post-structuralism. His distinction between the signifier (sound-image) and the signified (concept), and between synchronic and diachronic study, redefined how language can be studied scientifically.
Can help you study: The linguistic sign, signifier and signified, synchronic vs diachronic analysis, langue vs parole, the Cours, and the foundational concepts of structural linguistics.
→ Converse with Ferdinand de Saussure
Linguistic Relativity · Indigenous Languages · Language as Art · Sapir-Whorf
Sapir documented more indigenous North American languages than anyone before or since while simultaneously developing theoretical linguistics at the highest level. His Language (1921) remains the most elegant introduction to linguistics ever written. He argued that language shapes the categories in which thought is possible — the position later called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
Can help you with: Linguistic relativity, the documentation of indigenous North American languages, typological classification, the relationship between language and thought, and the history of American structural linguistics.
→ Converse with Edward Sapir
Prague School Phonology · The Phoneme · Phonological Oppositions · Grundzüge
Trubetzkoy’s Grundzüge der Phonologie established phonology as a discipline distinct from phonetics. Where phonetics describes physical sounds, phonology analyses the system of contrasts carrying meaning. His theory of distinctive oppositions showed that a phoneme is a bundle of features, not a sound. The book was smuggled out of Vienna as the Gestapo arrived; Trubetzkoy died of a heart attack weeks after being interrogated by them.
Can help you with: The phoneme, phonological oppositions and their typology, the distinction between phonetics and phonology, the Prague School and its legacy, and the history of structural phonology.
→ Converse with Nikolai Trubetzkoy
Structural Linguistics · Poetics · Binary Features · Six Functions of Language
Jakobson brought structuralism to America, applied it to poetry as rigorously as to grammar, and produced the most influential model of communication in linguistics. His six functions of language — referential, emotive, conative, phatic, metalingual, poetic — remain the standard framework for analysing what any utterance is doing. His analysis of distinctive features showed that all phonological contrasts reduce to binary oppositions.
Can help you with: The six functions of language, distinctive feature theory, structuralist literary analysis, the poetic function, the Prague School tradition, and the relationship between linguistics and poetics.
→ Converse with Roman Jakobson
Linguistic Relativity · Habitual Thought · Hopi Time · Fire Inspector
Whorf was a fire insurance inspector by profession and a linguist by vocation. Investigating industrial fires, he noticed that workers behaved dangerously around “empty” petrol drums because the word suggested safety even when the drums were full of vapour. Language was shaping behaviour. Combined with his study of Hopi grammar, this led him to argue that different grammatical structures produce different habitual ways of thinking.
Can help you with: The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, linguistic relativity in strong and weak forms, Hopi grammar and time concepts, the relationship between language and habitual thought, and how occupational insight can produce theoretical breakthroughs.
→ Converse with Benjamin Lee Whorf
Linguistic Typology · Universals · Implicational Hierarchies · African Languages
Greenberg established linguistic typology as a quantitative science. His 1963 paper on word-order universals showed that certain combinations of features co-occur across languages with non-random frequency — implicational universals that reveal the deep structural logic of human language. His classification of African languages into four phyla is still the basis of the field.
Can help you with: Linguistic typology, implicational universals and word order, the classification of African languages, the search for deep structural patterns across human languages, and the methodology of cross-linguistic comparison.
→ Converse with Joseph Greenberg
Semantics, Pragmatics & Discourse
What is meant as against what is said — implicature, metaphor, relevance, and the search for a vocabulary in which meanings can be stated without circularity.
Pragmatics · Conversational Implicature · The Cooperative Principle · Maxims
Grice explained how people communicate far more than they literally say. His theory of conversational implicature showed that listeners derive inferences from the assumption that speakers are being cooperative — observant of four maxims: be truthful, be informative, be relevant, be clear. When a speaker appears to violate a maxim, a cooperative listener infers the reason, and that reason is the implicature. The framework explains irony, indirect speech acts, and the gap between what is said and what is communicated.
Can help you with: Conversational implicature, the Cooperative Principle and its maxims, the distinction between sentence meaning and speaker meaning, pragmatics, irony and indirect communication, and the inferential processes behind utterance interpretation.
→ Converse with Paul Grice
Systemic Functional Linguistics · Metafunctions · Register · Every Clause Does Three Things
Halliday argued that every clause simultaneously does three things: represents experience (ideational function), enacts a social relationship (interpersonal function), and organises a stretch of text (textual function). His systemic functional grammar describes language as a network of choices rather than a set of rules. His framework has been more widely applied to discourse analysis, educational linguistics, and text analysis than any other contemporary grammatical theory.
Can help you with: Systemic functional grammar, the three metafunctions, register analysis, discourse analysis, educational linguistics, and analysing what a text is doing at multiple levels simultaneously.
→ Converse with M.A.K. Halliday
Frame Semantics · Construction Grammar · Case Grammar · FrameNet
Fillmore developed frame semantics: words activate entire cognitive structures — frames — of related concepts. “Buy” activates a commercial transaction frame with buyer, seller, goods, and money; understanding the word means activating the frame. His FrameNet project documented the frames activated by thousands of English words. He also co-developed Construction Grammar, treating grammatical constructions as form-meaning pairings.
Can help you with: Frame semantics, Construction Grammar, FrameNet, case grammar and semantic roles, the relationship between language and conceptual structure, and cognitive approaches to grammar and meaning.
→ Converse with Charles Fillmore
Semantic Primitives · Cross-Cultural Pragmatics · NSM · Cultural Scripts · Untranslatable Words
Natural Semantic Metalanguage proposes that all human meaning decomposes into approximately sixty-five universal semantic primitives — concepts like GOOD, BAD, WANT, THINK, KNOW, SAY — expressible in every language. Complex meanings are defined through combinations in a cross-translatable mini-language. Applied to emotions, it shows that English “anger,” Polish gniew, and Russian zlost’ carve up the affective domain differently; applied to cultural scripts, it makes unstated behavioural norms explicit and comparable.
Can help you with: Cross-cultural semantics, what is and is not translatable, the NSM framework, cultural scripts analysis, emotion vocabulary across languages, the hypothesis of semantic primitives, and the relationship between language, culture, and thought.
→ Explore Natural Semantic Metalanguage
Conceptual Metaphor · Embodied Cognition · Framing · Primary Metaphors
Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Metaphors We Live By, 1980) argues that abstract thought is structured by metaphor in ways speakers are unaware of. “Argument is war,” “time is money,” “theories are buildings” are not poetic elaborations but the cognitive structures through which these domains are understood. The metaphors are grounded in embodied experience. The theory also gave rise to political linguistics: framing an event as “tax relief” vs “budget cut” activates fundamentally different responses.
Can help you with: Identifying conceptual metaphors, understanding how embodied experience structures abstract thought, the political use of framing, primary vs. complex metaphors, and applying metaphor theory to rhetoric, politics, and communication design.
→ Explore Conceptual Metaphor Theory
Pragmatics · Ostensive Communication · Cognitive Effects · Optimal Relevance
Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986) proposes one principle governing all inferential communication: every act of ostensive communication creates a presumption of optimal relevance — that the stimulus will yield enough cognitive effects to justify the processing effort. Listeners search for the interpretation satisfying this presumption. The theory replaces Grice’s four maxims with one cognitively grounded principle, and extends to non-verbal communication, metaphor, irony, and all forms of loose talk.
Can help you with: Pragmatic inference, the Relevance Principle, the cognitive underpinnings of communication, irony and metaphor as pragmatic phenomena, the gap between sentence meaning and speaker meaning, and the relationship between linguistics and cognitive science.
→ Explore Relevance Theory
Recursive composition over structure · Casting every task into one interface · Self-improving training pipelines · Specification before optimisation · Write the metric, then cheat it
A simulacrum abstracted from the published technical work and public talks of Richard Socher, who is living, has had no part in it, and for whose companies it speaks in nothing. It belongs in this department because its founding claim is a claim about compositionality: that the meaning of a phrase is computed at the node rather than stored at the leaf, and that the composing function must be non-linear, because a function that merely averages its children makes not boring land halfway to boring. On that account negation is not a word-meaning at all but an operator that exists only where two constituents meet. ⚠ It is also candid about the sequel: the models that came afterwards dispensed with the syntactic tree altogether and beat the tree models, on the very corpus its own tradition built.
Can help you study: Compositionality treated as an engineering requirement rather than a principle — closure, tied weights, and non-linearity, and why each of the three is load-bearing. Where a parse tree comes from, what it costs, and the argument between imposed and learned structure that the last decade did not settle so much as abandon. Negation, scope and the sentence-level phenomena that defeat any order-blind representation. ⚠ And the open question it will not close for you: whether compositionality is a property of language or a property of the model, and what evidence could tell the two apart.
→ Converse with Socherian Composition Simulacrum
Sociolinguistics & Language in Use
Language as it is actually spoken, by particular people, in particular rooms — variation, competence, sign language, and the political work that word-choice performs.
Sign Language Linguistics · ASL · Language Is Not Mouth Stuff
Stokoe proved that American Sign Language is a genuine natural language, not a manual code for English. His 1960 paper demonstrated that ASL had the full structural complexity of spoken languages, with its own phonology, morphology, and syntax operating in three-dimensional space. The Deaf community and his own institution initially rejected his findings; he was eventually vindicated.
Can help you with: Sign language linguistics, ASL grammar and structure, the arguments for sign languages as natural languages, the history of Deaf education, visual-spatial grammar, and what sign languages reveal about language as a human capacity.
→ Converse with William Stokoe
Communicative Competence · Ethnography of Speaking · SPEAKING Model
Hymes coined “communicative competence” — knowledge of when to speak, to whom, in what form, and with what effect — as a corrective to Chomsky’s purely grammatical competence. His SPEAKING model (Setting, Participants, Ends, Act sequence, Key, Instrumentalities, Norms, Genre) provided an analytical framework for all components of a speech event. His ethnography of speaking showed that appropriate language use varies systematically across cultures.
Can help you with: Communicative competence, the SPEAKING model, ethnography of communication, language and social context, sociolinguistics methods, and critiques of purely formalist linguistics.
→ Converse with Dell Hymes
Language Variation · Social Stratification · Change in Progress · The Vernacular
Variationist Sociolinguistics treats linguistic variation not as noise to be filtered out but as structured data reflecting social meaning. Its central insight: variation is systematic. Speakers at different social positions use linguistic variables at different frequencies; these patterns are stable and reproducible. Change in progress can be detected in real time by comparing cohorts. The vernacular — unselfconscious everyday speech — is the most theoretically significant variety, not the most accessible to formal elicitation.
Can help you with: Sociolinguistic methodology, language variation and change, social stratification and linguistic variables, sociolinguistic fieldwork, the theory of the vernacular, and how linguistic change spreads through a community.
→ Explore Variationist Sociolinguistics
Soft language and the euphemism curve · Syllable count as a measure of distance · Enumeration to the edge of a category · The archive as method
A simulacrum abstracted from a body of work that remains in copyright, and adjectivally named for that reason: it is not the man, and it signs only its own name. What it does is measurement. When an institution has a phrase for something that hurts, it finds the earliest plain term for the same referent, dates it, dates each successor, and counts syllables, Latinate roots, hyphens, and abstract nouns standing where a verb used to be — then plots the curve against the calendar. The softening turns out not to be a matter of taste but a measurable quantity whose rate of change tracks institutional discomfort rather than clinical progress.
Can help you study: Measuring euphemism instead of deploring it — syllable count, Latinity and hyphenation as an index of distance from the referent. Why a hard word forces a response and names someone who must make it, while a soft word distributes the exemption to everyone in earshot. Enumerating a category of forbidden things to the edge, and finding the member that fits worst. Collection before assertion: a single instance is an anecdote, a folder of forty demonstrates without arguing. And the refusal that keeps it honest — the newer term is not always the worse one, and that the change made the thing harder to see has to be shown, never assumed.
→ Converse with Carlinian Soft-Language Simulacrum
Morphology & Lexicology
The internal architecture of the word.
Morphology · Word Formation · The Lexicon · Possible Words · Mark Aranoff
Based on the published writings of Mark Aranoff. His Word Formation in Generative Grammar placed morphology at the centre of linguistic theory and proposed that morphological rules operate on whole words rather than morphemes, and that the lexicon contains “possible words” — forms that could exist but happen not to. He is a foundational figure in modern morphological theory.
Can help you study: Morphology and word formation, the structure of the lexicon, possible vs actual words, the relationship between morphology and syntax, and generative approaches to word structure.
→ Converse with the Aranoffian Simulacrum
Regular and irregular inflection as two mechanisms · Blocking and the inhibitory link · Headedness and severed derivations · The German -s plural as a rare default
Abstracted from the published psycholinguistic work of Steven Pinker, who is living and has had no part in it. The extraction is drawn from the past-tense research programme rather than the general-audience books, and its subject is a claim about architecture: that regular inflection is a symbolic rule applied to a variable, while irregular forms are stored and retrieved, with a lexical hit suppressing the rule through an inhibitory link. The evidence is a set of cases where a word is cut off from its root and the default fires anyway — a baseball player flied out rather than flew out, because the verb descends from a noun and the stored form is unreachable. Sound is identical; the answer differs. The German plural supplies the cross-linguistic half: -s is uncommon and is nonetheless the default, taking names, borrowings and acronyms, which separates being the default from being frequent in a way English cannot.
Can help you study: Reading a mental architecture off the places where it breaks rather than where it works, since success is what every rival account also predicts. The difference between a regularity and a rule, and what evidence could distinguish them. Why a confound in one language is an experiment in another. Learnability arguments from what is absent in a child’s input, and the step most often skipped — specifying what the learner must have supplied instead. And, as a live methodological case, the difference between an argument a single experiment can kill and one no single datum can touch.
→ Converse with the Pinkerian Words-and-Rules Simulacrum
Universal & Constructed Language
Languages built on purpose — the philosophical scheme, the auxiliary tongue, and the invented language with a literature.
Philosophical Language · An Essay Towards a Real Character · Universal Language · The Royal Society
Bishop, natural philosopher, and co-founder of the Royal Society, Wilkins devised in his Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668) a systematic taxonomy of all knowledge and a language that would express ideas directly, without the arbitrariness of natural language signs. The most ambitious attempt at a universal language before Esperanto. Cross-posted from the Pansophic College.
Can help you study: Universal and constructed languages, philosophical language and the taxonomy of knowledge, the Royal Society and the Enlightenment ideal of a common learned language, and the history of attempts to design language from scratch.
→ Converse with John Wilkins
Constructed Languages · Esperanto
Polish ophthalmologist and creator of Esperanto (1887) — the most successful constructed language in history. Born in Białystok where Russian, Polish, German, and Yiddish speakers lived in mutual suspicion, he believed a shared second language could reduce conflict.
Can help you study: Esperanto, constructed language design, the relationship between language and peace, international auxiliary languages, and the principles of language engineering.
→ Converse with L.L. Zamenhof
Constructed Language · Phonology · Script Design
A constructed-language specialist and phonologist whose work centres on the design of languages as complete aesthetic and cognitive systems — sound, script, morphology, and the relationship between form and meaning.
Can help you study: Constructed language design, phonology, script design, the aesthetics of language construction, and the relationship between sound symbolism and meaning.
→ Converse with Elendil ion Elenion
