The Art of Inventing Languages: Interview with George Corley

I want to put this in a historical context, because a lot of the ones that you've mentioned, or at least the ones that you've mentioned that I've heard of, these exist in fiction, whether in novels, films, TV shows, fantasy, sci-fi, et cetera.

But conlangs are older than that genre.

So kind of where did this come from and what were some of the early motivations for, you know, the start of this field, if we can call it that, at that stage?

People usually credit the earliest sort of conlanging type activity to Hiligard of Bingen.

What she made,

it would not necessarily be what I would call a conlang now.

It was kind of a word list that she would use to replace Latin words, right? But it was a very interesting project for the time.

And what time period is this? 12th century.

She was an abbess.

And like I said, she mostly created like a list of words that she would substitute into Latin texts.

Right.

But there was sort of a spiritual element to what she was doing.

The next one I would highlight is John Wilkins.

which is 1600s, and he created an essay towards a real character and a philosophical language, which nowadays we generally just say it's John Wilkins' real character.

And this was the first of like the philosophical languages that we know of.

There may have been some earlier ones, but the motivation at that time was sort of a perfection of language.

At the time, sort of science was starting this project of categorizing everything, right? And he built all of his words based on these categories that he kind of assumed to be universal.

And then when you actually look into his categories, you can get some insight into... what a man like John Wilkins considered to be the universal categories of all things.

Nowadays, we would call this like an englang.

This is what I was talking about earlier is like trying to make something out of language, either perfect it or do something interesting with it on like a mechanical level, right? Then, like, 19th century is when we get what we now call the auxlangs, the auxiliary languages.

Volapük, which was aiming to be like an interlanguage, like a lingua franca that's artificially constructed.

And then Esperanto, which is the more well-known one by L.L. Zamenhof.

Which these are aiming to like unite people through a common language that is not necessarily everybody else's language.

Because, you know, throughout history and up to today, usually the Ligua Franca was the language of some particularly powerful group.

English is not the lingua franca of the world because it's better than other languages.