Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Interglossa

What appears to be the full text of the long-out-of-print Penguin book by Lancelot Hogben on his proposed auxiliary language Interglossa is here.  It's what you'd expect from the editor of Frederick Bodmer's The Loom Of Language, a book that I'll have to write about some time: full of optimism for a post-war internationalist future that will be organized and planned by nice British chaps.  Both Bodmer and Hogben felt that it was reasonable for different languages to have different words for things, but for modern languages to have declensions and conjugations was just ridiculous and someone should do something about it.

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

All languages are Welsh

according to Hieroglyfic (1768) by Rowland Jones.  An attempt to trace all languages back to a few original primitive sounds, years and years before Nicholas Marr did the same and annoyed Stalin.