Jules Meysmans

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Jules Meysmans
Born(1870-05-14)14 May 1870
Jodoigne, Belgium
Died1943 (aged 72–73)
Occupation(s)Stenographist, linguist
Known forCreator of the word interlinguistics

Jules Meysmans (14 May 1870 – 1943) was a Belgian stenographer and linguist, best known for coining the term interlinguistics . Meysmans invented his own shorthand system, one of several adaptations he made of existing systems. The founder of an institute for stenography, he was active in the international auxiliary language movement, supporting various projects throughout his life, including Volapük, Esperanto, Idiom Neutral, and Occidental.

Contents

Career

The "Meysmans" shorthand method Meysmans Stenography Method.jpg
The "Meysmans" shorthand method

Meysmans was born on 14 May 1870 [1] to Pierre-Charles Meysmans in Jodoigne, Belgium. His father's work as a cadastre surveyor led the family to move often. His younger brother, Léon Meysmans  [ nl ], would later become a socialist politician. Meysmans was educated at a Catholic school in Tienen, before gaining a teaching licence in Ghent. In 1890, he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in humanistic studies from the University of Ghent. [2]

The same year, he invented the "Meysmans" method of shorthand, [2] based on the Aimé Paris system – a notice in the 1922 Communal Notices of Brussels lists the "Aimé-Paris-Meysmans" system as being capable for the transcription of French, Flemish, English, and German. [3] Meysmans' system achieved some success, and was used by the Archdiocese of Kinshasa. [4] In 1897, he modified Karl Friedrich Scheithauer's  [ de ] shorthand system, but later stopped teaching it. [5] Meysmans was the founder of the National Institute of Stenography and Dactylography (French: Institut National de Sténographie et de Dactylographie) in Brussels, and held courses for teaching shorthand in several cities in Belgium. [1]

International auxiliary languages

Meysmans was an active member of the international language movement, supporting several throughout his life. He first joined the Volapük movement, although he left it for Esperanto in 1890, teaching courses about the language in Ghent and Brussels. In 1907, Meysmans became the leader of the Brussels-based Groupe de la Langue Internationale, an organisation that supported Idiom Neutral (a more niche language created in 1902 by Waldemar Rosenberger). A founding figure of the Neo-Romanticist school of language creation, [6] Meysmans was particularly a proponent of Latin-based constructed languages. Indeed, Meysmans praised them in his contributions to Peano's journal Discussiones, which existed to support the Academia pro Interlingua. [2] In 1912, he was leader of the Ventimiglia-based group Unione pro Latino Internationale; [7] a year later, Meysmans became the chair of the Academia. [8] Eventually, he came to support Edgar de Wahl's Occidental, and joined the Occidental-Academie's  [ eo ] Explorative Committee for the International Auxiliary Language (Comite Explorativ del Lingue International Auxiliari) in 1929. [9]

Meysmans was also the creator of several languages, including:

In 1911, Meysmans published an article entitled "Une science nouvelle" ('A New Science') in the monthly periodical Lingua Internationale, of which he was editor-in-chief. [2] In it, Meysmans coined the term interlinguistique ('interlinguistics'), defining it as encompassing both the study of constructed international languages, but also that of natural languages as a form of trans-linguistic communication (language contact). [11] He argued that constructed auxiliary languages could only become objects of study within the wider study of natural interlanguages, and that the use of auxiliary languages for international communication would be bounded by the same constraints as natural ones. [12] After its creation, the term was used primarily among Idists and Occidentalists [13] until 1931, when it was popularised by Danish linguist Otto Jespersen during a speech at the Second International Conference on Linguistics. [14]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Giuseppe Peano</span> Italian mathematician and glottologist

Giuseppe Peano was an Italian mathematician and glottologist. The author of over 200 books and papers, he was a founder of mathematical logic and set theory, to which he contributed much notation. The standard axiomatization of the natural numbers is named the Peano axioms in his honor. As part of this effort, he made key contributions to the modern rigorous and systematic treatment of the method of mathematical induction. He spent most of his career teaching mathematics at the University of Turin. He also wrote an international auxiliary language, Latino sine flexione, which is a simplified version of Classical Latin. Most of his books and papers are in Latino sine flexione, while others are in Italian.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Interlingua</span> Constructed language

Interlingua is an international auxiliary language (IAL) developed between 1937 and 1951 by the American International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA). It is a constructed language of the "naturalistic" variety, whose vocabulary, grammar, and other characteristics are derived from natural languages. Interlingua literature maintains that (written) Interlingua is comprehensible to the hundreds of millions of people who speak Romance languages, though it is actively spoken by only a few hundred.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Interlingue</span> International auxiliary language created 1922

Interlingue, originally Occidental ( ), is an international auxiliary language created in 1922 and renamed in 1949. Its creator, Edgar de Wahl, sought to achieve maximal grammatical regularity and natural character. The vocabulary is based on pre-existing words from various languages and a derivational system which uses recognized prefixes and suffixes.

An international auxiliary language is a language meant for communication between people from all different nations, who do not share a common first language. An auxiliary language is primarily a foreign language and often a constructed language. The concept is related to but separate from the idea of a lingua franca that people must use to communicate. The study of international auxiliary languages is interlinguistics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Latino sine flexione</span> Latin-based international auxiliary language

Latino sine flexione, Interlingua de Academia pro Interlingua or Peano's Interlingua is an international auxiliary language compiled by the Academia pro Interlingua under the chairmanship of the Italian mathematician Giuseppe Peano (1858–1932) from 1887 until 1914. It is a simplified version of Latin, and retains its vocabulary. Interlingua-IL was published in the journal Revue de Mathématiques in an article of 1903 entitled De Latino Sine Flexione, Lingua Auxiliare Internationale, which explained the reason for its creation. The article argued that other auxiliary languages were unnecessary, since Latin was already established as the world's international language. The article was written in classical Latin, but it gradually dropped its inflections until there were none.

Idiom Neutral is an international auxiliary language, published in 1902 by the International Academy of the Universal Language under the leadership of Waldemar Rosenberger, a St. Petersburg engineer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edgar de Wahl</span> Estonian teacher and linguist

Edgar Alexei Robert vonWahl was a Baltic German mathematics and physics teacher who lived in Tallinn, Estonia. He is best known as the creator of Interlingue, an international auxiliary language that was known as Occidental throughout his life.

The Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language was a body of academics convened in the early part of the 1900s (decade) to decide on the issue of which international auxiliary language should be chosen for international use. The ultimate decision of the committee charged by the Delegation was to adopt the Esperanto language, but with certain reforms. The result became a distinct language known as Ido.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Academia pro Interlingua</span>

The Academia pro Interlingua was an organization dedicated to the promotion of international auxiliary languages, and is associated in particular with Giuseppe Peano's language Latino sine flexione.

Interlinguistics, also known as cosmoglottics, as the science of planned languages has existed for more than a century. Formalised by Otto Jespersen in 1931 as the science of interlanguages, in more recent times, the field has been more focused with language planning, the collection of strategies to deliberately influence the structure and function of a living language. In this framework, interlanguages become a subset of planned languages, i.e. extreme cases of language planning.

Interlingua is an auxiliary language developed by the International Auxiliary Language Association.

Esperanto and Novial are two different constructed international auxiliary languages. Their main difference is that while Esperanto is a schematic language, with an unvarying grammar, Novial is a naturalistic language, whose grammar and vocabulary varies to try to retain a "natural" sound. Demographically, Esperanto has thousands of times more speakers than Novial.

Novial was created as an international auxiliary language by Danish linguist Otto Jespersen, who introduced it to the world in 1928. Jespersen had previously been a co-author of Ido, which started to take form around 1907. Both languages base their vocabularies primarily on prominent Germanic and Romance languages, but differ grammatically in several important respects. Novial is more analytic in its grammar than Ido, and, in Jespersen's view, more natural.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Constructed language</span> Consciously devised language

A constructed language is a language whose phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, instead of having developed naturally, are consciously devised for some purpose, which may include being devised for a work of fiction. A constructed language may also be referred to as an artificial, planned or invented language, or a fictional language. Planned languages are languages that have been purposefully designed; they are the result of deliberate, controlling intervention and are thus of a form of language planning.

Zonal auxiliary languages, or zonal constructed languages, are constructed languages made to facilitate communication between speakers of a certain group of closely related languages. They form a subgroup of the international auxiliary languages but are intended to serve a limited linguistic or geographic area, rather than the whole world like Esperanto and Volapük. Although most zonal auxiliary languages are based on European language families, they should not be confused with "Euroclones", a somewhat derogatory term for languages intended for global use but based (almost) exclusively on European material. Since universal acceptance is not the goal for zonal auxiliary languages, the traditional claims of neutrality and universalism, typical for IALs, do not apply. Although they may share the same internationalist commitments of the latter, zonal auxiliary languages have also been proposed as a defense against the effects of the growing hegemony of English on other cultures or as a means to promote a sense of ethnicity or community in a manner similar to revitalized languages, such as Modern Hebrew and Cornish. Related concepts are koiné language, a dialect that naturally emerges as a means of communication among speakers of divergent dialects of a language, and Dachsprache, a dialect that serves as a standard language for other, sometimes mutually unintelligible, dialects. The difference is that a zonal language is typically a mixture of several natural languages and is aimed to serve as an auxiliary for the speakers of different but related languages of the same family.

The International Academy of Volapük was a ruling body established at the second Volapük congress in Munich in August 1887 with the goal of preserving and improving Volapük.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Volapükologist</span> Person whose scientific interest is the Volapük language

A volapükologist is a person whose scientific interest is Volapük or who learns the language for hobby reasons.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pan-Romance language</span> Constructed language representing Romance languages

A pan-Romance language or Romance interlanguage is a codified linguistic variety which synthesizes the variation of the Romance languages and is representative of these as a whole. It can be seen as a standard language proposal for the whole language family but is generally considered a zonal constructed language because it's the result of intense codification. Zonal languages are, according to interlinguist Detlev Blanke, constructed languages which "arise by choosing or mixing linguistic elements in a language group".

Interlingue and Interlingua are constructed international auxiliary languages.

The constructed language Interlingue, originally known as Occidental, has a history spanning a century since its original publication by its creator Edgar de Wahl in 1922.

References

  1. 1 2 "Biografio de Jules Meysmans" [Biography of Jules Meysmans](PDF). Informilo por Interlingvistoj. February 2015. pp. 14–15. ISSN   1385-2191 . Retrieved 20 November 2023.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Gobbo, Frederico (20 October 2023). "Ses difinoj serĉantaj fakon" [Six definition of new subjects]. Beletra Almanako 46 (BA46 - Literaturo en Esperanto) (in Esperanto). Mondial. p. 102. ISBN   978-1-59569-450-8.
  3. ↑ Ville de Bruxelles (1922). Bulletin Communal (PDF) (in French). Brussels. p. 156.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  4. ↑ "Actualites - Archdiocese de Kinshasa". Archdiocese of Kinshasa. Archived from the original on 20 October 2017.
  5. ↑ Navarre, Albert (1909). Histoire générale de la sténographie et de l'écriture à travers les âges (in French). Institut sténographique de France. p. 642.
  6. ↑ Bernasconi, Edo (1977). "Neo-Romanticism in Language Planning". Esperanto aŭ interlingua? Faktoj kaj teorioj kontraŭ mitoj kaj antaŭjuĝoj (in Esperanto). Kultura Centro Esperantista.
  7. 1 2 3 4 Dulichenko, Aleksandr (1990). Международные вспомогательные языки [International auxiliary languages](PDF) (in Russian). Valgus. pp. 180, 191, 193. ISBN   978-5-440-00022-3.
  8. ↑ Peano, Giuseppe (17 January 1913). 100 exemplo de Interlingua – via Wikisource
  9. ↑ Berger, Ric (February 1929). "Cronica" [Annals]. Cosmoglotta . p. 36.
  10. ↑ Libert, Alan Reed (25 June 2018), "Artificial Languages", Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics, doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.11, ISBN   978-0-19-938465-5 , retrieved 12 November 2023
  11. ↑ Halle-Wittenberg, Martin-Luther-Universität (1991). Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift: gesellschafts- und sprachwissenschaftliche Reihe (in German). Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg.
  12. ↑ Schubert, Klaus (1 June 2011). Interlinguistics: Aspects of the Science of Planned Languages. Walter de Gruyter. p. 91. ISBN   978-3-11-088611-5.
  13. ↑ Fiedler, Sabine; Haitao, Liu (2001). Studien zur Interlinguistik (in Esperanto). Kava-Pech. ISBN   978-80-85853-53-7.
  14. ↑ Boers, Frank; Darquennes, Jeroen; Kerremans, Koen (2 October 2009). Multilingualism and Applied Comparative Linguistics (Volume II). Cambridge Scholars Publishing. p. 25. ISBN   978-1-4438-1489-8.
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