 |
| Ro | |
|---|---|
| Pronunciation | [ɹo] |
| Created by | Edward Powell Foster |
| Date | 1906 |
| Setting and usage | Categorizing human thought. |
| Users | Unknown (2018) |
| Purpose | |
| Latin | |
| Sources | a priori language |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | None (mis) |
| Glottolog | None |
| IETF | art-x-rooo |
Ro is an a priori constructed language created by Rev. Edward Powell Foster beginning in 1904.
Rev. Edward Powell Foster was born October 5, 1853, in Bloom Furnace, Ohio. He lived in his later years in Waverly, West Virginia. [1] Foster died in Marietta, Ohio, on July 17, 1937, and is buried in Riverview Cemetery in Williamstown, West Virginia. [2] [3] Foster held ministerial positions and professorships at various locations in Kansas, Missouri, Cincinnati, and Marietta, and also studied at the Universities of Berlin and Leipzig. The Marietta (College) Alumnus magazine, in Foster's obituary from 1937, cites an article Foster wrote "ten years ago" where he talked about his work with Ro.
In Ro, words are constructed using a category system. For example, all words starting with "bofo-" signify colors; the word for red is "bofoc", and yellow is "bofof". Foster did not simply try to design a better language in general, but to optimize his language for one design criterion: recognizability of unknown words. Foster wrote about Ro:
Ro did not begin with attempting to rival or supplant any other language whatever, either natural or artificial, nor was it suggested by any of them. Unexpectedly came the thought: "How strange it is that there is nothing in the appearance of a written or printed word that gives the slightest hint of its meaning. Why should a word not be a picture? A new word, never seen before would then, like a painting seen for the first time, convey at least some of the meaning to the eye." [4]
After working on the language for about two years, Foster published the first booklet about Ro in 1906. The publication of Ro periodicals was supported by several American sponsors, especially from the Marietta, Ohio area, including Melvil Dewey, [5] inventor of the Dewey Decimal Classification (another attempt to categorize human knowledge), Vice President Charles G. Dawes, [5] George White, [5] who mentioned Ro in the Congressional Record, [6] [7] and Alice Vanderbilt Morris of IALA. [5] Several more books about Ro by Foster and his wife appeared over the years, as late as 1932. The entirety of George White's mention of Ro in the Congressional Record reads: "By Mr. WHITE (by request) : Resolution (H. Res. 432) providing for an investigation of a new language known as Ro ; to the Committee on Education." [8]
A common criticism of Ro is that it can be difficult to hear the difference between two words; usually one consonant makes the word different in meaning, but still similar enough that the intended meaning often cannot be guessed from context. This characteristic is common among philosophical languages, which are characterized by vocabulary developed taxonomically, independently of natural languages. A posteriori languages, such as Esperanto and Interlingua, are more popular than the a priori type, perhaps partly because their familiar vocabulary makes them easy to learn and recognize. Conversely, a priori languages are seen as being more neutral because there are so many languages and root words used in different languages may be completely different.
Solresol was an earlier classificatory language that by using a smaller symbol set achieved easier distinctness. There have been a few more recent attempts to design a language along similar lines, such as Ygyde [9] and the Japanese-made Babm, but most subsequent constructed language makers have avoided this taxonomic or hierarchic design for the reasons mentioned above.
Ro is written with the Latin alphabet. The letters C, J, Q and X are pronounced as: /ʃ/, /ʒ/, /ŋ/ and /χ/ respectively. The vowels (A, E, I, O and U) are pronounced as in the Spanish language. [10]
The following sample is from Esperanto, Elvish, and Beyond: The World of Constructed Languages . It is the last stanza of William Cullen Bryant's "Thanatopsis" translated into Ro by Foster himself:
Asi lib, ut avit ace vodas,
Em kep eb cok zudod pibaf av keb
Id bofwo dacagz ov bocnap, avid
Ak hek dugac in dufalz ov lobu
Ac en ket iqk futoq rambar taji,
Paksolo id datag, ub, poboso
Ip en mojop rigam, kidjeb lotmag
Iqk ra av dimgef doqab ov dodac
Ip ad, ud mobem id lastom rivalz.
Ro has been assigned the codes qro and art-x-rooo in the ConLang Code Registry. [11]
Esperanto is the world's most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Created by the Warsaw-based ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, it is intended to be a universal second language for international communication, or "the international language". Zamenhof first described the language in Dr. Esperanto's International Language, which he published under the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto. Early adopters of the language liked the name Esperanto and soon used it to describe his language. The word esperanto translates into English as "one who hopes".
In linguistics, a false friend is a word in a different language that looks or sounds similar to a word in a given language, but differs significantly in meaning. Examples of false friends include English embarrassed and Spanish embarazada 'pregnant'; English parents versus Portuguese parentes and Italian parenti ; English demand and French demander 'ask'; and English gift, German Gift 'poison', and Norwegian gift 'married'.
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.
Volapük is a constructed language created between 1879 and 1880 by Johann Martin Schleyer, a Catholic priest in Baden, Germany, who believed that God had told him in a dream to create an international language. Notable as the first major constructed international auxiliary language, the grammar comes from European languages and the vocabulary mostly from English. However, the roots are often distorted beyond recognition.
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The invention of languages is the foundation. The 'stories' were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows.
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.
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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.
The longest word in any given language depends on the word formation rules of each specific language, and on the types of words allowed for consideration.
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Esperanto and Interlingua are two planned languages with different approaches to the problem of providing an International auxiliary language (IAL). Esperanto has many more speakers; the number of speakers is c. 100,000-2,000,000. On the other hand, the number of speakers is c. 1,500 for Interlingua, but speakers of the language claim to be able to communicate easily with the c. 1 billion speakers of Romance languages, whereas Esperanto speakers can only communicate among each other.
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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.
Quenya is a constructed language, one of those devised by J. R. R. Tolkien for the Elves in his Middle-earth fiction.
Yandex Translate is a web service provided by Yandex, intended for the translation of web pages into another language.
J. R. R. Tolkien was both a philologist and an author of high fantasy. He had a private theory that the sound of words was directly connected to their meaning, and that certain sounds were inherently beautiful. Scholars believe he intentionally chose words and names in his constructed Middle-earth languages to create feelings such as of beauty, longing, and strangeness. Tolkien stated that he wrote his stories to provide a setting for his languages, rather than the other way around. Tolkien constructed languages for the Elves to sound pleasant, and the Black Speech of the evil land of Mordor to sound harsh; poetry suitable for various peoples of his invented world of Middle-earth; and many place-names, chosen to convey the nature of each region. The theory is individual, but it was in the context of literary and artistic movements such as Vorticism, and earlier nonsense verse that stressed language and the sound of words, even when the words were apparently nonsense.
