This is part of a much larger work I am still in the process of writing.
“If you plant a plastic flower, will it grow?”[1]
In her book In the Land of Invented Languages, linguist Arika Okrent details the history of the attempts to build a single perfect universal language. The aim and appeal of building such a language is to achieve linguistic solidarity regardless of time, place or culture. The book details nine hundred years of the nine hundred[2] varying attempts to capture and contain language in a finite set that may be mastered by anyone and everyone. However, the history of invented languages, as Okrent explains, is riddled with repeated failures based on the irregular patterns of natural language. For my purposes, the constant failure to create a complete language set from scratch demonstrates the natural evolutions of, “the way all natural languages are born – organically, spontaneously”.[3] The point of explicating the ideas behind the inventions of artificial languages is to show that natural language, by its nature, must evolve if it is to attempt to refer to the changing world. Such evolutions cannot be accounted for in the structuralist, or Saussurian theories of language and meaning. These alterations are not explicitly detailed or known to us. At the conclusion of this section I will use John Wilkins as an example of a failure to create a language.
Natural languages are inherently messy, and as such are unable to be contained within one static language, as the history of invented languages has demonstrated. Such failures may be attributed to the lack of a single universal truth that may transcend time and space because our concepts and truths, which languages attempt to encompass, are necessarily dynamic. My intention in this section is not to claim that individuals cannot alter the course of natural language. Rather, I believe that individuals cannot hope to create an ordered and complete knowledge set through an artificial language.[4]
The languages we speak were not created according to any plan or design. Who invented French? Who invented Portuguese? No one. They just happened. They arose. Someone said something a certain way, someone else picked up on it, and someone else embellished. A tendency turned into a habit, and somewhere along the way a system came to be. This is how pidgins, slangs, and dialects are born; this is the way English, Russian, and Japanese were born.[5]
Our quest for a wholly logical language may not be entirely in vain given the information we gain from those who attempt to create languages, though the original goal of those individuals seems doomed always to fail. Additionally, such failure may also illuminate the evolutions of the natural languages that those who attempt to create artificial languages are operating against.
These languages are purposefully constructed and set down by (usually) one individual and include extensive dictionaries and grammatical references. I maintain that the history of artificial language is another one of humanity's attempts to conquer nature, attempting to create ordered systems marked by rationality that forgo the natural inconsistencies and irregularities which deny our own intuitive senses that run rampant throughout natural languages. These attempts subscribe to a view that language can be constructed and that it can remain static. Okrent demonstrates these attempts through her explications of the various motivations behind the invention of artificial languages throughout the ages, concluding that their failures are due, in large part, to the dynamic nature of natural language.
Those who attempt to improve upon natural language aim to, “eliminate its design flaws, or rather the flaws it has developed for lack of conscious design. Looked at from an engineering perspective, language is kind of a disaster.”[6] The so-called 'disasters' of natural language are made apparent in a handful of examples: “We have words that mean more than one thing, meanings that have more than one word for them, and some things we'd like to say that, no matter how hard we struggle, seem impossible to put into words.”[7] Exceptions to grammatical rules, etc., make languages, especially English, difficult to learn.
Our designations of objects, or our conventions, do not change the nature of real (physical) objects. Nor can we say that our conventions accurately mirror the way the world actually is. “It is rather to say that we have certain conventions that lead us to act as if there is an object that has those persistence conditions and essential properties. More accurately it is our conventions together with our beliefs about the structure of the world that lead us to act as if there is such an object.”[8] Our beliefs about the structure of the world are determined through perception which is, in itself, vague as well. We may act in accordance with our beliefs about the structure of the world, but this does not change what that structure is. Despite the ambiguity of language, most of us have pragmatically resigned ourselves to the idiosyncrasies of natural language. However, there are those who endeavor to solve these problems and create the ideal language, such as the scientist, John Wilkins.[9]
Wilkins's failure to construct an ideal language demonstrates the futility of a complete and logical categorization of the world through language. Inevitably, his system eventually devolved into countless arbitrary categorizations, despite his original intent to design a language wherein words would, “reflect the nature of things – only in this way could the language serve as an instrument for the spread of knowledge and reason”.[10] Wilkins desired a language whose words could illuminate the very objects they referred to. Such attempts, as shown by philosophers like Roy Sorensen in his book, Vagueness and Contradiction, demonstrate the futility of attempting to use words to accurately mirror reality.
The failures of Wilkins are summed up neatly by Borges in his article, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”:
It is clear that there is no classification of the universe not being arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what thing the universe is.[11]
The faults of artificial language serve to demonstrate the imperfections of natural language, and how the developments of such are dependent upon both place and time. This establishes the idea of the inherent fluidity of language. If language is fluid, then meaning must also be fluid. This helps to explain why the Structuralist position on meaning, which states that meanings are independent from interpreter, observer, time, place or culture.
[1] Ibid, 7.
[2] Okrent states that there are nine hundred languages through nine hundred years, though recognizes that other attempts at creating an artificial language may be lost to us. She begins with the earliest recorded invented language – Lingua Ignota of Hildegard von Bingen, a twelfth century German nun. While the purpose of Hildegard's language has been cited by scholars as a type of glossolalia, this hypothesis has since been rejected based on clear signs of intention and meticulous organization that the divinely inspired, unsystematic glossolalia would not possess.
Okrent, Arika. In the Land of Invented Languages. New York: Random House Inc, 2009, 10-11.
[3] Okrent. In the Land of Invented Languages, 5.
[4] While some will want to discuss symbolic logic, I find that it is outside of the scope of this paper. For my purposes, projects such as predicate logic are to be differentiated from invented languages such as Esperanto, etc. Logic systems are to be thought of as representative of the formal properties of natural language, rather than a replacement for natural language. Okrent does, however, address artificial language systems that attempt to assign numbers to words in her discussions of Sir Thomas Urquhart. Urquhart attempted to assign letters to concepts in order to form words, though he provided no examples. Others, such as Cave Beck of Ipswich, detailed extensively those systems that claimed to be able to substitute numbers for concepts. His work, The Universal Character: By Which all the Nations in the World May Understand One Anothers Conceptions, was published in 1657.
Ibid, 32-33.
[5] Okrent. In The Land of Invented Languages, 4-5.
[6] Ibid, 6, 11.
[7] Ibid, 11.
[8] Heller, Mark. The Ontology of Physical Objects: Four-Dimensional Hunks of Matter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1990, 39.
[9] Okrent. In the Land of Invented Languages, 11-12.
[10] Ibid, 50.
[11] Borges, Jorge Luis. Other Inquisitions:1937-1952. Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2000, 101.
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