A Priori Artificial Languages (review)

This book gathers data giving an idea of the nature of a priori languages and the degree of their connection with universal properties of natural languages. Unlike a posteriori languages (Esperanto, Interlingua, and many others), a priori languages are not based on one or more natural languages. Their creation is motivated by the desire for a neutral language, a language based on the rules of logic, or a language reflecting reality more clearly than natural languages. The book describes fourteen less well-known a priori languages: aUI, Babm, Chabé Abane, Fitusa, Jakelimotu, Letellier’s Language, Lingualumina, Loglan/Lojban, Oz, Ro, Solresol, Sotos Ochando’s Language, Suma, and Völkerverkehrssprache. This selection is to a large extent arbitrary, and the individual analyses are not exhaustive due to lack of sources (some projects remained merely outlines of languages with some information on grammar and vocabulary). No analysis is done of the earliest projects, such as George Dalgarno’s and John Wilkins’s languages from the seventeenth century.

The book has seven chapters, each dealing with one aspect of a priori languages. After the introduction, Ch. 2 provides a short analysis of the phonetic and phonological systems of the analyzed languages, their sound inventories, and orthographic rules and presents their suprasegmental features. Ch. 3 deals with writing systems of a priori languages. Some of them use a previously existing writing system (the Roman alphabet); others employ their own graphical systems. In Ch. 4, the author looks at some aspects of a priori languages’ vocabulary. Some of them have very restricted lexicons, while others present quite elaborate vocabularies in some fields. Chs. 5 and 6 investigate morphological and syntactic features—words and their division into smaller units, parts of speech and their markers, derivation, case systems, systems of pronouns and other parts of speech, word order, predication, and usage of tenses and moods. The last chapter examines such semantic questions related to a priori languages as the possible usage of metaphors.

It is clear from analyses of a priori languages that the distinction between a posteriori and a priori languages is not well-grounded. Many a priori languages have elements from a natural language, and some a posteriori languages have very original components. This distinction had been based especially on lexical analysis. However, the author insists that other language levels have to be taken into account, showing that this distinction is not a strict dichotomy, but a spectrum.

A priori languages have received only a modest amount of attention from linguists, and few of them, apparently, were attractive enough to become popular. None of them has come close to being a universal second language. However, they may be of considerable theoretical interest, even though they have been used little or not at all. Their analysis may demonstrate new facts about the human language faculty as such, especially with respect to universal principles. If a universal property holds even for artificial a priori languages, we can assume that this may be a property of any human language. These extraordinary products of the human mind, resulting sometimes from a deep analysis of the surrounding world, should be of interest to experts on general linguistics, language acquisition, and cognitive science.