Solresol language
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Solresol is an artificial language, devised by a Frenchman, Jean François Sudre, beginning in 1817. He published his major book on it, Langue musicale universelle, in 1866, though he had already been publicizing it for some years. Solresol enjoyed a brief spell of popularity, reaching its pinnacle with Boleslas Gajewski's 1902 publication of Grammaire du Solresol. It is based on solfege (a way of identifying musical notes), and can thus be whistled or played on a musical instrument as well as spoken.
As in Ro, the longer words are divided into categories of meaning, based on their first syllable, or note. Words beginning with 'sol' have meanings related to arts and sciences, or, if they begin with 'solsol', sickness and medicine (e.g., solresol, "language"; solsolredo, "migraine").
A unique feature of Solresol is that meanings are negated by reversing the syllables in words. For instance fala means good or tasty, and lafa means bad. It is unclear how this interacts with the way words are categorized by their first note.
Additional features of Solresol include:
- highly impartial (equally easy or difficult for everyone, like other a priori constructed languages)
- integrated systems (signs, colors, etc.) for most different handicapped people, immediately operative without special learning)
- gives fast learning success to illiterate people (only 7 syllables or signs or 10 letters to know and to recognise)
- it presents no pronunciation difficulties
- very simple but effective system to differentiate the function of the words in the sentences
Solresol did have to face the difficulty that in France, sign languages for deaf people were not allowed until over a century later (congress of Milan 1880 - law Fabius 1991). This is an important reason of the difficult expansion of solresol.
After a few years of popularity, it faded into obscurity in the face of more successful languages such as Volapük and Esperanto. Despite this, there is still a small community of Solresol enthusiasts scattered across the world, better able to communicate with one another through the electronic medium of the Internet than they might have in days past.
A more recent constructed language based on musical tones is Eaiea, created by Bruce Koestner, which uses the entire 12-step western chromatic scale.
References
- Umberto Eco. The Search for the Perfect Language. 1993. ISBN: 0631205101
External links
- Langmaker.com about Solresol (http://www.langmaker.com/outpost/solresol.htm)
- Wikisource version of the original Grammaire du Solresol (http://sources.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammaire_du_Solr%C3%A9sol)
- Gajewski's Grammar of Solresol, a translation from the original French (http://www.ptialaska.net/~srice/solresol/sorsoeng.htm)
- Gajewski's Grammar of Solresol, translated in different languages and soon html version of the text of the book of Sudre (http://solresol.eu.tt)
- Omniglot on the various ways of writing Solresol (http://www.omniglot.com/writing/solresol.htm)be:Сальрэсоль
de:Solresol es:Solresol eo:Solresolo fr:Solresol it:Solresol la:Solresol nl:Solresol pl:Solresol ru:Сольресоль zh:索来索语