At least 700 artificial languages are on record. Behind each of
these there is a practical experience in respect to which
natural language functions in a less than desirable manner.
There is a language on record that addresses
left-hand/right-hand biases. There is one, authored by S. H.
Elgin, in which gender biases are reversed (Láadan). And there
is Inda, a language constructed like a work of art. There are
exotic languages written for certain fictional worlds: J.R.R.
Tolkien's Elvish, or the language of the Klingons of Star Trek
fame, or Anthony Burgess's Nadsat, the language of the yobbs in
A Clockwork Orange. And there are scientifically oriented
attempts to structure a language: James Cooke Brown invented
Loglan to be a logic language. Sotos Ochado (almost 100 years
before Brown) invented a language based on the classifications
of science. Some artificial languages of the past correspond to
obvious pragmatic functions. Ars Magna, designed by Ramon Llul
(celebrated in history books dedicated to precursors of the
digital age), was to be a language of missionaries. Lingua
Ignota, attributed to the legendary Abbess Hildegard, is a
language of practical monastic experiences extended well beyond
the performance of the liturgy.
When we acknowledge these languages we implicitly acknowledge
attempts to improve the performance of language functions. In
some cases, the effort is driven by the goal of transcending
barriers among languages; in others, of getting a better
description of the world, with the implicit hope that this would
facilitate mastery of it. Awareness of the fact that language is
not a neutral means of expression, communication, and
signification, but comes loaded with all the characteristics of
our practical endeavors, prejudices included, motivated attempts
to generate languages reflecting an improved view of the world.
Regardless of the intention, and especially of the success they
had, such languages allow us a closer look at their cognitive
condition, and hence at their contribution to increases in the
efficiency of human practical activities.
Increased expressive power, as in the artificial languages
invented by Tolkien and Burgess, or in the language of the
Klingons, is an objective relatively easy to comprehend.
Propagated by means of literacy and within the literate
experience, such languages are accepted primarily as artistic
conventions. Precision is the last quality they aim for;
expressive richness is their goal. These are languages of
sublime ambiguity. Those seeking precision will find it in
Loglan, or better yet in the languages of computer programming.
Disseminated by means contradicting and transcending the
assumptions of literacy, and within a pragmatics requiring means
of higher efficiency, programming languages, from Cobol and
Fortran to C, C++, Lisp, or Java, are accepted for their
functionality. They are not for poetry writing, as the family of
expressive artificial languages are not for driving a computer
or its peripherals. These are languages of never-failing
univocality. With such languages, we can control the function,
and even the logic of the language. These languages are
conceived in a modular fashion and can be designed to optimally
serve the task at hand. Among the functions pursued are
provability, optimization, and precision. Among the logics that
can be used are classical propositonal logic, intuitionistic
propositional logic, modal logic, temporal logic, and others.
Reflecting human obsession with a universal language, some
artificial constructs advance hypotheses regarding the nature of
universality. Dedicated, like many before him, to the idea of a
universal language, François Sondre (1827) invented a language
based on the assumption that music comes the closest to
transcending boundaries among various groups of people. Imagine
a theory expressed as a melody, communication accomplished by
music, or the music of the law and law enforcement. There is in
such a language enough room for expression and precision, but
almost no connection to the pragmatic dimension of human
self-constitution. If time is, as we know, encoded in music, the
experience of space is only indirectly present. Accordingly,
its functioning might address the universality of harmony and
rhythm, but not aspects of pragmatics which are of a different
nature.
A category of so-called controlled languages is also
establishing itself. A controlled language is a subset
(constrained in its vocabulary, grammar, and style) of a
natural language adapted to a certain activity. Artificial
languages are products inspired and motivated by the functioning
of our so-called natural language. Their authors wanted to fix
something, or at least improve performance of the language
machine in some respect. In order to understand the meaning of
their effort, we should look into how language relates the
people constituted in the language to the world in which they
live. Let's start with the evolution of the word and its relation
to the expression of thoughts and ideas, that is, from the
univocal (one-to-one relation to what is expressed) to the
ambiguous (one-to-many relation).
Systems of univocal signs participate in the production of ideas
only to a small degree. As an outgrowth of signals, initial
signs are univocal. Feathers are definitely not from fish or
mammals; blood stains are from wounds; four-legged animals leave
different marks than biped humans. Polysemy (more than one
meaning assignable to the sign) is a gradual acquisition and
reflects the principle of retroaction of meaning on the carrier:
words, drawings, sounds, etc. A drawing of an animal points to
what is depicted, or to things associated with the animal: the
softness of fur, savage behavior, meat, etc.
Philosophy and literature (and the arts, in general) became
possible only at a certain level of language development brought
about by the practical experience of society confronted with new
tasks related to its survival and further evolution. The
philosopher, for example, resorts to common speech (verbal
language) but uses it in an uncommon way: metasemically,
metaphorically, metaphysically. Ancient philosophy, important
here for its testimony regarding language and literacy, is still
so metaphoric that it can be read as literature, and actually
was enjoyed as such. Modern philosophy (post-Heidegger) shows
how relations (which it points out and dwells upon) have
absorbed the related. As a formalized argumentation, freed of
restrictions characteristic of literacy, but also so much less
expressive than the philosophy of the written word and the
endless interpretations it makes possible, philosophy generates
its own motivations and justifications. Its practical
consequences, within a pragmatics based on different forms of
semiotic functioning than those of literacy, diminish
constantly.
The distance between the verbal and the significance of the idea
is itself a parameter of the evolution from nature to culture.
Words such as space, time, matter, motion, become possible only
after experience in writing. But once written, there is nothing
left of the direct, probably intuitive, human experience of space
and time, of experience with matter in its various concrete
forms, or of the experience of motion (of the human body or
other bodies, some flying, some swimming, running, falling).
Visual representations-other forms of writing-are closer to what
they report about: the Cartesian coordinates for space, the
clock for a cyclical perception of time, etc. They express
particular instances of relations in space or time, or
particular aspects of matter or motion.
The word is arbitrary in relation to the idea it embodies. The
idea itself, getting its life in instances of activity, is
knowledge practically revealed in the order of nature or
thought. In expressing the idea, rational rigor and
expressiveness collide. Synthesizing ideas is an instance of the
self-constitution of the human being. Ideas express the implicit
will of the human being to externalize them (what Marcuse called
"the imperative quality" of thought). Once written, words not
only defy the ephemerality of the sounds of speech, but also
enter the realm of potentially conflicting interpretations.
These interpretations result from the conversion of the way we
use words in different pragmatic contexts.
To be literate means to be in control of language, but it also
means acceptance and awareness of being hostage to the
experiences of the past in which its rules were shaped. When
spelling, for instance, is disassociated from the origin of the
word, a totally arbitrary new realm of language is established,
one in which transitory conventions replace permanency (or the
illusion of permanency), and the appearance of super-temporality
of ideas is questioned. Each idea is the result of choices in a
certain paradigm of existence. Its concrete determination, i.e.,
realization as meaning, comes through its insertion in a
pragmatic context. When the context changes, the idea might be
confirmed, contradicted (it becomes equivocal), or open to many
interpretations (it becomes ambiguous). To give an example, the
idea of democracy went through all these stages from its early
embodiment in Greek society to its liberal application, and even
self-negation, in the civilization of illiteracy. It means one
thing- the power of people-but in different contexts, depending
on how people was defined and how power was exercised. It means
so many things in its new contexts that some people really
wonder if it actually means anything at all anymore.
Literacy made communication of ideas possible within a scale of
humankind well served by linear relations and in search of
proportional growth. But when ideas come to expression in a
faster rhythm, and turn in shorter cycles from the univocal to
the ambiguous stage, the medium of literacy no longer does
justice either to their practical function or to the dynamics of
an individual's continuous self-constitution. Moreover, it seems
that ideas themselves, as forms of human projection, are less
necessary under the new projection of pragmatic circumstances we
examine. What once seemed almost as the human's highest
contribution impacts today's society less and less. We live in a
world dominated by methods and products, within which previous
ideas have, so it seems, cultural significance, at most.
Knowledge is reduced to information; understanding is only
operational. Artificial languages, which keep multiplying, are
more and more geared towards methods and products. In the
interconnected world of digitally disseminated information, we
do not need Esperanto, but rather languages that unify the
increasing variety of machines and programs we use in our new
experiences on the World Wide Web. Efficiency in this world
refers to transactions which do not necessarily involve human
beings. Independent agents, active in business transactions of
what emerges as the Netconomy, act towards maximizing outcome.
Such agents are endowed with rules of reproduction, movement,
fair trade, and can even be culturally identified. Even so, the
Netconomy is more a promise than a reality. The functioning of
such agents allows us to see how the metaphor of language
functioning reverts to its literal meaning in the civilization
of illiteracy.