Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2000, Page 62

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Baldur Ragnarsson
SUMMARY
‘Planned languages’
Keywords: planned languages, intemational languages, grammatical categories
A planned language has been defined as a language made according to a plan where
the complicated and random rules of the ethnic languages are avoided or simplified.
The ultimate aim af such a language is to become of universal use as an auxiliary
language for people of all nations. The history of ideas and experiments in the mak-
ing of planned languages is a long one. Some philosophers of the 17th and 18th cent-
ury thought about it, others drew up outlines of a language based on logic and philo-
sophical concepts. These experiments were all a priori, i.e. not based on languages al-
ready in existence. The most famous a priori-language of the 19th century is Solresol
which is based on the seven notes of the sol-fa musical scale.
Early in the 19th century Rasmus Christian Rask wrote down his ideas how a
planned language of the a posteriori kind should be constructed, i.e. on the basis of
the natural languages. He proposed that a planned language should fundamentally be
based on Latin and Greek words with addition of the most common words in the new
languages, all roots of words should be unchangeable and inflectional forms should
be as few and simple as possible. Although his manuscript was not published until
much later all planned languages since then have more or less been in accordance
with his ideas.
The first planned language to be used as a spoken language and to develop a for-
mal organisation was Volapiik by Johann Schleyer, and the description was published
in 1878. The language is a mixed one with a posteriori and a priorí elements. Its
vocabulary is derived from English but words are usually shortened, often to un-
recognizability, because of Schleyer’s preference for monosyllables. There are intri-
cate schemes of declension and conjugation but these are completely regular and free
of exceptions. In spite of considerable support during the first decade after its publi-
cation it rapidly declined, mostly because of the author’s refusal to accept proposals
of changes in the language. Many volapiikists then went over to a new planned lan-
guage, Esperanto, which appeared on the scene in 1887. Esperanto was created by Dr.
L. L. Zamenhof, a Pole of Jewish origin. The vocabulary is derived mostly from Lat-
in and the Romance languages, the writing is completely phonetic and grammatical
rules are few and simple and without exceptions. Compound words are very com-
mon, as are words formed from a root by the use of prefixes and suffixes. Each word-
class has a special ending: nouns (singular) end in -o, adjectives in -a, verbs (infini-
tives) in -i, and so on. A special feature of the language is the independence of every
morpheme which makes it theoretically possible to form any kind of words from any
kind of morphemes, e.g. from the noun martelo ‘hammer’ we form the adj. martela
‘to do with hammers (hammerlike, hammering)’, the verb marteli ‘to hammer’, and
so on. Even morphemes that serve as prefixes and suffixes can be used to form nouns,