Ars signorum
| Ars signorum | |
| Spoken in: | -- |
| Timeline/Universe: | international auxiliary language |
| Total speakers: | probably, none |
| Genealogical classification: | a priori |
| Basic word order: | SVO |
| Morphological type: | agglutinating |
| Morphosyntactic alignment: | accusative |
| Created by: | |
| George Dalgarno | 1661 |
Ars signorum (Latin: The Art of Signs) is a philosophical language published by George Dalgarno, a Scottish-born Oxford schoolmaster, in 1661. It is one of the first known languages of this kind. Dalgarno initially cooperated with John Wilkins, but the two could not agree on a taxonomy, as Wilkins aimed at an encyclopedic taxonomy covering every species of animals, plants, minerals and artifcats, while Dalgarno opted for a taxonomy covering only generic notions, from which more specific words could be formed by compounding. Hence, they parted company and Dalgarno pursued his own ideas. Wilkins would go on to design An Essay towards a Real Character, which he published in 1668.
Ars signorum is also the title of the book in which Dalgarno lays out the language. The book is written in Latin and focuses on the philosophical considerations behind the design of his language, to the point that it fails to give a coherent description of the language's grammar. But at least, it contains some sample texts (translations from the Bible), a fold-out chart of the taxonomy and the word roots derived from it, and a Latin dictionary of the language. This almost complete absence of the kind of information that a language learner would want certainly was part of the reason why the language apparently was not learned by anyone and thus was a dead language from the start.
Phonology
Dalgarno devotes nine pages of his book to the phonology of his language, discussing phonetic features and the reasoning behind his choices of phonemes.
Consonants
| Labial | Coronal | Dorsal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stops | voiceless | p | t | k |
| voiced | b | d | g | |
| Fricatives | voiceless | f | s | |
| voiced | v | |||
| Nasals | m | n | ||
| Liquids | l r | |||
An uncertain matter is the combination sh, which Dalgarno uses as a "euphonious" substitute for sr. The letter h is not used otherwise in the language, and it is uncertain whether the combination is pronounced as [s]+[h], or, as in English, as [ʃ].
Vowels
| "Guttural" | "Labial" | |
|---|---|---|
| Close | i | u |
| Close-mid | e | o <υ> |
| Open-mid | ɛ <η> | ɔ <o> |
| Open | a |
Literature
- Cram, D.; Maat, J. 2001. George Dalgarno on Universal Language. Oxford University Press. Contains a complete edition and translation of Ars signorum and other works by George Dalgarno.
| This article is part of a series on Engineered languages. Arithmographic languages: Characteristica universalis |
