Universal language

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
This article is about a universally used language. For a widespread language, see World language.
For other uses, see Universal language (disambiguation).

Universal language may refer to a hypothetical or historical language spoken and understood by all or most of the world's people. In some contexts, it refers to a means of communication said to be understood by all humans. It may be the idea of an

pidgin language, which is actually used to facilitate understanding between two or more people with no common language. In other conceptions, it may be the primary language of all speakers, or the only existing language. Some religious and mythological traditions state that there was once a single universal language among all people, or shared by humans and supernatural
beings.

In other traditions, there is less interest in or a general deflection of the question. The written Classical Chinese language is still read widely but pronounced differently by readers in

mother tongue
.

Comparably, the

Catholicism, which covered most of Western Europe and parts of Northern Europe and Central Europe
.

In a more practical fashion, trade languages, such as ancient Koine Greek, may be seen as a kind of real universal language, that was used for commerce.

In

monogenesis
refers to the idea that all spoken human languages are descended from a single ancestral language spoken many thousands of years ago.

Mythological and religious universal languages

Main articles: Mythical origins of language, Adamic language, Divine language, and Language of the birds

Various religious texts, myths, and legends describe a state of humanity in which originally only one language was spoken.

In

confusion of tongues" (the splintering of numerous languages from an original Adamic language)[citation needed
] as a punishment from God.

Myths exist in other cultures describing the creation of multiple languages as an act of a god as well, such as the destruction of a 'knowledge tree' by Brahma in Indic tradition, or as a gift from the God Hermes in Greek myth. Other myths describe the creation of different languages as concurrent with the creation of different tribes of people, or due to supernatural events.

Early modern history

Further information: Philosophical language

Recognizable strands in the contemporary ideas on universal languages took form only in

Early Modern Europe. In the early 17th century, some believed that a universal language would facilitate greater unity among mankind largely due to the subsequent spread of religion, specifically Christianity, as espoused in the works of Comenius. But there were ideas of a universal language apart from religion as well. A lingua franca or trade language was nothing very new; but an international auxiliary language was a natural wish in light of the gradual decline of Latin. Literature in vernacular languages became more prominent with the Renaissance. Over the course of the 18th century, learned works largely ceased to be written in Latin. According to Colton Booth (Origin and Authority in Seventeenth-Century England (1994) p. 174) "The Renaissance had no single view of Adamic language and its relation to human understanding." The question was more exactly posed in the work of Francis Bacon
.

In the vast writings of

reasoning on a firmer basis by reducing much of it to a matter of calculation that many could grasp. The characteristica would build on an alphabet of human thought
.

Leibniz's work is bracketed by some earlier mathematical ideas of

Panglossianism. Descartes's ambitions were far more modest than Leibniz's, and also far more successful, as shown by his wedding of algebra and geometry to yield what we now know as analytic geometry. Decades of research on symbolic artificial intelligence
have not brought Leibniz's dream of a characteristica any closer to fruition.

Other 17th-century proposals for a 'philosophical' (i.e. universal) language include those by

An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, 1668). The classification scheme in Roget's Thesaurus
ultimately derives from Wilkins's Essay.

mythography
, as futile and arid directions.

In the 18th century, some rationalist natural philosophers sought to recover a supposed

lapsarian
tongue.

Others attempted to find a common linguistic ancestor to all tongues; there were, therefore, multiple attempts to relate esoteric languages to Hebrew (e.g. Basque and Irish), as well as the beginnings of comparative linguistics.

Modern history

Further information: World language

The constructed language movement produced such languages as

Ido (1907), Interlingue (1922), and Interlingua (1951).[1]

English remains the dominant language of international business and global communication through the influence of global media and the former British Empire that had established the use of English in regions around the world such as North America, Africa, Australia and New Zealand. However, English is not the only language used in major international organizations, because many countries do not recognize English as a universal language. For instance, the United Nations use six languages — Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish.

The early ideas of a universal language with complete conceptual classification by categories is still debated on various levels.

Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge's Taxonomy
as an illustrative example.

See also

References

  1. Interlingua: A Dictionary of the International Language
    , New York: Storm Publishers, 1951.

Bibliography

  • Slaughter, M. M. (1982). Universal Languages and Scientific Taxonomy in the Seventeenth Century.
    ISBN 978-0-521-24477-0
    .
  • Sweet, Henry (1911). "Universal Languages" . Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.).
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