{"id":7498,"date":"2013-08-12T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-08-12T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog-journals.internal\/?p=7498"},"modified":"2013-08-12T09:23:01","modified_gmt":"2013-08-12T09:23:01","slug":"a-language-for-all-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/2013\/08\/12\/a-language-for-all-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"A Language for all the World"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Written by John Edwards<\/p>\n

Based on an article in the July 2013 issue of Language Teaching.<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

In the popular mind, constructing a language has always been seen as an odd activity, one that seems to fly in the face of \u2018natural\u2019 language dynamics. After all, languages evolve; they do not emerge from some sacred forehead, much less from a mortal brain. And yet interest in a divine \u2013 and therefore immediately fully-formed \u2013 language was once important (and, even today, remains significant in some rather curious religious quarters). Attention to this, and to later and more mundane projects aimed at improving upon natural languages in some way, is a neglected but important aspect of linguistic history \u2013 and, indeed, of modern scientific development.<\/p>\n

The first stage here involved attempts (highly speculative, of course) to recapture the original lingua humana, as spoken in the Garden of Eden. Adam, we are told, named all the birds and beasts of the earth in this original language, a variety that \u2013 unlike all languages since \u2013 encapsulated a perfect correspondence between spoken words and the things they represented. As Milton wrote in Paradise Lost, Adam named the animals \u2018as they pass\u2019d, and understood their nature.\u2019 Could this first language have been Hebrew \u2013 or perhaps Aramaic, or Arabic? If so, then speakers of those languages (or even of their post-Adamic descendants) might surely claim some higher moral ground than others.<\/p>\n

By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, these early speculations were set aside as essentially pointless. But the notion of a language more perfect than existing natural varieties still appealed, and, in a second part of our story, we find scholars trying to create entire languages ab ovo, motivated by the desire for a more logical and regular variety that would better reflect and channel scientific classification. It eventually became clear, however, that attempts to make a language that owed nothing to existing varieties were as fruitless as efforts to discover the language of Eden. So, in a third and still-existing stage, \u2018artificial\u2019 languages have been assembled from pre-existing rules and components; the most well-known example is Esperanto. This work has been underpinned by hopes for a more practical medium, but there have also been expectations that a language that was both regular and widely shared would contribute to international harmony and understanding.<\/p>\n

You can read the entire article here without charge until 30th September 2013.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Written by John Edwards Based on an article in the July 2013 issue of Language Teaching. In the popular mind, constructing a language has always been seen as an odd activity, one that seems to fly in the face of \u2018natural\u2019 language dynamics. After all, languages evolve; they do not emerge from some sacred forehead, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":7499,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-7498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-social-sciences"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7498\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7498"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=7498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}