Designed Language

I was thinking about language the other day and realized there’s a beautiful example of a system that is partially designed with intent, and partially grown through chaotic iteration. Most language has a design, but mostly has grown organically through a history of centuries and centuries. Anyway, I got curious about purely designed languages, such as Esperanto, and found an entire list of designed languages. There are two that stood out to me: Toki Pona, which is designed to be as small as possible, and Ithkuil, which is made to express human thought as accurately as possible. Where Toki Pona can be learned in days, a thought expressed in Ithkuil can easily take hours to construct.

The […] goal is to attempt the creation of what human beings, left to their own devices, would never create naturally, but rather only by conscious effort.

There’s an interesting notion there, design as opposition to organic and uncontrolled growth. I’m not sure whether I found anything to really dig at here, but I do know reading through the Wikipedia page for Constructed Languages is fascinating.

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