An Encyclopaedia of Language_09 docx

In Halliday’s model 1974, the order in which functions emerge developmentally in child languageacquisition is the following: Any survey of language engineering, both with a posteriori la

of mankind at a correspondingly primitive stage of development From these beginnings language typology emerged Theproblem of the origin of language itself suffered an interesting fate: the prize offered by the Berlin Academy in 1771 for an

essay on this subject attracted some 31 entries, and, despite Herder’s winning contribution (Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache), continued to prompt lively discussion to the end of the century and beyond That the Société de Linguistique deParis found it necessary to proscribe contributions on this subject as late as 1866 shows as clearly that popular interest in thesubject was still very much alive as that the academic mainstream despaired of ever finding a solution

But in the meantime an unexpected new element was introduced: the Sanskrit language The question of language originwas first briefly diverted into the assumption that Sanskrit was the parent language, and then forgotten as energy went into thedetailed formal comparison of Sanskrit and cognate languages A few scholars took advantage of the breadth of perspectiveafforded by the discovery of Sanskrit and still more exotic languages to formulate far-reaching hypotheses about the natureand role of language Wilhelm von Humboldt, brother of the scientist and explorer Alexander and a friend of Goethe’s,viewed language as the organ of inner existence, the way to understanding—or manifesting—thoughts and feelings (Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts,

1836) The human spirit manifests itself in different forms of civilisation and culture among different peoples, and also indifferent languages Each is an attempt, an approximation, a contribution to the universal need to develop a people’sintellectual and spiritual powers and to unfold their own mode of relating to the world Far from representing phenomenadirectly, each language articulates that speech community’s perception of the world around it from its own distinctive point ofview Humboldt’s deep interest in the essence of individual differences between languages is found not so much in themainstream of theoretical linguistics in the twentieth century as in anthropological linguistics, initiated by the work of E.Sapirand B.L.Whorf, and in the work of German scholars from Leo Weisgerber on

But by the time Humboldt’s great work was published (posthumously) the universal aspect of language study was beingpushed aside by the newly emerging discipline of comparative philology Although philologists of the stature of Jakob Grimm,Max Müller, H.Steinthal, and W.D.Whitney concerned themselves with problems like the ultimate origin of language, itsrelation to thought, and its position among the sciences, their writings on these subjects were eclipsed by the contemporaryenthusiasm for historical and comparative work Thus it was that although the ideas taught by Ferdinand de Saussure in his

celebrated lecture course at Geneva (Cours de linguistique g énérale, published posthumously on the basis of his students’

lecture notes in 1916) were far from novel, and had been in circulation intermittently during the nineteenth century, in thechanged intellectual climate of the post-Great War world they struck the scholarly community as fresh, stimulating, and above

all unfamiliar The consequence was an over-rigid interpretation of ideas presented schematically in the Cours which had once been current in subtler and more diversified guises Such, for instance, has been the case with the doctrine of l’arbitraire

du signe, the arbitrary nature of the relationship between the linguistic sign and what it denotes Elevated into a dogma in mostbranches of linguistics, it contravenes the intuitive feeling of the native speaker (and the literary critic) for the affective value

of certain sounds and sound-groups, a fact recognised by von Humboldt (and by Plato long before) The linguistic sign,

defined as the union between a concept (signifi é) and its acoustic representation (signifiant), is yet another manifestation of

Aristotle’s schema, but lacking the refinement of the level of percept Saussure’s distinction between the synchronic and thediachronic approach to language was taken as a charter for the liberation of a synchronic descriptive structural linguistics fromhistorical linguistics, despite Saussure’s own awareness of the symbiotic relationship of the two temporal axes Perhaps the

most fruitful of Saussure’s insights has been the celebrated langue −parole dichotomy—langue that aspect of language which

is a system of signs existing in the speech community independent of the will of any individual, while parole denotes the particular utterances of individual speakers; langue is the essential, parole the accidental aspect of language.

Saussure’s importance lies more in his making explicit the implications of a structuralist approach to language than in thespecific tenets of his doctrine, most of which have been modified by both European and American Structuralists—Bloomfieldand his followers, Troubetzkoy and other linguists of the Prague School, Hjelmslev and the Copenhagen School, Martinet,Chomsky and the many offshoots of Generative Grammar—who all acknowledge some degree of indebtedness to him Butmore important still are the consequences of his work for disciplines on the periphery of linguistics or quite outside it:semiotics, anthropology, history, psychology, philosophy and literary criticism Particularly among French scholars—Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Barthes, Derrida—Structuralism has undergone a development which takes it far beyond its originalcontext Within the linguistic mainstream, attention has recently returned to semantics, and the allied discipline of pragmatics,heavily influenced by logic, has sprung up The twentieth-century development of these and other branches of Westernlinguistics is covered in Chapters 5 and 6 of this volume Rather than duplicate this information, let us now shift the focus ofthis hitherto Eurocentric account to some equally rich but—to the Westerner—less accessible traditions

NON-EUROPEAN TRADITIONSThe Greco-Roman tradition out of which modern Western linguistics has grown is only one of several independent traditions

of language study known to have existed in the last three millennia But it is by no means the most ancient, nor necessarily themost varied or subtle in its understanding of language The ancient Near East, India and China can all boast of linguistictraditions of greater antiquity, while for richness of insight and comprehensiveness of scope both India and the Arab traditioncompete on equal terms with the West Each of these traditions arose independently of the others and for the most partdeveloped separately, drawing on the resources of the culture within which it grew Episodes of contact and mutual influencewere few but significant: the Arab tradition was repeatedly fertilised by insights derived from the works of Aristotle;Buddhist missionaries took the Indian system of phonetic classification to Tang dynasty China; and Westerners twice received

a vital stimulus from alien traditions, from the Semitic tradition around 1500 and from India around 1800 But to understandhow each tradition came to take its characteristic shape it is more important to consider people’s outlook and way of relating

to the world as they are manifested in all areas of culture, than to go source-hunting In any case, a borrowed piece of doctrinetakes on a different significance when transplanted into a alien cultural setting, and the very act of borrowing is itselfimportant

Although the Arab, the Indian and the Chinese linguistic traditions would each merit discussion on the same scale as theEuropean tradition, space permits of no more than the barest outline In the circumstances, it has seemed most useful todiscuss these traditions with reference to the Western tradition, contrasting the course of their development as well as glancing

at those areas of doctrine where contact has taken place The works mentioned in the suggestions for further reading offer amore comprehensive view of these traditions, as well as ample bibliographical leads

3.1The Arab worldApparently arising out of nothing, no venerable Classical tradition stretching behind it, Arab grammatical writing makes itsfirst appearance in the elaborate and detailed form given it by its most renowned exponent, Sibawayhi, a bare 150 years afterthe death of Muhammad This extraordinarily rapid codification was followed by an equally speedy and prolific expansioninto all areas of language study: phonetics, morphology, syntax, semantics and the philosophy of language In the space of sixcenturies linguistics among the Arabs developed in a direction more akin to Western post-Renaissance linguistics than tocontemporary medieval work in the West Yet by 1400 its momentum was gone Instead of sharing in the intellectual change

of direction brought about by the new world outlook of the European Renaissance, Arab writers in all branches ofscholarship, scientific as well as linguistic, continued to work out of their old traditions, which had ceased to provide freshinspiration By comparison with European linguistics, linguistics in the Arab world reached a technically much more

‘modern’ level in a remarkably brief space of time—but, like a prematurely blossoming flower, withered away just as itsfellows were catching up

How the study of grammar developed in its very earliest stages in the Arab world is likely to remain a mystery Two factorsplayed into it, one internal, the other external Within Islamic culture great importance was attached to the Qur’ān, to thepreservation of the text and the exegesis of its contents As Islam spread to non-Arabic-speaking peoples the need for formalgrammatical instruction became urgent, all the more so since the script did not indicate the vowels, nor, in its earliest form,did it distinguish among several of the consonants Without a thorough knowledge of the language there could be no question

of correct oral recitation of the Qur’ān, a vital part of religious ceremony This was the motivation attributed to the reputedinventor of Arabic grammar, Abū ’l-Aswad ad-Du’alī (who died c 688) Many of the most noted grammarians of Arabic,starting with Siṱ bawayhi himself, were of non-Arab (often Persian) or mixed descent Had it been simply a matter ofvocalising the text, Arab linguistic scholarship need not have developed further, even as the Massoretes concentrated on thevocalisation of Hebrew and allied problems connected with recitation of the scriptures, but went no further But the needs ofconverts speaking unrelated languages, notably Persian, and the possibilities presented by the lively intellectual surroundings

at centres such as Nisibis, Jundishapur, and later Baghdad, contributed to the unprecedented speed with which the Arabgrammatical tradition emerged Greek was still used in parts of the Near East in the first centuries of Islam, and much Greekmaterial, including a part of the grammar attributed to Dionysius Thrax, had been translated into Syriac, a Semitic language withwidespread currency in the Near East Although the extent of Greek influence on the foundation of the Arab grammaticaltradition is still disputed, the existence of contact between the two traditions is not at issue, and details such as the choice of a

model verb meaning ‘to beat’ in both traditions—ḍaraba in Arabic, t úptō in Grteek—corroborate this More problematical is

the question of dependence at the systemic level Without parallel in the other major linguistic traditions is the importance ofthe terminology and concepts of Islamic law in early Arabic grammar

The earliest grammar to have come down to us from the Arab tradition is the Kit āb (‘Book’) by Siṱ bawayhi (who died in

793) Perhaps its most striking feature to the reader familiar with the Greco-Roman tradition is the minor importance of

semantic issues The introduction begins by setting out the three word classes, names (ism), operations/actions ( ) and words

‘directed towards a meaning’ which are neither names nor operations (ḥarf) Names require no explanation, and are given none;

operations take various forms to specify the actions of the names, and indicated what has passed, or what will be but has not yettaken place, or that which is and has not yet finished Much of the discussion which follows, on

, broadly ‘inflection’, is form-centred to an extent unknown in the West Instead of identifying functional, semantic or logicalcategories such as ‘subject’ or ‘nominative’ or ‘first person singular’, and listing the different forms by which they may berealised, Sībawayhi identifies different formal states and processes, and exemplifies each one as it manifests itself in words of

different classes Thus, ‘stabilisation’ (or ‘taking an -a(n) ending’) occurs in both the ism and the : ra’aytu Zaydan ‘I saw Zaid’ and lan

‘he will not act’; but ‘stretching’ (taking an -i(n) ending) occurs only in the ism, as in marartu bi-Zaydin ‘I passed Zaid’, and

‘amputation’ (apocope) only in the , as in lam

‘he has not done’ Had a Roman grammarian wanted to work in the same way, he would have decided not to discuss the parts

of speech in turn, but instead to treat all the forms ending in the same letter together; those ending in -a, for example, wouldinclude verbs in the imperative singular, nouns, pronouns, adjectives and participles in the nominative and ablative singular,adverbs and prepositions Although Siṱ bawayhi works with notions like number, person and gender, they are to a largeextent taken for granted: the emphasis is on form

A natural consequence of a form-orientated linguistics is the handling of syntactic relations in terms of a change in form

effected by an operation (

), whether implicit or explicit Thus, the sentence yaq ūmu Zaydun ‘Zayd stands’ contains two independent elements, neither entailing a relationship of dependency, whereas in inna Zaydan lan yaq ūma ‘truly Zayd will not stand’, ‘Zayd’ is made dependent by inna ‘truly’ and yaq ūma ‘he will stand’ by lan ‘not’ The parallels with modern dependency grammar are more

far-reaching than this simple example suggests

A further manifestation of the Arab preoccupation with linguistic form is the profound interest in articulatory phoneticsapparent from the very start of the Arab tradition Both Sībawayhi and al-Hṱ alīl (who died in 791), the compiler of a huge

dictionary, provided a classification of the consonantal sounds of Arabic based on the maḥ rag̣, ‘area of emission’, a broader notion than the Sanskrit sth āna and karaṇa, involving the specification of the point in the vocal tract at which the

airstream is interrupted Sībawayhi’s list of sixteen maḥ ārig̣ was gradually reduced to five, which passed into the Hebrewand thence into the Western tradition Recognition of nasality goes back to Siṱ bawayhi himself, who offers the time-honoured test: ‘if you hold your nose, the nasals cannot be produced.’ Ibn Sinā, known to the West as Avicenna (980–1037),

included among his voluminous writings a treatise on the ḥur ūf (the Arabic term ḥarf, pl ḥurūf, functions like the Latin littera) which contained a detailed description of the anatomy and function of the larynx The lively Islamic tradition ofphonetic investigation, represented by a large number of writers from Sībawayhi on, was paralleled by a no less active interestamong Hebrew grammarians

The Arab interest in form and in physical phenomena was a characteristic rooted deeply in their culture, its manifestationsvisible not only in linguistics but throughout their intellectual life It was from outside Islam that the impetus came to considerlanguage from other points of view In the second half of the eighth and during the ninth century many Greek texts weretranslated into Arabic (sometimes via Syriac), including the Aristotelian corpus Under their influence, and particularly amonggrammarians belonging to the Muctazilite sect, a more philosophical approach to grammar took root, exemplified in the works

of al-Fārābī (who died in 950) and az-Zağğāğī (who died in 949 or 951) Logic and grammar were compared and theirrespective domains delimited, and attention was given to such matters as the correct way to frame a definition, atapproximately the same time as the assimilation of Aristotelian logic was causing a preliminary reassessment of the role ofgrammar in the West Thus, later grammars such as Ibn Aṱ jurrūm’s (the famous Ạ jurrūmiyya) define the utterance ashaving form, composite, informative and conventional: the Aristotelian elements are obvious (A further parallel with the

development of grammar in the West is the popularity in the later Middle Ages of grammars in verse such as the Alfiyya by

Ibn Mālik.)

The importance attached to the formal aspects of language is a natural consequence of the reasoning that, since languagemirrors the world, it must be governed by the same laws Since all phenomena perceived by the senses could be described in

quantitative terms, so too could language Grammarians sought regularities in language, particularly through observing qiy ās,

‘analogy’, while natural philosophers, most notably the Pythagorean-influenced Jābir ibn Hṱayyān, traced the proportionsfound in natural phenomena in language Whereas Western pre-Renaissance linguistics stressed those aspects of languagewhich participated in the eternal and spiritual, Islamic scholars devoted equal attention to its earthly side And yet by the timeWestern scholars were ready to appreciate the Arab approach, it had lost its impetus The awakening to form experienced byRenaissance Europeans had nothing new to offer the Arabs Arab linguists had travelled the same path centuries before; aware

of the importance of form from the very start of their tradition, they had exhausted its possibilities The Renaissance broughtthem no fresh tools to use They were the lenders rather than the borrowers, contributing a few fundamental concepts fromtheir rich stock to the founding of the Western disciplines of phonetics and morphology They had much more to offer, butWestern scholars chose to go their own way, arriving at the same insights in their own time, using their own methods

3.2IndiaThe study of language in India arose out of the needs of religious ritual, and remained closely linked with religion for most ofits history At the most profound level the Vedic hymns acknowledge the mysterious nature and power of speech: ‘Speechwas divided into four parts known to inspired priests Three parts, placed in hiding, mortals do not rouse to action; the fourth

part of speech they speak’ (Ṛgveda I 164.45) And yet, despite their fascination with the spiritual nature of speech, Indians

concerned themselves with its physical aspect far earlier than Europeans did The immediate impetus came from the practicalneeds of religious ritual The Vedic hymns and prayers used in Brahmin rituals had been given definitive form near the start

of the first millennium BC Handed down from father to son, the text inevitably began to sound first old-fashioned, and thendownright archaic, as the Sanskrit language gradually underwent change Instead of updating the text, the Brahmins felt itimperative to maintain its traditional form as accurately as possible To counteract the sloppy pronunciation of the youngergeneration—the usual response the world over to the effects of language change—they instituted formal training, supported

by lists of the legitimate assimilatory features (sandhi) found in each collection of Vedic hymns, prefaced (or finished) by a

summary of the theoretical notions underlying the practical instruction Although very brief, usually only three or four pages

in length, the outlines contained in these texts (called pr ātiśākhyas) amount to an introduction to the principles of articulatory

phonetics They centre on the Sanskrit alphabet, itself a masterpiece of phonemic analysis and articulatory systematisation:

various subsidiary notions: articulator (karaṇa) and place of articulation (sth āna), voicing, aspiration, nasality, degree of

closure The systematic nature of Indian phonetic analysis—arrived at somewhere in the first half of the first millennium BC—provided Western scholars from about 1800 with the key to handling features such as voicing and aspiration in an orderlyclassificatory matrix

The same attention to the physical aspect of speech is apparent in the oldest and best-known Sanskrit grammar to comedown to us, Pānṱini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī (‘Eight Books’), written in the fifth or fourth century BC The Aṣṭādhyāyī is very differentfrom the hierarchically-structured grammars of Greco-Roman Antiquity, or even from Varro’s more fluid characterisations.Instead of allowing the structure perceived in the language to dictate the overall shape of the work, as Donatus, for instance,does in beginning with the smallest units of speech and building up to the largest, Pānini attaches overriding importance to thepresentation, the outer form, of the doctrine Economy of expression dominates: not only does he use a large number oftechnical abbreviations and a telegraphic metalanguage (which has to be mastered by the student at the outset), but he alsoemploys a dittoing procedure which enables him to avoid repeating a rule which applies to many different types of linquisticphenomena—at the expense of assembling together rules which have nothing more in common than being affected by this morepowerful rule Each rule is given equal prominence, down to those which govern a single word; the concept of ‘exception’, so

integral a part of the Western tradition, is absent Consequently, it is very difficult to form any impression of the structure of

Sanskrit from the Aṣṭ ādhyāyī without protracted study Traditionally, the young child would spend eight years memorising it

before being shown how to apply its doctrine, for in order to generate even the simplest verb form, rules from all parts of the

work must be applied Not surprisingly, both commentaries, like Patanṱ jali’s huge and detailed Mah ābhāṣya, (c 150 BC), and simplified and rearranged versions of the Aṣṭ ādhyāyī, like Śarvavarman’s Kātantra (before AD 400) and the Siddhānta Kaumud ī by Bhatṱtṱoji Dīksṱita (early seventeenth century), found large numbers of readers.

Underlying Pānṱini’s work, and indeed that of all Indian grammarians, is the notion of ‘root’ as an abstract entity whichnever—or very rarely—manifests itself in actual speech, but provides the raw material which, after the operation of variousphonological changes, becomes a base to which affixes may be added, eventually culminating in the spoken word So much apart of the linguistic tradition was this that lists of roots were compiled from Pānṱini on Pānṱini’s treatment of morphology istherefore utterly different from that current in the ancient West He uses no paradigms; instead, he relies on complexsequences of generative rules To take a somewhat simplified example, to form the third person singular of the present tense of

the verb ‘go’, ̣ gam, we have to follow a procedure which involves the addition of a conventional marker indicating a present tense form: laṭ A condition for the addition of laṭ to verbs is the insertion of an infix between root and suffix In the case of roots of the class to whicḥ gam belongs, this infix is -a- Replacing the present tense marker with the third person singular ending -ti gives *gamati, not yet a Sanskrit word One further rule, prescribing the change of roots of the ̣ gam type when followed by a laṭ suffix, remains to be applied, producing the actual Sanskrit form, gacchati Less ponderous—once it has

been mastered—than it sounds, this method provides elegant descriptions of much of the luxuriant morphology of Sanskrit It

is rather less appropriate for foreign beginners, however (and it is interesting to note that whereas those European grammarians

of Sanskrit who had had the advantage of instruction from a native pandit adhered as closely as they could to the basicallyPaninian system, scholars based in Europe—notably Frank (1823) and the enormously influential Bopp (1824–37)—abandoned much of the apparatus of the Indian system of description, preferring to adapt the traditional framework of Greekand Latin grammar to accommodate Sanskrit.)

Accompanying Pānṱini’s keen sense for the formal structure of language was a precise awareness of the separate domains ofform and meaning One feature of Indo-European languages where their relationship has repeatedly challenged grammarians

is that of the nature of case: to what extent can the changes in the form of a noun as it discharges different grammaticalfunctions in a sentence be equated with semantic or real-world categories? In the traditional Western analysis of a pre-sandhi

sentence like Devadattaḥ odanam pacati, ‘Devadatta cooks rice’, Devadattaḥ is described as the subject of the active verb pacati, ‘cooks’, and therefore has the nominative, or subject, case-form; but in the corresponding passive sentence odanaḥ Devadattena pacyate, ‘rice is being cooked by Devadatta’, odanaḥ ‘rice’, is now in the nominative case, even though its

relation to the act of cooking has not changed Pānṱini circumvents the difficulty by setting up a series of categories, kārakas,which, although ultimately based on the syntactic relations through the cases, are semantic notions which can be manifested inmany different ways: through a verb (active, passive, in the appropriate mood and tense), a preposition, or by word-formation,

as well as by case endings In our first example, the agent k āraka is expressed in the active verb form, pacati; the name of the actual agent therefore need not express agency (since a k āraka expressed in the verb should not be given double expression), but instead takes the umarked, or default, form, the nominative case In the second sentence, it is the object k āraka which is expressed by the verb pacyate, ‘is being cooked’, and therefore ‘rice’, odanaḥ, is now left unmarked (i.e nominative); the agent k āraka, on the other hand, now has to be expressed explicitly, this time through the instrumental case form, Devadattena Although far more comprehensively elaborated, k āraka theory has much in common with the medieval Western doctrine of the modi significandi: both attempt to explain how it comes about that the same semantic content can be

manifested in different lexical and syntactic structures within a given language Parallels may be drawn too with Fillmore’s ‘deepcases’ and with Tesnière’s dependency syntax (See Chapter 3, section 5, above)

As in the Western tradition, the problem of sentence meaning was tackled largely by philosophers rather than bygrammarians, although occasionally, as in the case of Patañjali and Bhartrṱhari, the two provinces coincided in one man TheVedas again provided the focus: given that their very words were regarded as eternal and uncreated, their nature and statusrequired investigation The Mīmāmṱsā school (third to second century BC) sought a philosophical basis for the Vedas in whichlinguistic issues played a large part Its members propounded two opposing views of sentence meaning, both of which tookthe word as the unit According to the first theory, sentence meaning was linear and cumulative, based on the word, anautonomous unit of thought and sense Sentence meaning was simply the sum of the individual word meanings According tothe second, word meaning was defined by sentence meaning Only when the listener had grasped how ‘cow’ and ‘horse’ stood

in paradigmatic relation to one another in sentences like ‘bring the cow’ and ‘bring the horse’ could he attach any meaning tothe isolated words ‘cow’ and ‘horse’ These two views were in time overshadowed by the much more thorough-going work of

Bhartrṱhari (c 450–510) In his V ākyapadīya he attempted to dislodge his fellow-grammarians from their complacent

preoccupation with methodological technicalities by reminding them of the fundamental role of language and of grammar:

‘just as all the universals of things depend upon the form of their words for their communication, so is this science the basis ofall other sciences’ (I 15) No knowledge is possible without the organising, sequential properties of language, so closely

linked with memory Even the child has residual traces of a knowledge of the word from its previous existence, on the basis

of which both cognition and the use of the speech organs can arise—neither of them faculties which can be taught But what

is the nature of the words that one utters? ‘Just as light has two powers, that of being revealed and that of being the revealer,similarly, all words have two distinct powers’ (I 55) A particular relationship obtains between individual sounds and that

which is revealed through them, the sphoṭa The speech-essence, the source of the world of reality, goes through three stages

in becoming manifest in human speech: the stage of indivisible reality or consciousness without extension in time, in which

an idea occurs in a flash, complete; the intermediate stage in which the idea is set out sequentially, becoming a organised linear thought capable of being verbalised (and already possessing certain features characteristic of a particularlanguage); and the stage of producing audible words marked by the individual idiosyncrasies of the speaker The totalmeaning of a sentence can no more be explained in terms of its parts than the meaning of a picture can be explained by listingthe different colours used in it ‘Just as the meaning of the word is not understood from each sound, in the same way the meaning

logically-of the sentence is not understood from each word’ (II 60) Meaning itself is indivisible: it bursts forth from the spokenutterance in a flash of intuition Words, roots, suffixes, individual speech sounds, are an analytical convenience, agrammarian’s fiction By viewing utterance meaning as unitary and primary, and not dependent on individual words,Bhartrṱhari provided the basis for a very powerful theory of meaning—one capable of dealing with ungrammatical utterances,with foreigners’ grotesque but nevertheless comprehended attempts to communicate, with figurative language, and indeedwith the suggestive power of language Bhartrṱhari’s successors concentrated on figurative language, applying his teachingsand their own to the study of Sanskrit poetry In the ninth century Aṱ nandavardhana developed a more comprehensive

approach to the suggestive power of language in his Dhvany āloka, studying factors such as intonation, emphasis, gesture, tone

of voice, and sociocultural elements peculiar to a particular speech community Traditional Indian semantics is nowundergoing lively investigation and development by Indian scholars versed in both Indian and Western semantics

3.3China

In one respect the ancient Chinese world-view was strikingly similar to that of the pre-modern West, and in anotherunexpectedly dissimilar; and in each case this is reflected in their views on language Perhaps the most conspicuous feature ofthe Chinese outlook is a belief in order The universe was an ordered system, and everything within it had its place—heaven,the gods, the planets, man, the lower orders To maintain this highly structured, hierarchical system Chinese society had recourse

to the Confucian system of ethics This system permeated the whole of society: nothing was without its niche, everything hadits own meaning and purpose It was incumbent upon human beings to discover the meaning of the phenomena around them.The second essential trait of the Chinese outlook, one which is visible as clearly in medicine as in linguistics, is a desire tofunction on two levels: broad, universal principles applicable to every sphere of existence, and individual, particularphenomena Intermediate levels—generalisations relevant to a particular class of phenomena, for instance—were notinvestigated These views naturally had their consequences both in the choice of fields of study and in the way in which theywere pursued If the aim of study is to discover the meaning of a phenomenon, then it will be inappropriate to remain upon thelevel of the phenomena themselves Explanations must be sought on a higher level (unless the seeker is to revert toreductionism) Hence, in China as in the medieval West, astronomy merged into astrology and biology into the teleologicaland moralising remarks of medieval bestiaries Chinese thinkers observed processes on one level, the physical, but soughtexplanations on another

This attitude naturally had implications for the study of language There was no notion of studying language ‘in and for itself;only those aspects were studied which were compatible with the Chinese world-view So, for example, there are nocomprehensive descriptions of Chinese grammar Instead, language was used to fortify the ethical bases of Chinese society.For example, Confucius, when asked about the true nature of a government, replied that it was of the essence of a government

(zheng) to be upright (zheng): the semantic connection reinforces the natural order of things, as in the medieval Western association of reges with recte agenda Argumentation of this kind plays a large part in early Chinese ethics and philosophy,

notably in the works of Confucius and Mencius Essentially, the question asked was ‘what light can language shed on theworld?’ That part of language most likely to illuminate the world was its meaningful aspect

Consequently, it was the word which was the focus of Chinese linguistics— the word as the bearer or embodiment ofmeaning Levels below the word— morphology and phonetics—could contribute nothing (phonology was a special casewhich we will consider later), while the study of meaning at a higher level was carried out by literary critics Syntax was notpursued Where the word as a meaningful entity is the centre of attention, then linguistic study will tend to focus on word-lists: vocabularies, glossaries, thesauruses, dictionaries Lexicography and dialect studies, also concentrating on lexis, werethe most highly developed branches of linguistics in pre-modern China

The earliest dictionary, ascribed to a disciple of Confucius, Zi Xia, is the Er Ya (‘Treasury of Fine Words’, between the

third and first centuries BC) It is divided into nineteen sections, most of which are semantic categories: names, idioms,

difficult words, family relationships, occupations, tools, music, sky (both the calendar and climate), land, hills, mountains,water, plants, trees, insects and reptiles, fish, birds, wild animals, domestic animals Any semantic classification suffers from

certain limitations Many words do not lend themselves to categorisation on this basis, a problem which the Er Ya

acknowledged by reserving several sections for miscellaneous terms and words used figuratively Perhaps more to the point,what of the difficulties faced by the reader of an unfamiliar text who wants to look up a strange character? To be told to look

it up in a semantically-classified work puts him a similar plight to that of the Western child who asks how to spell a word and

is told to look it up in an alphabetically-ordered dictionary A path to a solution was suggested by the most famous of all

Chinese dictionaries, the Shuo Wen Jie Zi (‘The Explanation of Simple and Derived Characters’) (c 100 AD) As its name

suggests, the focus of classification has shifted from the meanings to the characters Characters were assigned to one oranother of six categories on the basis of their construction—iconic, symbolic, phonetic and phonetic loan, semanticcompound, modified—and the semantic common factor, or radical, was isolated and used as the criterion of classification.The original list of 540 radicals was later reduced to 360, and finally to the list of 214 which is still in use today Dictionarieswhich rely on radicals as their ordering criterion still have much in common with thesauruses, for all the characters whichshare the same radical will come together Thus, all the characters with the ‘man’ radical come together, ensuring a bunch ofwords denoting human beings, and similarly words denoting liquids are grouped together because they have in common the

‘water’ radical, and so on Under each radical characters are listed in order according to the number of strokes additional tothe radical they have, making it possible to locate unfamiliar ones Only in the present century, under Western influence, haveChinese lexicographers experimented with phonetic principles

The celebrated distinction between ‘full’ and ‘empty’ words, taken over into Western linguistics as a straightforwardopposition between words with lexical meaning and words serving only to express grammatical relationships, was in itsoriginal context a semantic distinction between words denoting objective concepts or things, and those which were essentiallysubjective, expressing the feelings and responses of the individual This category included intensifies, modal particles and alsothe verb ‘to be’ (which has greater assertive force in Chinese than in English)

One problem which Chinese scholars grappled with from very early times was that of indicating pronunciation in a script inwhich each character represented an entire word For dialect studies in particular the lack of any means of phoneticrepresentation was a significant handicap Early works resorted to homophony, saying that character x sounded like character

y Some time before about 600 AD a more satisfactory technique was developed Called fanqie, it involved the analysis of the syllable into two segments, (a) the initial vowel or consonant plus (b) the rest of the syllable, including the tone Another syllable beginning with the same initial was found to represent (a), and one finishing with the same features as (b) to represent the second half Thus, dong could be represented by de hong The system was further refined to permit the indication of suprasegmental phenomena such as palatalisation The fanqie analysis was structural in nature: it works with

relationships between entities rather than with the entities in their own right, a procedure also characteristic of Chinesemedicine Not until the basic tenets of Indian teaching reached China with Buddhism, from the seventh century, was a kind ofarticulatory phonetics elaborated Initial consonants were divided into five categories according to place of articulation: lips,tongue (=dentals), incisors (=dental affricates), molars (=velars), throat (=laryngeals) Although degrees of voicing wererecognised, palatalisation—not catered for by the Indian system—was ignored Interestingly, although a popular version ofIndian grammar was introduced at the same time, it failed to undergo further development Only with the arrival of Westerngrammar at the end of the nineteenth century did Chinese scholars give serious consideration to the grammar of their own

language The celebrated product of this meeting was Ma Jian Zhong’s Ma Shi Wen Tong (1898), a grammar which sought to

apply ‘universal’ (i.e Latin) categories as closely as possible to Chinese Only in the present century—when politicalvicissitudes have permitted—have scholars such as Wang Li attempted to devise a more sensitive grammatical structure forChinese, a process in which many Western scholars, particularly in America, have joined

REFERENCESWhere these are simply evaluated within particular approaches they appear in the text above Where they are more generallyuseful they are listed below (with brief references in the text)

GENERAL REFERENCES AND FURTHER READINGItems are presented in relation to the places and eras surveyed A reader’s further study is best guided by the titles in eachsection

General (including works relevant to several sections)

Amirova, T.A., Ol’chovikov, B.A and V.Roždestvenskij, Ju (1980) Abriss der Geschichte der Linguistik, transl from the Russian (1975)

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Asher, R.E and Henderson, E.J.A (eds) (1981) Towards a History of Phonetics, The University Press, Edinburgh.

Auroux, S et al (1985) La linguistique fantastique, Joseph Clims, Paris.

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Foucault, M (1966) Les mots et les choses, Gallimard, Paris, transl into English as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human

Sciences (1970), Tavistock, London.

Histoire Epistémologie Langage (1979–).

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Hymes, D (1974) Studies in the History of Linguistics: Traditions and Paradigms, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Ind.

Koerner, E.F.K (1978) Western Histories of Linguistic Thought: An Annotated Chronological Bibliography 1822 −1976, Studies in the

History of Linguistics 11, Benjamins, Amsterdam.

Parret, H (1976) History of Linguistic Thought and Contemporary Linguistics, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin and New York.

Robins, R.H (1st ed 1967, 2nd ed 1979) A Short History of Linguistics, Longman, London.

Schmitter, P (1982) Untersuchungen zur Historiographie der Linguistik: Struktur—Methodik —theoretische Fundierung, Tübinger

Beiträge zur Linguistik 181, Gunter Narr, Tübingen.

Sebeok, T.A (1975) Current Trends in Linguistics 13: Historiography of Linguistics, 2 vols., Mouton, The Hague.

Todorov, Ts (1972) ‘Le sense des sons’, Po étique 11: 446–62.

II.

Greco-Roman Antiquity

Allen, W.S (1981) ‘The Greek contribution to the history of phonetics’, in Asher and Henderson (1981):115–22.

Arens, H (1984) Aristotle’s Theory of Language and its Tradition: Texts from 500 to 1750, Studies in the History of Linguistics 29, Benjamins,

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Baratin, M and Desbordes, F (1981) L’analyse linguistique dans l’Antiquit é classique 1 Les théories, Klincksieck, Paris.

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Coseriu, E (1975) Die Geschichte der Sprachphilosophie von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart: eine Übersicht, 1 Von der Antike bis Leibniz,

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Kemp, A (1986) ‘The Tekhn ē grammatikē of Dionysius Thrax translated into English’, Historiographia Linguistica, 13:343–63.

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Pinborg, J (1975) ‘Classical Greece’, in Sebeok, T.A (1975):69–126.

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K., bibliography by Egli, U., Schriften zur Linguistik 12, Vieweg, Braunschweig and Wiesbaden.

Steinthal, H (1st ed 1863, 2nd ed 1890–1) Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft bei den Griechen und R ömern mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die Logik, Ferdinand Dümmler, Berlin, repr Georg Olms, Darmstadt 1961.

Uhlig, G (1883–1910) Grammatici Graeci, Teubner, B.G Leipzig, repr Georg Olms, Heidelberg (1979).

Wouters, A (1979) The Grammatical Papyri from Graeco-Roman Egypt: Contributions to the Study of the ‘Ars grammatica’ in Antiquity,

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III.

The Middle Ages

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Bursill-Hall, G.L (1975) ‘The Middle Ages’, in Sebeok, T.A (1975):179–230.

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Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt.

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Linguistics, 39, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Covington, M.A (1986) ‘Grammatical theory in the Middle Ages’, in Bynon and Palmer (1986):23–42.

Hunt, R.W (1980) Collected Papers on the History of Grammar in the Middle Ages, Studies in the History of Linguistics, 5, Benjamins,

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Law, V (1985) ‘Linguistics in the earlier Middle Ages: the Insular and Carolingian grammarians’, Transactions of the Philological Society:

171–93.

Pinborg, J (1967) Die Entwicklung der Sprachtheorie im Mittelalter, Aschendorff, Münster and Frost-Hansen, Copenhagen.

Rosier, I (1983) La grammaire sp éculative des Modistes, Presses Universitaires de Lille, Lille.

IV.

Since the Renaissance

Aarsleff, H (1976, repr with corrections 1983) The Study of Language in England, 1780 − 1860 University of Minnesota, Minneapolis and

Athlone, London.

Aarsleff, H (1982) From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History, Athlone, London.

Alston, R.C (1965–73) A Bibliography of the English Language from the Invention of Printing to the Year 1800, 11 vols., E.J.Arnold,

Leeds and Bradford.

Anthropological Linguistics 5.1 (1963): History of Linguistics.

Apel, K.O (1963) Die Idee der Sprache in der Tradition des Humanismus von Dante bis Vico, Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 8, Bouvier,

Bonn

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Jahrhunderts mit einem Rückblick auf die früheren Zeiten, Geschichte der Wissenschaften in Deutschland, Neuere Zeit 8, Cotta,

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der Linguistik, Tübinger Beiträge zur Linguistik 123, Gunter Narr, Tübingen (revised version of their article in Sebeok (1975):481– 606).

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Hague.

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du langage naturel chez Jacob Boehme et ses sources’, Po étique, 11 (1972):337–66.

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23 LANGUAGE ENGINEERING: SPECIAL LANGUAGES

DONALD C.LAYCOCK and PETER M ÜHLHÄUSLER

1

INTRODUCTIONLanguage has been compared variously with either bodily organs such as legs or hands, or else man-made tools like axes andhammers Related to the view that language is a mental organ is that it is optimally suited to the requirements of humancommunication and that it is therefore best left alone: given no human interference it will adapt to the communicative purpose

it is put to If language is viewed as a tool, however, there is ample room for the possibility of a misfit between language andthe world or its communicative tasks This constitutes a justification for direct human interference in order to make it a moreadequate tool

As the language metaphors of linguistics change, so do their views on the legitimacy and indeed feasibility of languageengineering What was thought to be inadvisable and impossible within American structuralism, for instance, seems alegitimate concern to those working within the developmental paradigm pioneered by Bailey in the late 1970s

Our concern here is twofold First we wish to discuss the theoretical limits within which all human interference withlanguage must take place Second, we would like to analyse a number of different types of such interference and explore theirhistorical roots In doing this we have opted to combine recent insights into linguistic naturalness with more traditionalterminology

The parameters of naturalness and artificiality have not always been properly separated in past discussions In particular,one can observe a tendency to label as ‘natural’ any solution that draws lexical or grammatical material from an existing linguistic

system It is for this reason that we shall avail ourselves of the widely used distinction between a priori and a posteriori languages.

A priori languages are constructed from scratch, their roots being selected on the basis of theoretical philosophical

considerations rather than adapted from real human languages A posteriori languages, on the other hand, typically are

simplifications or adaptations of one or more existing languages A number of artificial languages, e.g Schleyer’s Volapük orthe proposals made by Comenius, are of a mixed type

The attraction of a priori systems is perceived to be that they offer the possibility of encoding language-independent

universal logic In actual fact, in the absence of such a logic, they tend to be very closely based, in their semantic properties,

on the European languages spoken by their inventors and hence turn out to be a posteriori languages in disguise It is not clear to us whether totally language-independent a priori languages can be created in principle The attraction of a posteriori

languages is often seen to be their ‘naturalness’ In practice, the vast majority of special languages have been derived from avery small number of Standard Average European (SAE) languages (principally Romance) and hence reflect the culture-specific semantics of only a small part of the world’s population In this connection, proposals such as Pham Xuan Thai’s

Frater, an a posteriori language based on Latin, Greek, Chinese, Japanese and ‘other non-Aryan speech communities’ are an

interesting exception

2

THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS: FORMAL PROPERTIESWhilst it is possible in principle to add to, subtract from and permutate an existing linguistic structure in an almost infinitenumber of ways and/or to invent entirely new languages from scratch, in practice many constraints operate if the outcome is

to be a communication system which human beings can handle Further constraints arise if the requirement is to create alanguage that can be acquired by children and yet others if the requirement is that it should lend itself to acquisition by adultswithout formal instruction Quite different limitations obtain when communication between species or with the inhabitants ofimagined or real other worlds are at issue Yet other constraints need to be considered when languages are to be used by andwith machines

Let us explore first the notion of ‘possible human language’ It has been characterised either in terms of a set of abstractprinciples, as in Chomsky’s more recent writings, or else in terms of more superficial implicational patterns which lay downthe limited possibilities for the combination of surface properties of languages such as word order, the encoding of causatives

or the formation of relative clauses Typologists of the school represented by Greenberg and Comrie note that only a smallsubset of all mathematically conceivable combinations of features are found in actual languages Whilst their ultimate aim ofdiscovering those typological features on which the maximum number of other features depends has been achieved only inpart, such studies as are available nevertheless tell us a great deal about the highly restricted options of human languages inencoding certain concepts

Derivations from typological studies include the study of language change, language acquisition, pidginisation andcreolisation as well as the notion of ‘linguistic naturalness’, a gradient concept ranging from the most natural to the mostabnatural The term ‘unnatural’ is reserved for phenomena that cannot be produced by the human speech organs or handled bythe human intellectual apparatus Examples of unnatural phenomena include sound which can only be produced if the lips areenlarged by wooden plates and the effects of knocking out one or more of the front teeth However, as natural humanlanguages can be expected to function in conjunction with natural human activities, claims that languages are excessivelyaffected by, for example, the chewing of the areca nut (as has been said of the Santa Cruz language in the Solomon Islands), or

by excessive teeth-chattering from the cold (Eskimo), or by extreme heat (African and Pacific Island languages), are nonsense.Languages devised for extraterrestrial communication and computer languages are also unnatural in the technical sense

‘Naturalness’ is considered to be a property of human language in general, though the degree to which languages approachthe most natural end of the continuum differs According to Bickerton (1981, 1984), for instance, creoles are maximallynatural, whilst old cultural languages such as French or English are located at the other end of the spectrum Whatever the degree

of naturalness in an individual language, the following observations hold for all languages:

(i) The presence of a less natural category implies that of a more natural one Trial, for instance, implies dual which in turnimplies plural (at least with nouns) The reverse is not the case,

(ii) More natural categories are acquired before less natural ones: word final [p] is acquired before [b] and [t] is acquiredbefore [6] in all positions,

(iii) The maintenance of less natural categories requires more nurture and formal learning than that of more natural ones.The characterisation of linguistic naturalness is rendered difficult by the presence of two basic requirements to language: that

it be produced and that it be perceived Unless one is dealing with an extremely limited language, e.g one consisting of onlythe forms [mama], [pupu] and [dodo], it is inevitable that there is a conflict between optimalisation of production(phonological naturalness) and optimalisation of perception (morphological naturalness) Generally speaking, what is easier toproduce is more difficult to distinguish and vice versa The requirement of one form=one meaning can cause a high degree ofabnaturalness in production For example, if the English concept ‘more than one’ was expressed invariably by [s], the

resulting plurals of rat, dog and rose would be a rather natural [ræts] next to almost unpronounceable [dogs] and [rœuzs] The

requirement of one form=one meaning has other implications for perception; languages that rank high on the morphologicalnaturalness scale will favour synthesis or polysynthesis such that words consist of many smaller parts, each of them with theirfixed meaning Polysynthesis, as is well known to typologists, virtually excludes fusion and similar natural phonologicalprocesses Language engineers have seldom appealed to such principles in a conscious fashion Instead, in most instances they

seem to have opted unconsciously for strategies optimalising morphological naturalness (a posteriori languages such as

Esperanto being a good example) This is defensible if languages are to be used among second-language adult speakers Children,

on the other hand, tend to require a considerable amount of phonological naturalness as well and will change languages in thedirection of greater pronounceability

Whereas the understanding of linguistic naturalness among language engineers has been very limited, the notions ofsimplicity and simplification, the former referring to the end product, the latter to the process leading to it, have played amuch more important role At the most general level simplicity relates to the requirement of expressing the maximum number

of distinctions by means of the most economical linguistic apparatus In practice, any act of engineering which increases thecoverage of grammatical rules, removes contextual conditions for their application or eliminates competing rules that do thesame job, contributes to the overall simplicity of the resulting system Above all other things it means that lexicalirregularities are replaced, as much as possible, by grammatical regularities

Technical simplicity is a great virtue for machine languages and in areas of human language, such as scientificterminologies Human processing skills, limitations on time and other human ‘performance’ factors impose quite severelimitations on simplicity in languages for human use Thus, whilst a computer can cope with a convention which expressesthe number 17 as two+ two+two+two+two+two+two+two+one, human beings cannot Instead, more number stems areneeded It appears that human languages have only very limited leeway for shifting the boundary between lexicon and

grammar However, this principle is often found to be violated, particularly in apriori languages.

In a language imagined by Tyssot de Patot (1710), for example, the numerals are expressed by the successive consonants of

the language (b is ‘1’, d is ‘2’, p is ‘10’, and ‘21’ is expressed dpb) Even fewrer numerical roots are used by John Weilgart, in

aUI, his ‘language of space’ (Weilgart 1968); the first five numerals are expressed by five nasalised vowels, and the next five

by the same vowels lengthened (represented in his system by a, e, i, o, u, A, E, I, O,U)

Next to violating constraints on the boundary between lexis and grammar in human languages, the promotion of maximumsimplicity also clashes with considerations of naturalness within grammar and grammatical components Thus, from the point

of view of simplicity, a system which adds a plural ending every time more than one of an entity is mentioned would seempreferable to one where plural endings occur with some lexical stems only Applying this principle English should have plural

forms such as traffics, funs, wheats and pronouns such as Is, yous and hes, shes and its.

From the point of view of naturalness, the most natural environment for plural marking are nouns referring to human

beings, followed by animates, countable objects, mass nouns and finally abstract terms The absence of a form such as funs is

thus natural, but an irregularity in the technical sense

Other examples are the Esperanto forms patro (stem pair+noun marker -o) and patrino (stem patr ‘father’+in

‘feminine’+noun marker o) Here we are dealing with a violation of the principle that what is prominent in the perception or

experience of speakers of a language should be encoded by simple lexical items Since the mother tends to be more central tothe experience of children than their father, the direction of the derivation should be the reverse of what it is in Esperanto;considerations such as the requirement that languages should be free from sexism, racism and so forth also militate againstthis Esperanto form

The principle just mentioned is known as Zipf’s Law and it raises another important issue, namely whether languages are inessence iconic or arbitrary This is not the place to go into detail about the history of this debate Instead, some areas whereiconicity appears to have been regarded as important by language engineers will be briefly illustrated

Lexical stems can be motivated in two senses, either by being a direct icon of the entities they refer to (onomatopoeia) orelse being made up of sound segments that are iconic of aspects of the real world, e.g [i] for smallness or proximity, [t] forabruptness and so forth Again, this is the system of Weilgart’s aUI, where, for instance, the basic vowels a, e, i, o, u, represent

‘space, movement, light, life, human’; but such a system is proposed as early as 1636 by M.Mersenne, in his Harmonie universelle, where the vowels represent the following qualities:

a and o=what is great and noble

e=delicate, subtle things, suitable for the representation of sadness and mourning

i=very thin, small things

o=the expression of great passion

u=dark, hidden things

(Knowlson 1975:67–8, which see for further examples)

In George Dalgarno’s philosophical language, presented in his Ars signorum (1661), words tend to have a basic root shape, with the differentiations being expressed by vowels, or by inserted consonants (r is ‘opposite’, l ‘the mean between two

extremes’) Such minimal distinctions are of course totally at odds with the important principle of redundancy in naturallanguage, since the slightest interference in the channel (noise of any kind) will obliterate essential distinctions Pronouns anddemonstratives in Dalgarno’s language, for instance, are (using some Greek letters):

lal ‘I’, lŋl ‘thou’, lei ‘he’, lol ‘this’,

lvl‘itself’, lul ‘who’

Mishearing the vowel could lead to very serious misunderstanding Constructing languages entirely out of iconic segments orlexical stems often means having to give up considerations of the next step of iconicity, morphological or constructionaliconicity (cf Mayerthaler 1981) With this type the length and the morphological complexity of a lexical item are related toboth the already mentioned cultural prominence and naturalness Thus, a word referring to great great great grandmother isiconically encoded if it is longer than that for great great grandmother, great grandmother, grandmother and mother, andcounter-iconically if it is not Similarly, plural forms of nouns should be longer or morphologically more complex thansingular ones and past tense forms of stative verbs longer than non-past forms Thus, Esperanto, where equally long andmorphologically complex forms are required for all tenses, is not ideally encoded, a problem which does not arise withVolapük where non-present forms are morphologically more complex than present ones

Little is known about iconicity in word order other than the existence of certain general principles, such as the fact thatprominence of a topic should be reflected by its appearance in a syntactically prominent position or sequence of events should

be mirrored by sequence of clauses No examples of conscious attempts to introduce syntactic iconicity are known to theauthors

Attempts to rationalise the pronunciation of artificial languages have been either absent or rudimentary Thus, highlymarked sounds such as [y] and [ø] are found in Volapük, and the distinction between [l] and [r] is found in most of the

twentieth-century languages such as Esperanto, Ido, etc including Frater which is allegedly based on Chinese and Japanese aswell as European languages, and complex consonant clusters are encountered in many of them Much more attention isusually paid to streamlining the writing systems of these languages e.g by eliminating digraphs or special symbols This, ofcourse, is in line with the general observation that most artificial languages are derived from a written form of language and

designed to facilitate written in preference to oral intercommunication Whereas some a priori languages lend themselves to

the former only, artificial languages designed exclusively for oral communication are very rare, a possible example beingSchwörer’s Kolonialdeutsch (1916), designed for the use of the coloured workforce of a German world empire

Whereas phonetic or phonological naturalness in the sense of optimalising production is not much in evidence, concern for

sound symbolism or onomatopoeic iconicity is encountered frequently, particularly in a priori languages Thus, the idea that

the vowel (i) should stand for smallness, (a) for largeness and (0) for roundness or universality is encountered in a number ofproposals, though in most instances such iconicity tends to be postulated in an impressionistic manner and be mixed withculture-specific conventions

The paucity of information in the areas of syntactic and phonetic naturalness relates to the more general observation thatnot all levels of language have been equally susceptible to engineering Deliberate interference with human languages seems

to be guided by the following hierarchy:

degree of interference

most

least

lexicon derivational morphology inflexional morphology phonology

phonetics syntax

Language creation often exploits the principle that there are trade relationships between the levels Thus, the size of the

irregular lexicon is reduced by promoting a more powerful derivational morphology in many a posteriori proposals.

At each level a number of operations can be carried out, mainly addition, subtraction, substitution and rearrangement or acombination of these (polysystemic) Such processes are common in the mechanical alterations of natural languages called

‘ludlings’ (Laycock 1972), or play-languages of the Pig Latin type Some examples of each type follow:

Addition: you can talk Gree -yougree cangree talkgree Greegree

you can talk skimono jive -skyou skcan sktalk skskimono skjive

Substitution: Ei, da sitzt ‘ne Flieg’ an der Wand -i, di sitzt ‘ni Flig’ in dir Wind

Rearrangement: look at the old woman butterfly -cool ta the dillow namow

-flutterby

-withus youvus govusArguably the most important and least heeded property of ‘natural’ human languages is their versatility Far from being closedrule-governed systems they are open-ended and only partially governed by rules The human language ability is rule-changingrather than (as Chomsky and his followers have it) rule-governed creativity Thus, an important measure for the success of

artificial languages should be their adaptive creativity It can be noted that most invented systems, in particular a priori systems, are ill-suited to change The history of languages such as Esperanto demonstrates that a posteriori languages also

suffer from this deficiency Those who are in the business of language elevation (e.g in the case of Afrikaans, BahasaIndonesia etc.) have begun to cater for change, though this remains one of the least researched areas

The uneven coverage of different levels of language is encountered again with rank or size-level Engineering typicallyconcentrates on the rank of word, maximally the sentence Very little regard is paid to paragraph or discourse organisation inspite of the fact that languages can differ greatly in their discourse pragmatics; sharing words and grammatical structures isinsufficient in bringing about an understanding between different groups

THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS: FUNCTIONAL PROPERTIESThe study of language functions is still at a pre-theoretical stage and no conclusive findings exist about either the number offunctions or the boundaries between them For the purposes of this section we shall rely on the work of scholars such asHalliday and Jakobson In Halliday’s model (1974), the order in which functions emerge developmentally in child languageacquisition is the following:

Any survey of language engineering, both with a posteriori languages derived from existing human languages or a priori

languages designed on the basis of philosophical or theological considerations, will demonstrate the primacy of the cognitivefunction in man-made systems

It is interesting to note that in many early examples of language engineering other, non-linguistic, functions were often

dominant Thus, in medieval and postmedieval Europe the creation of a new language was seen as imitatio dei, i.e promoting

the creation of a better world Figures such as Jacob Böhme (1586–1654) insisted that the creation of a perfect language was

an urgent necessity in preparing mankind for the imminent second coming of Christ, a view which was also held by many ofhis contemporaries and successors Comenius (1592–1670) sketches a three-stage programme for the transition from apantaglossic via a polyglossic to a monoglossic mankind, the endpoint being reached when all mankind could praise God in asingle language

Similarly abnatural functions of language which emerge again and again are attempts to create codes which could provideaccess to the secrets of the universe and systems for concealment of information, either for the use of small privileged groups

or, in the case of some forms of glossolalia, for individuals only Such secret languages also emerge ‘naturally’ in children

(e.g in twin languages such as Spaka—see Diehl et al 1981).

The most important distinction in the area of functions is that between artificial languages designed as replacements of one,many or all human languages and others which are to serve as supplementary interlanguages or languages of special domains.The desirability of a single language was motivated, in many earlier writings, by the argument that the original (pre-Babel)state was one of monolingualism Later writers, particularly those of the nineteenth and twentieth century emphasise theimportance of a single world language for world peace Thus, Schleyer, the inventor of Volapük, adopted as his motto:

‘Menade bal, p üki bal’ ‘to one human race, one language’; others, such as Baumann, the inventor of Weltdeutsch (1916), saw

the use of a single German-derived language of intercommunication as a means of perpetuating German superiority Whereassingle languages, by definition, would have to fulfil all functions of human languages (plus any additional ones which theirinventors may wish to promote), auxiliary or supplementary artificial languages can be restricted to a small range of functionsand domains

For the majority of those devising a priori languages the main function of language was seen as reflecting the orderliness

of creation It was generally felt that the proper representation of things is taxonomy and that words should be isomorphicwith the things they refer to By bringing about such a fit between language and the world, it was felt that a proper foundationfor human cognition was laid

The expectations of most authors of a posteriori languages tended to be less ambitious, though again related to the function

of cognition: auxiliary languages were seen as a means of exchanging ideas between members of different communities.Typically, these ideas are those of educated groups (Schuchardt 1928:371 refers to the exchange of scientific ideas as themost important and most immediate task) which, at the time when most artificial languages were devised, meant the inhabitants

of Europe and North America The demonstration that an artificial language also lent itself to the poetic function wasfrequently felt to be an important additional virtue Thus, there has been a stream of poetical work in Esperanto ever since thefirst volume of poetry appeared in 1893 Distinct from this poetic function is the creation of languages for stylistic or otherliterary purposes, in order to illustrate how the inhabitants of various utopias and dystopias speak A survey of theselanguages (Laycock 1987) draws attention to some salient aspects of such literary creations:

(a) their typological diversity is greater than that of natural human languages, but in quite different ways

(b) unnatural types (e.g speaking backwards or a priori systems) are common among the inhabitants of literary worlds (c) most a posteriori languages are modelled very closely on a small number of European languages, especially in features

such as word order (SVO) and nominative-accusative grammar

(d) iconicity is high and regularity paramount

(e) the languages are frequently controlled and regulated by some governing body such as an academy

The desire to bring about a fit between language and the world underlies many literary creations Thus, to mention some

recent examples, the use of Russian and quasi-Russian forms in Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange has been interpreted as an

index of a violent society and the use of numerous West Germanic and Scandinavian roots in Nabokov’s Zemblan isappropriate to a country like Zembla, a distant northern land (see Krueger 1967)

The poetic function of artificial languages is manifested not only in ‘high’ literature but, to an even greater extent andacross a wide range of cultures, in verbal play and play languages such as ludlings (those involving regular transformations).Play-languages form part of the linguistic competence of a whole community, but, since their use requires practice, they oftenserve as virtually ‘secret’ languages for a particular subgroup in a community, since the other members of the community lackthe fluency that comes from constant use Such a subgroup is frequently composed of adolescents and pre-adolescents, at astage after children have mastered the basic grammatical norms of the language, and now feel free to experiment, in anenvironment where their concerns (sexual and individualistic) may already be at odds with those of the adult world

In view of the fact that language is talked about in terms derived from everyday languages one could expect a concern, onthe part of the inventors of artificial languages, for culture-neutral (universal logic) metalanguage In actual fact, there is littleevidence of this among planned and artificial languages other than as part of a wider effort to organise human discourse intotaxonomies Typically, the metalinguistic categories established within the classical tradition are taken over in theconstruction of languages Thus, there is an almost universal subdivision into the traditional parts of speech, inflections withverbs (tense rather than aspect) and number indication with plurals Constructions for which there are no labels at the time ofinvention, (e.g ergativity, switch-reference, anti-passives) are not considered by the vast majority of language makers

Linguistic terminology continues to remain unsatisfactory and better attention to metalinguistics, particularly on a posteriori sorts of metalinguistics rather than on a prioristic systems, remains an urgent task.

Attempts to construct languages appropriate to the expressive function typically relate to religious experience and tend to

be restricted to individual needs (as in glossolalia) rather than communication between individuals In the latter case, aspointed out by Samarin (1976:6 ff), language creation is geared towards promoting the spiritual cohesion of religious groups

as well as the exclusion of outsiders

Perhaps inevitably, however, such phatic communication is rarely in the form of a fully worked-out language, but isexpressed in non-linguistic modes such as glossolalia, which is merely a form of language-babbling, or glossomimia, which isthe imitation of natural languages in such a way to give the impression that the actual language is being spoken Glossolalia iscommon in many of the world’s religions—not only charismatic Christianity—and serves to indicate the acceptance by thespeaker of a divine spirit Glossomimia, on the other hand, is more common in dramatic representations, where, for instance,

an actor may wish to give the impression of being a German guard in a prison camp; he will speak a nonsensical ‘language’ withthe phonetic qualities of German, and the nature of the role will thereby be established

The term phatic communication was introduced in the 1920s, i.e after the majority of a priori and a posteriori languages

under consideration in this paper had already been constructed Thus, in spite of the importance of phatic communication (i.e.keeping the communication channel open) for harmony in interpersonal relations, little formal planning of language forconflict-avoiding small talk etc has been produced Rather, the general assumption has been that the maximum amount ofinformation should be exchanged through planned languages

Whilst we have so far observed a neglect of the lower non-cognitive functions in artificial languages, there has beenconsiderable activity in connection with the last function to be considered here, the directive function The idea that it waspossible to construct a language for mind control is most closely associated with Orwell’s Newspeak (cf Bolton 1984), where

it is argued that, by removing words from the dictionary, the associated concepts and the ability to argue about them is alsoremoved At the same time, existing words are given new more specific meanings and new terms are coined to suitideological requirements Social control through language use (rather than language creation), of course, has a very longtradition and languages constructed with social control as a principal motive also predate literary newspeak Thus, Schwörer’sKolonialdeutsch of 1916 was designed for purposes such as:

‘to increase the regional mobility of native workers, thus increasing their reliability’;

‘a language for German masters and colonisers to give orders in’;

‘a symbol of German authority’

Like Newspeak, Kolonialdeutsch was vastly reduced in its lexical resources, in order to prevent the ‘natives’ fromoverhearing their masters’ conversations and from ‘debating controversial topics among themselves’ Since the German plansfor world domination after the First World War did not materialise, this artificial form of German was never implemented,nor were subsequent attempts to revive a similar form of German for use with guest workers Most current attempts to makelanguage more suited to social control concentrate on small areas of the lexicon rather than large-scale structural revision.Considerable advances have been made in both the language of advertising (e.g Vestergaard and Schrøder 1985) and politics(Bolinger 1980).

In sum, most language engineering has been carried out with relatively little regard to the functions of language, and a gooddeal of it with deliberate disregard of functions other than the cognitive one Whilst cognition is an important aspect oflanguage, its role tends to be overrated by the members of academic institutions Such progress that has been made in theareas of logic and grammar still needs to be matched by advances in the rhetorical dimensions of language

4

A PRIORI LANGUAGES

A priori languages exist for the most part as ideational constructs, as, in the sense of being languages that display ‘perfection’

in all the possible ways— iconicity and total naturalness—they cannot exist as actual languages, or even be constructed to any

real degree Nevertheless, the concept of the ideal a priori language has been a common theme throughout all recorded

civilisations, and we deal now with some of the principal preoccupations

The ideal language has been envisaged as the divine language, the primal language, and the philosophical language Forsome writers these three are all the same; others may wish to distinguish them The divine language is that spoken bybenevolent superhuman forces such as God or the gods, and angels and other divine messengers; the features are bestsummarised by Swedenborg (1758, 1958):

‘In the entire heaven all have one language…Language there is not learned but is implanted by nature with every one,for it flows from their very affection and thought The tones of their speech correspond to their affection, and the vocalarticulations which are words correspond to the ideas of thought that spring from the affection; and because of thiscorrespondence the speech itself is spiritual, for it is affection sounding and thought speaking…Because the speech ofangels proceeds directly from their affection…angels can therefore express in a moment what a man cannot express inhalf an hour.’

The language, therefore, is immutable, instinctive, iconic, ultra-brief, logical and natural These qualities are also attributed tothe primal language, or supposed original language of mankind, which in most religious systems is considered to be of divineorigin

There are, of course, considerable problems with such a concept, from a linguistic point of view In such a language itwould be impossible to lie, since the complete match between utterance and reality would mean that only true statementscould be uttered; moreover, nothing new could be uttered, and all possible statements would already be known to hearers, sothat the only choice is between platitudes and silence, or else, as in the imagination of Borges (1970), the uttering of a singleword which will in fact substitute for all possible utterances:

‘In time, the notion of a divine sentence seemed puerile or blasphemous A god, I reflected, ought only to utter a singleword and in that word absolute fullness No word uttered by him can be inferior to the universe or less than the sum total

of time Shadows or simulacra of that single word equivalent to a language and to all a language can embrace are the

poor and ambitious human words, all, world, universe.’

The philosophical language is not usually conceptualised in such an extreme form; it need not be immutable (although change

is not easily incorporable into most of the proposed systems), it is capable of being learned (and is therefore not instinctive),and it is not ultra-brief or comprehensive (in the sense of a single utterance being able to stand for much longer utterances innatural languages) Also, as pointed out earlier in this paper, the iconicity and logic of the philosophical language operate inthe opposite direction to naturalness

From about the sixteenth century on (with a few earlier precursors like Ramon Lull) the idea begins to take shape amongEuropean scholars that it might be possible to create such a universal philosophical language that would be as non-arbitrary aspossible, based on a philosophical categorisation of human experience, and completely regular in morphology and derivation

It is perhaps not coincidental that this idea grows in force with the gradual decline of Latin as the lingua franca of scholarlyEurope

Credit for one of the first serious suggestions for such an a priori language is often given to Descartes, in a letter to Père

Marin Mersenne (1629) But Descartes admits only grudgingly the possible utility of a multilingual dictionary with aninterlingual key, and has few concrete suggestions to make on the construction of a language based on philosophicalcategories, other than to suggest that the philosophy would have to be correct, and that the morphology should be regular:

‘ car faisant une langue, ó il n’y ait qu’une façon de conjuger, de décliner, et de construire les mots, qu’il n’y en aitpoint de défectifs ni d’irréguliers, qui sont toutes choses venues de la corruption de l’usage, et même que l’inflexion desnoms ou des verbes et la construction se fassent par affixes, ou devant ou après les mots primitifs lesquelles affixessoient toutes spécifiées dans le dictionnaire, ce ne sera pas merveille que les esprits vulgaires apprennent en moins desix heures a composer en cette langue avec l’aide du dictionnaire, qui est le sujet de la première proposition.’

Leibniz also toyed with the idea in the third quarter of the seventeenth century, but, as Knowlson (1975) points out, his ideaswere only theoretical in nature, and many of his notes on the subject were not accessible to his contemporaries, and havebecome known only through the work of Couturat (1901, 1903) Credit for one of the most thorough-going attempts to

construct such a language must therefore be given to George Dalgarno, who published his Ars signorum in 1661.

The complexity to which such philosophical languages can aspire is seen also in a language proposed by Thomas Urquhart

in 1953 Urquhart did not create the words of his language, but set down its rules: two hundred and fifty roots, ‘elevengenders, ten tenses (occurring with all parts of speech), six moods, four voices, twelve parts of speech—and, moreimportantly, every letter to have a meaning, and every word generatable in the language will actually occur’, so that

92 Two and twentiethly, In this Language the opposite members of a division have usually the same letters in the wordswhich signifie them; the initial and final letter being all one, with a transmutation only in the middle ones

93 Three and twentiethly, Every word in this Language signifieth as well backward as forward; and however you invert theletters, still shall you fall upon significant words: whereby a wonderful facility is obtained in making of Anagrams

The whole concept of the a priori philosophical language is satirised by Jonathan Swift, in his account (1726) of the

philosophers of Laputa, who carried around with them all objects that could conceivably be the subjects of discourse, ‘since

words are only names for things’ The strength of the lampoon lies in the fact that in a short while it would occur to such philosophers that they could carry around pictures of the objects talked about, and that it is only a small step from such iconic

representation to the iconic representation of objects in words, as envisaged in the philosophical language

Perhaps because of such satirical comment, it is rare to meet with fully elaborated a priori languages later than the eighteenth

century Their direct descendants, however, are the formal language systems described in textbooks of mathematics andformal logic—including the interesting Lincos, a language designed for ‘cosmic intercourse’ (Freudenthal 1960 and 1974)—and also some computer languages Mention has also been made of Weilgarth’s ‘language of space’ (1968), which is claimed

to be beneficial in imparting concepts to mentally-disturbed children But such languages also tend to derive a great deal of

their structure from a posteriori principles, and are therefore not philosophical languages in the strict sense.

Because of the iconic nature of the philosophical language, some attempts have been made to present the language in pictorialform; such ‘sign languages’ are called pasigraphies Weilgarth’s aUI is one such, since it provides pictorial elements for each

of the units of the language, and two other twentieth-century pasigraphies are Leslie Charteris’s Paleneo (1972) and

‘Blissymbolics’ (Bliss 1965) Such systems have their uses in the signs required for communication across many languages

at, for example, international airports, but tend, in their detailed elaboration, to be far from transparent, and thus to offer littleadvantage, if any, over invented languages presented in normal script

The idea of a pictorial iconic language in general can be traced back to the dawning knowledge, in Europe, of the Chineselanguage (Frodsham 1964) Chinese was popularly supposed to have a writing system in which whole words, or ‘concepts’, wereexpressed by single characters, some of which were analysable as pictorial representations—and were therefore non-arbitrary,along the lines of the philosophical language In addition, the presence of tones in Chinese, and the concept of music as an

‘international language’ (a concept which ignores the extremely cultural bases of all music, and also the very limited extent ofpossible communication) gave rise, from the seventeenth century on, to a large number of ‘Utopian’ languages based onmusical themes By ‘Utopian’ languages we mean languages designed to serve Utopian states, and which, like the statesthemselves, are regulated so as to be, in some way, an ‘improvement’ on natural languages—whether they are conceived of as

merely modified natural languages (a posteriori languages), or as philosophical a priori languages, or a combination of both.

Although such fictional Utopian languages cannot be considered as serious linguistic engineering, one continuing theme, that

of the expression of concepts contradictory in meaning, needs to be singled out, since it resurfaces in the construction of a posteriori languages Since there is a direct logical relation between a word, or concept, and its contradictory, it follows that

in an ideal language the contradiction should always be expressed in the same way In Solresol, an a priori language based on

the musical scale, and playable on any instrument, proposed in 1818 by Jean-Frédéric Sudre, contrary ideas are expressed by

reversing the notes—thus domisol is ‘God’ and solmido is ‘Satan’—but as Couturat and Léau (1903) point out, the system breaks down with dosidomi ‘vegetable’ and midosido ‘sacrifice’ A corollary of this regularised negation, so much a feature

of the a posteriori languages, are the ideas that the same word in a Utopian language can express widely different meanings,

even opposites, or that the ambiguity of the spoken language is so high that speech must be accompanied by gesture; suchideas also have their ultimate origin in misconceptions about the nature of Chinese—even the notion of gestures may derivefrom observation of Chinese signalling written characters in the air But the Utopian languages of fiction, including science-fiction, are many, and only some of the prevailing themes have been indicated here (For a comprehensive treatment, seeLaycock 1987.)

5

A POSTERIORI LANGUAGES

A posteriori languages are usually defined as deliberately simplified versions of existing human languages or groups oflanguages Contrasting with this narrow definition is the broader view which on the one hand studies instances of languageengineering leading to more esoteric and more complex languages, and on the other simplified languages (pidgins, koinés andlingue franche) whose simplicity is not the result of deliberate human agency It is somewhat ironic that perfectly smoothly

functioning a posteriori languages were used by millions of non-literate speakers in many parts of the world at a time when

the academics of central Europe were trying to discover the secret of the optimal language for international communication It

is interesting to note that the majority of these scholars either did not take note of pidgins or else rejected them; as did

Jespersen in his Introduction to An International Language who argues that Simplicity does not mean that the language we

construct is to be a kind of “Pidgin” incapable of expressing nuances of thought which are necessary to highly cultivatedEuropeans…The interlanguage that I am advocating…is totally different from such languages through being expressive and

efficient, though being extremely simple in its grammatical structure.’ One of the few attempts to base an a priori language on

the structures of the Mediterranean Lingua Franca and other pidgins is Steiner’s Pasilingua (1885) Schuchardt, who didintensive research on both pidgins and creoles and international auxiliary languages, also emphasises the importance of theformer for the latter and argues that instead of deliberately simplified forms of Latin (such as Nov-Latin or Mondo lingue) onecould equally well (1928:382) ‘introduce a creolised version of a Romance language as an international language.’

The originator of the idea of an international auxiliary language is Descartes who, in a letter to Père Mersenne of 1629,

outlines proposals for both simplified existing a posteriori languages and a priori ones, a proposal which met with considerable

acceptance in intellectual circles, as the eclipse of Latin and the rise of national languages had made intellectual discoursebetween scholars from different European nations increasingly difficult During the seventeenth and first half of the

eighteenth century a number of a priori languages were constructed (see above) as well as mixed systems such as those of the

type proposed by Comenius and Leibniz, the latter (1646–1716) combining a Latin-derived lexicon with universal

philosophical semantax The earliest purely a posteriori language is discussed in the Encyclopedic of Diderot and d’Alembert

in an article by M.Faiguet dated 1765 Whilst only a sketch is provided, a number of principles of simplification are clearly

stated which are appealed to over and over again in later examples of a posteriori languages Thus, inflexional morphology is

vastly reduced, grammatical accidents such as gender no longer coded and articles disposed of What little morphologyremained was entirely regular

A complete proposal for an a posteriori language based on Latin is that by Carpophorophilus (1734): the Latin lexicon is reduced in size through the elimination of synonyms, the declension is replaced by articles, there is a single plural affix -im

borrowed from Hebrew and the verbal inflection is regularised

Numerous similar proposals for a posteriori languages follow in the nineteenth century Most of them were the work of

individuals working in isolation and thus never got implemented The majority of them were based on a few languages spoken

in Western Europe, particularly Latin and other Romance languages and, as far as we can see, all of them were conceived asclosed systems rather than languages capable of change and adaptation The first artificial language actually spoken by asignificant number of human beings was Volapük, an invention of the German priest Schleyer (1880) As already indicated,Volapük combined elements of both a posteriori and a priori languages Thus, part of its lexicon was derived from other

languages (mainly English, German and Latin) by regular as well as ad hoc processes (e.g vola from English ‘world’ and p ük from ‘speak’), whilst other items were invented, particularly the bound stems of words such as -el ‘inhabitant of’, as in Parisel ‘Parisian’ or -af ‘animal’ as in suplaf ‘spider’.

As Volapük was designed eventually to replace all other languages, simplification was restricted to the regularisation ofmorphological patterns but not the shedding of grammatical categories such as tense, gender or voice Rather, it was a highlysynthetic language, demanding considerable encoding and decoding skills from its users The following forms chosen from

the verbal paradigm of l öfön ‘to love’ illustrate this:

l öfob ‘I love’

älöfob ‘I loved’

ul öfob ‘I shall have loved’

l öfom ‘he loves’

l öfof ‘she loves’

l öfob-s ‘they (fem) love’

pe-i-l öf-o-f ‘she was always loved’

l öfo-b-seok ‘we love one another’

no-li-e-l öfo-s-la ‘will you not have loved’

e-l öfo-m-la ‘that he has loved’

and about 505,430 possible verb forms

In spite of such difficulties, Volapük rapidly acquired an international following beyond the wildest dreams of its inventor

An estimated million speakers used this language in 1888 and three international Volapük congresses took place in rapidsuccession in 1884, 1887 and 1889, the last one with representatives from 13 countries It is reported that the decision to holdall proceedings in Volapük revealed its deficiencies to the delegates More important, it appears, was the ideological conflictbetween Schleyer who wanted to see his invention capable of expressing the full range of semantic distinctions found in otherhuman languages and those who wished to reduce Volapük to a more modest status of an international auxiliary language.Some of his previous followers (such as the creators of Bopal, Spelin, Dil, Balta, Veltparl and La langue bleue) proposedsimplified adaptations, others deserted to the Esperanto movement, which was then gaining impetus

Esperanto, invented by the Polish oculist Ludwig Zamenhof (1859–1917) is an a posteriori language based primarily on

Romance and Germanic (Teutonic) lexicon and grammar A first version published in 1887 and a second version,incorporating many outsiders’ suggestions as well as changes by Zamenhof himself, was put forward in 1894

The spread of Esperanto was slower but more steady than that of Volapük Its success is due to the more felicitousgrammatical structure of the language (considerably less synthetic than Volapük), its flexibility, and possibly politicalpersecution in both Czarist Russia and Nazi Germany which gave the language the status of a progressive liberating anti-language The equilibrium between an international lexicon and a small set of (about 50) agglutinating inflectional andderivational formatives made it a very easy language to master, particularly for speakers of SAE languages Some of itsstructural properties, however, are so typically European (six pronoun system, the distinction between nominative andaccusative forms of the noun, the agreement of adjectives with the nouns they modify) or abnatural (the derivation of all

feminine forms from a masculine base by affixation or that of polar opposites by means of a prefix mal-) that learners from

other cultural backgrounds are at a great disadvantage Another criticism is that a number of widely known international roots

(e.g possible Latin-derived forms such as anno ‘year’ or skola ‘school’ are rejected in favour of less well-known roots such

as jar (taken from German) or lernejo (German root with Esperanto affix).

As in the case of other a posteriori languages related to SAE languages, the yardstick for what constitutes a concept and

consequently a lexical item is closely modelled on the inventor’s own knowledge of languages, in particular German Thus,

there is only one verb translating ‘to be’, namely, sein but two verbs for ‘to look after’, flegi from German pflegen for ‘look after the sick’ and varti from German warten for ‘to look after children’ Speakers of languages other than SAE ones would

find such culture-specific lexicalisation a considerable difficulty

Selecting a single semantic domain, colour terminology, and comparing Esperanto with other artificial languages willillustrate this point The results of numerous studies on colour systems in human languages (summarised, for instance in

Berlin and Kay 1969) show (a) that human languages can differ widely in the number of colour distinctions they lexicalise, (b) that only a small subset of all mathematically probable combinations of colour terms are permitted in human languages and (c)

that certain colour distinctions are considerably more basic than others For constructing a universal auxiliary language thismeans that one must work from the premise that the only colours one can assume to be readily intelligible to everybody areblack, white and possibly red If one considers concrete proposals, however, one finds a very different picture:

Esperanto (according to Wells 1969) appears to have 12 primary colour terms, including mauve, purple, pink, grey andbrown, the latter reflecting Western Germanic predilection for naming dark reddish colours Unsurprisingly, brown is also one

of the colours in Schleyer’s Volapük (1885) together with eleven other primary colours including purple, pink, grey andorange Brown, pink and purple are absent in Henderson’s Lingua (1888) where only six basic colours (black, white, red,green, yellow and grey) are found

The colour brown is absent in Frater (Thai 1957) in spite of the fact that it is a basic colour term in the mother tongue

(Vietnamese) of its inventor The inclusion of another basic colour term in this language, klor ‘greenish-yellow’, may be an

instance of hypercorrection or overcompensation for the absence of a blue-green or yellow-gold distinction in Vietnamese.From such considerations it follows that to call an international auxiliary language La Langue Bleue is not quite felicitous,leaving alone the problem that the sky, which is supposed to have been the limit for this language, tends not to be blue insome tropical parts of the world but has a glaring whitish tone

However, lexical ethnocentrism was not one of the reasons for the developing rift in the Esperanto movement; rather, as inthe case of Volapük, the later fate of Esperanto is characterised by a split between those in favour of the original or a mildly

revised language and those advocating radical revisions The split was triggered by the foundation of the ‘Delegation on theadoption of an International Auxiliary Language’ in 1900, consisting of a group of competent scholars including the linguistJespersen After initial discussion of a larger number of languages (discussed in detail by Jespersen 1921) the choice wasnarrowed down to Esperanto and Idiom Neutral, a language designed by a group that had left the Volapük movement in 1903.

At a later stage Ido, an artificial language derived from Esperanto, was submitted anonymously and received very favourably

by the Delegation The final decision was to recommend Esperanto with a number of reforms along the lines of Ido, a decisionunacceptable to many Esperantists Ido, in turn, received several improvements and changes and a language calledEsperantido was proposed by René de Saussure None of these languages derived from Esperanto could arrest the furtherspread of the original version which continues to remain the most widely spoken artificial language, and is seen by some asthe future language of the Common Market

The First World War affected the artificial language movement in several ways First, existing languages, in particular

Esperanto, were used in war propaganda by both German and French groups, and second, it promoted the development of a posteriori languages derived from single national languages The need for a language which could bring about internationalco-operation was felt even more strongly after the war By then, a number of principles and practices of artificial language-making had crystallised, including:

(a) that aposteriori languages are preferable to apriori ones

(b) that naturalness (as yet ill-defined) should be promoted as much as possible

(c) that the language should be for the whole world rather than the educated classes of Western Europe

(d) that the solution should be the result of teamwork rather than an individual effort

(e) that the implementation of the solution should be in the hands of an international authority such as the League of NationsThe first two points are illustrated by an increasing tendency to favour solutions found in actual human languages over

invented solutions, even at the cost of reduced regularity Point (c) is not widely applied, however, as the majority of linguists

concerned with the improvement or creation of artificial systems continue to be speakers of SAE languages with a verylimited experience of languages of other families Conspicuous by its absence is an understanding of the sociolinguisticmechanisms of cross-linguistic communication This criticism has been made of virtually all the languages that succeededEsperanto and Ido, such as Peano’s Latino sine flexione (1908) Jespersen’s Novial (1928) and Ogden and Richard’s BasicEnglish (1931) Among the few exceptions are Hogben’s Interglossa of 1943 which combines Greek vocabulary with Chinesesyntax, and Thai’s Lingua Sistemfrater (Frater) of 1957 Of the above languages Basic English needs to be singled out as aspecial type since in this reduced form of English, we find that the spelling, pronunciation and grammar of the Englishlanguage have been left intact, the principal change being a carefully limited lexical inventory of 850 items This languagethus could fulfil the dual functions of international auxiliary language and transitional stage in the acquisition of English as asecond language

The failure of most proposals for auxiliary languages is related to the limited insights and authority of individuals Thus,decisions of importance tended to be made in international bodies and one of the major present-day proposals, Interlingua, isthe work of a team of scholars (including Jespersen, Sapir, Martinet and Swadesh) belonging to the International AuxiliaryLanguage Association

The problem of implementation is the most difficult in the spread of linguistic innovations of any type What is needed arei) authority ii) reasons why innovations should be accepted and iii) considerable financial resources Esperanto in the daysbefore the outbreak of the First World War had all of these, though the new totalitarianism that followed made its furtherspread and acceptance difficult Support from organisations such as the League of Nations and the United Nations forinternational languages has been very cautious over the years, even more local proposals such as those for a commonEuropean language (Eurolengo, Jones 1973) meeting with very little support

Recent work in sociolinguistics suggests that the acceptance of a language is the consequence of groups of peopleidentifying with one another and with a common means of communication Another reason why people are willing to learnlanguages for intercommunication, in particular pidgins or similar lingue franche, is that they expect economic rewards Aslong as members of the international community can derive more profit (in various senses of the word) from learninglanguages such as English or French, the chances of Esperanto, Interlingua or similar systems remain very slender

6

NẠVE LINGUISTIC ENGINEERING

A form of linguistic engineering is only now being recognised in the languages of small and often illiterate communities: theeffect of influential individuals on the speech of the whole community We can call such linguistic engineering ‘nạve’ in thesense that it does not proceed from any overall plan, nor is it necessarily aimed at any improvement of the language; mere

change is usually sufficient The principal motives would seem rather to be the need for linguistically differentiating a groupfrom all other groups The area is little researched; some of what information there is (Laycock 1982a, b) comes from the area

of New Guinea, where language groups have the requisite smallness The maximum size of a community in which anindividual can impose linguistic whims, without the assistance of any form of media, would seem to be about 8,000, since this

is the largest size that permits of a network in which each speaker is known to every other speaker, or is at least in aspecifiable close-kin relation with another known speaker In such a community the linguistic whims of a chief, or ‘big man’,

or other forceful individual, can ‘blanket’ an entire community; in larger communities, such innovative language changesspread only in waves, and do not reach the peripheries

A classical example of such humanly-induced linguistic change would seem to be the metathesised forms of a language likeRirio, in the Solomon Islands (Laycock 1982a), which corresponds to unmetathesised forms in the neighbouring, and closely-related, language of Babatana The fact that such a difference is not caused by regular linguistic change is seen in thecircumstance that Ririo speakers create new metathesized forms from loanwords that have come into the language only after

the metathesis must have already been established—for example, Ririo kias, Babatana kesa, borrowed from the English word

‘cash’

An even more clear-cut case is provided by the language of Buin, spoken by some 17,000 persons in the North Solomonsprovince of Papua New Guinea Less than a tenth of the population speak a very distinct dialect called Uisai The languagehas several hundreds of grammatical forms (demonstratives, deictics, pronouns) showing a gender distinction betweenmasculine and feminine, through three numbers (singular, dual, plural) In the Uisai dialect, all such forms have reversedpolarity—that is, all the forms indicating ‘masculine’ in the other dialects indicate ‘feminine’ in Uisai, and vice versa In such

a case, there is no room for normal mechanisms of slow linguistic change, since the change involves a ‘flip flop’ of twoopposing categories, masculine and feminine Such a change is analogous to the change in Sweden from driving on the left todriving on the right; the change had to be accomplished instantly The most plausible explanation for such a linguistic change

—although this is not subject to direct investigation at the moment—is that some influential person of the Uisai communityonce announced something like ‘As from tomorrow we are not going to speak like other Buin speakers; we are going to say

‘he’ for ‘she’, and so on’ Once adopted, the change would be difficult at first for adult speakers, but would soon becomenatural to younger generations; and within one generation there would be a new group of speakers to whom this was the

‘natural’ form of speech

As both the Ririo case and the Buin case involve a single interchange of two elements—reversing final consonant andvowel in the Ririo case, masculine and feminine in the Buin case—it seems reasonable to postulate that one of the majormechanisms in linguistic change, whether conscious or unconscious, may be expressed in terms of interchange of binaryopposites Certainly there is considerable evidence from speech errors, and speech pathology, of interchange of elements, such

as initial consonant clusters in spoonerisms (town drain for down train), or the phenomenon of ‘opposite speech’ (black for white) among schizophrenics Secret languages involving ‘opposite speech’ are frequently reported, one classic instance beingthat of the Walbiri (Hale 1971) It is not surprising that nạve linguistic change should exploit a mechanism that appears soclose to the surface of our normal linguistic perceptions

Nạve linguistic engineering is still under investigation, but further research e.g on taboo and secret languages, may beexpected to provide insights into mechanisms of language change, and strategies for language elevation, that will be useful inthe study of more sophisticated forms of language engineering

7

LANGUAGE ELEVATIONThe term ‘language elevation’ refers to planning activities that differ in a number of ways from the ones discussed so farincluding:

(i) Planning is aimed at actual human languages that either are or, in cases such as Hebrew in present-day Israel, once served

as, the language/ vernacular of a genuine speech community,

(ii) Language engineering is usually kept at a very modest level, such a posteriori changes as are introduced not greatly

affecting intelligibility and continuity,

(iii) Planning is typically exercised for some functions, domains and media only The spoken vernacular is not affected to asignificant extent,

(iv) Language elevation typically involves the creation of national languages rather than languages of intercultural orinternational communication

Language elevation is manifested in two domains, (a) the social domain, where status planning is carried out to enhance the prestige of the vernacular selected for elevation and (b) the structural domain, in the form of corpus planning Corpus

planning can be further subdivided into graphisation (development of suitable writing systems), standardisation(regularisation of grammatical patterns and elimination of lectal variability) and modernisation (adapting the language to theneeds of a modernised society) Acts of language elevation in the sense used here have their beginnings with technologicalchanges such as printing and political ones such as the development of nation states The relationship between language andthe medium through which it is expressed is roughly as follows:

(a) non-literate societies can tolerate small dialects and considerable dialectal variation,

(b) literate societies with printing tend to favour standardised languages with little dialect variation,

(c) electronic media such as radio and television favour larger languages with little internal variation,

(d) computers call for one large language or a very few such

Furthermore, the existence of large states does not promote single languages in the absence of strong central governments

Thus, for the empires of antiquity, the existence of many languages within their boundaries made a divide et impera policy

possible The emergence of standard written languages in the wake of the invention of printing is illustrated by the example ofGerman where, from the late sixteenth century onwards, a number of language societies promoted first the status of German

vis- à-vis Latin and subsequently the linguistic purity of the German language itself The recognition of a superregional

German language was achieved with the publication of Schottel’s grammar of 1641 However, the general acceptance andspread of spoken forms of German related to its ‘Schriftsprache’ did not occur until the nineteenth century, with theintroduction of compulsory schooling and the creation of a unified nation The developments in Italy exhibit strikingsimilarities, as do developments in some of the newer nation states of the Third World such as Malaysia or Indonesia.Numerous longitudinal studies are found in Le Page (1986 ed.), one of the few documents where language elevation is

discussed in a diachronic framework The principal uniting factor is a picture of ad hoc decisions, inefficient and costly

solutions and lack of methodology In a large number of instances, language elevation has continued to be carried out in avery haphazard fashion following the whims of politicians and pressure groups rather than the advice of such languageplanning experts as have established themselves in the recent past The following sketch of an ideal case of language elevation

is hardly a mirror of present-day reality Nevertheless, it would seem useful to bring together a number of important resultsfrom recent work in this field

The process of language elevation must be seen as consisting of the following four main stages:

(i) problem identification

(ii) development of concrete proposals

(iii) evaluation of proposals

(iv) implementation

Some differences in terminology and emphasis are found Haugen (1922), for instance, distinguishes the stages of i) normselection, ii) codification iii) implementation and iv) elaboration The stage of problem identification involves a diagnosis ofwhat is wrong both with the nationwide patterns of communication and with the structural responses of the vernacularappointed to serve as a national language The criteria appealed to when evaluating the situation include:

(i) referential adequacy, i.e ‘the capacity of the language to meet the needs of its users as an instrument of referentialmeaning’ (Haugen 1966:62);

(ii) systematic adequacy, i.e a language should be structured in such a way that its rules are maximally general and natural;(iii) acceptability, i.e a form must be adopted or adoptable by the majority of whatever society or sub-society is involved.Subordinate to these considerations are others, such as euphony, brevity, and symmetry between expression and content,which are listed and discussed by Tauli (1968:38 ff) Of these, the criterion of acceptability most directly relates to the choice

of norm This choice involves the appointment of one or more vernaculars of a multilingual nation as national languages, andthat of a suitable dialect in a linguistically more homogeneous one In both instances, questions of political power and controlare dominant In principle, the code selectors can adopt one of two strategies: adopt the code associated with the mostpowerful or most numerous group, or else elevate a vernacular spoken by a small powerless group Selection of the powerfulcode is illustrated by the examples such as French (based on the variety spoken around Paris) and Turkish In both these casesthe power was extended, over time, first over non-standard dialects and subsequently other languages spoken within thenation state Examples of small or non-powerful languages being selected as the basis of a national language are that ofPilipino (or Filipino), the national language based on the central Luzon language Tagalog, and Bislama of Vanuata, a pidginEnglish which was elevated to a national language after independence In both instances the choice appears to have foundvery widespread acceptance Pidginised forms of vernaculars have also been given official status in the case of Swahili

(Tanzania) and Sango (Central African Republic) (For explanation of the terms ‘lingua franca’, ‘pidgin’ and ‘creole’ see thenote under the References to Chapter 26, below.)

Code selection can involve more than one language Thus, a number of the new Pacific nations have designated a number oflanguages as ‘official’, typically the former colonial language and one or more regional languages, often assigning to themdifferential status such as ‘official language’, ‘national language’, or ‘parliamentary language’ Elevating the status of some

languages or varieties tends to promote the status decline of other languages This is manifested by (a) former independent systems becoming subsystems of the standard e.g Bavarian becoming a dialect of German, (b) the functional restriction to private regional matters and (c) after a shorter or longer period of inegalitarian bilingualism, eventual language death The

examples of Maori and Hawaiian illustrate that even large majority languages cannot survive in a political climate that offers

no adequate status

The determination of the referential adequacy of languages is made difficult by the observation that languages do not refer

to a fixed set of pre-established entities in the real world but rather impose a referential grid on so-called reality It is thereforenot clear for instance how many lexical entries a fully adequate language must have Moreover, adequacy can only bedetermined against the background of the functional use speakers make of a language particularly in bi- and multilingualsocieties Generally speaking, the adaptation of referential resources to communicative needs is determined by the degree oftechnological and social change in a given community The gap between what a language needs to refer to and what it canactually refer to is greatest in times of rapid change or upheaval, such as the westernisation and modernisation of societies Theimportance of lexical corpus planning in such a context has been emphasised by a number of researchers (e.g Tauli 1968 andWurm, Mühlhäusler and Laycock 1977)

Systematic adequacy refers to the extent to which languages follow regular rules, or, put differently, the relative importance

of grammar and lexicon Old languages, particularly those which have borrowed from other systems or have been used inesoteric functions, tend to be full of exceptions and lexicalisations Whilst the creation of greater symmetric adequacy is auniversal motif in language engineering, there are certain external constraints, in particular the assessment of the relativemerits of regular indigenous word formation against borrowing of widely accepted international lexemes (see Rosario 1968)

An internal constraint, already raised in the discussion of a posteriori languages, is the conflict between linguistic regularity

and linguistic naturalness Generally speaking, those in the business of language elevation have paid insufficient attention tothe second aspect

The development of concrete proposals in the past tended to be the work of single or small groups of self-appointedlanguage reformers, such as Aavik in Estonia or Aasen in Norway In countries of the Third World, missionaries often carriedout language elevation and engineering almost single-handedly One of the best-known mission lingue franche of NewGuinea, the Papuan Language Kâte derives many of its present-day structures from the grammatical and lexical efforts of theGerman missionary Pilhofer; the standard version of Central African Sango is a similar case Committees of teachers,linguists and politicians were involved in the elevation of Turkish under Atatürk in 1930 and Greek Katharevousa in thenineteenth century Teachers and politicians were also the originators of an elevated Bahasa Indonesia

The area in which the majority of work has been carried out is that of the lexicon, in particular the creation of terminologiesand the regularisation of word-formation processes The simultaneous action of both processes can be seen in the followingexamples from Pilipino (discussed by Rosario 1968):

numeral pamilang pang- (instrument prefix)+bilang (number)

fraction bahagimbilang bahagi (part)+bilang (number)

numerator panakda pang- (instrument prefix)+takda (schedule)

denominator pamahagi pang- (instrument prefix)+bahagi (part)

Another example is afforded by proposals to increase the referential adequacy of Tok Pisin in the area of descriptiveadjectives (discussed by Wurm, Mühlhäusler and Laycock 1977) Instead of borrowing adjectives from external languages

(e.g English derived blain ‘blind’ or hepi ‘happy’) it is suggested that an existing word formation mechanism of the language

is extended to cover new instances Thus, the fact that syntactic constructions such as ai i pas ‘the eye is obstructed’ already have corresponding lexical compounds (aipas ‘blind’) is exploited in new forms such as:

hetgut ‘intelligent’

The principal task of lexical planners is to anticipate possible explanations, i.e to speed up the drift that can be determinedwhen such planning is paired with an understanding of the longitudinal developments in the word formation component of thelanguage (as in the case of the above Tok Pisin examples)

Very much the same principles apply to other areas of planning Understanding the development will direct planners tothose solutions that have the least disruptive effect on the system and the greatest chance of being learnable and acceptable tospeakers A discussion of the theoretical desirability of a developmental linguistic foundation for graphisation and other areas

of corpus planning is given by Bailey (1975) Bailey’s model of ordered variability appears to offer the greatest chance fororderly planning, particularly as it pays close attention to considerations of naturalness The fact that many language planners,particularly in the past and in some Third World countries, have been educated in a static framework of linguistic descriptionhas meant that their efforts were directed towards putative gaps in a static system rather than towards an understanding ofnatural expansion The evaluation of proposals is concerned with the considerations just mentioned as well as thosementioned earlier in this section In practice, evaluation of competing proposals has rarely been made in an orderly manner

Consequently, solutions in almost all areas of all languages that have undergone elevation remain ad hoc The greatest

shortcoming appears to be in procedures for evaluating the non-local effect of local changes (e.g introducing borrowedlexicon may have repercussions outside the lexicon, in phonology and syntax) A developmental Baileyan approach againoffers a suitable model, as it is designed to discover implicational relationships between different processes in different parts

8

CONCLUSIONSThe systematic study of language engineering in its many manifestations is still in its infancy In spite of the almost universalpresence of deliberate human interference in their languages, this factor has been regarded as marginal to the interests oflinguistics, both in traditional philology, where languages have been regarded as comparable to other natural organisms, and

in more recent frameworks such as Transformational Generative Grammar where ‘natural languages’ are also at the centre ofinterest It is by no means accidental that those linguists who were most interested in artificial languages and languageplanning, such as Schuchardt, Jespersen, Sapir and, more recently, Bailey and scholars working on variation, are those whorejected the notion that languages were self-contained closed systems and that change was governed by natural laws

Unfortunately, virtually all language engineering has been based on precisely this assumption The invariance of most a priori systems is not greatly relaxed in the majority of a posteriori ones, and many instances of language elevation exhibit a

noticeable lack of consideration for flexibility and adaptability Furthermore, the interrelationship between the cognitive andnon-cognitive dimensions of human language has tended to be misunderstood or simply ignored in virtually all the casessurveyed in this paper

Language engineering to date has been, by and large, a haphazard affair, and such success as has been achieved has oftenbeen at tremendous cost Thus, it is by no means clear that the reduction of linguistic heterogeneity has no costs, involving as

it does the loss of alternative philosophies and solutions, or that speaking the same language promotes better understandingbetween people The importance of the computer in many present-day societies may give a new lease of life to some of theold vices; the languages that computers can cope with are typically closed (rule-governed rather than rule-changing),computer translation assumes a names-for-objects view of the relationship between language and the world and computers aresuited to the cognitive functions of language (rather than any other) Of course, language planning for technological purposes,such as that of sublanguages in the Soviet Union (Moskovich 1982) has its place However, the chess game or computermetaphor offers a fundamentally misleading metaphor of human communication, as does the conduit metaphor which regardscommunication as an exchange of messages similar to that in telegraphy

Language engineering for human communication (rather than interstellar, computer or angelic interlocutors) needs to caterfor factors such as rule changing creativity, adaptation and accommodation, negotiation of meanings and structures and social

indexicality In other words, if language engineering is to make further progress, it has to turn to the non-cognitive functionsand language development An understanding of how pidgin languages develop may be the most promising point of departurefor such an enterprise.

A recurrent motif in language engineering has been, implicitly or explicitly, what Harris (1981:9ff) describes as theprincipal constituents of the Western language myth: the telementational fallacy and the determinacy fallacy Both fallacies goback to Aristotle The former refers to the view that ‘linguistic knowledge is essentially a matter of knowing which wordsstand for which ideas’ (p 9), the latter that ‘all it needs is for men to agree upon some fixed set of correlations between ideasand verbal symbols, in order to provide themselves with a viable system for exchanging thoughts’ (p 10) Under analternative view, all men are not provided by nature with the same set of concepts Instead, such realities as they perceive arepartially brought into being by the verbal code they employ According to this view, the aim of replacement of the diversity ofpresent-day languages by a single universal language would result in a dangerous reduction in the range of alternative world-views and philosophies Moreover, even the more modest aim of creating an auxiliary language which could be used byspeakers of all languages with equal facility is likely to run into difficulties Language engineers are well advised to considerthe limitations to their activities

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Swedenborg, Emanuel (1958) Heaven and its Wonders and Hell from Things Heard and Seen, trans from Latin New ed., rev D.H.Hartley,

The Swedenborg Society, London.

Swift, Jonathan (1726) Travels into several remote nations of the world, Benj Motte, London.

Tauli, Valter (1968) Introduction to A Theory of Language Planning, Almquist & Wiksells, Uppsala.

Tyssot de Patot, Simon (1710) Voyages et aventures de Jacques Mass é, J.L’Aveugle, Bordeaux.

Urquhart, Thomas (1653) Logopandecteision, or An Introduction to the Universal Language, Giles Calvert, London.

Vestergaard, T and Schrøder K (1985) The Language of Advertising, Blackwell, Oxford,

Wells, J.C (1969) Esperanto Dictionary, Teach Yourself Books, London.

Weilgart, John W (1968) aUI—the language of space, Cosmic Communication Company, Decorah (Iowa)

Wurm, Stephen A (ed.) (1977) New Guinea Area Languages and Language Study Vol 3, Pacific Linguistics C-40, Canberra.

Wurm, S.A., Mühlhäusler, P and Laycock, D.C (1977) Language Planning and Engineering in Papua New Guinea, in Wurm (ed.) 1977: 1151–78.

Yaguello, Marina (1984) Les Fous du Langage, Seuil, Paris.

FURTHER READINGThe items in the above list marked with an asterisk will be found especially helpful for readers keen to probe these topicsfurther

For computer languages, see Chapter 18, section 1.3, above