Solresol
| Solresol | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Created by | François Sudre |
| Date | 1827 |
| Purpose |
constructed languages
|
| Sources | a priori |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 |
None (mis) |
| Glottolog | None |
Solresol is a constructed language devised by François Sudre, beginning in 1827. His major book on it, Langue musicale universelle, was published after his death 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 posthumous publication of Grammaire du Solresol.
The teaching of sign languages to the deaf was discouraged between 1880 and 1991 in France, contributing to Solresol's descent into obscurity. After a few years of popularity, Solresol nearly vanished in the face of more successful languages, such as Volapük and Esperanto. There is still a small community of Solresol enthusiasts scattered across the world, better able to communicate with one another now than previously thanks to the Internet.
Solresol words are made from one to five syllables or notes. Each of these may be one of only seven basic phonemes, which may in turn be accented or lengthened. There is another phoneme, silence, which is used to separate words: words cannot be run together as they are in English.
The phonemes can be represented in a number of different ways – as the seven musical notes in an octave, as spoken syllables (based on solfège, a way of identifying musical notes), with the seven colors of the rainbow, symbols, hand gestures etc. Thus, theoretically Solresol communication can be done through speaking, singing, flags of different color – even painting.
Each "note" of Solresol is represented as a symbol, for example, "Do" is a Circle, "Re" is a vertical line, "Mi" and "La" are both half-circles, the former facing downwards, the latter facing right, Fa is a diagonal line from left-top to right-bottom, Sol is a horizontal line, and Si is a diagonal line from left-bottom to right-top.
Words of Solresol are formed by connecting the symbols in the order they appear in the word.
The Solresol Latin alphabet is the smallest alphabet, containing just 10 letters (a, d, e, f, i, l, m, o, r and s).
In Solresol morphology, 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"). Like other constructed languages with a priori vocabulary, Solresol faces considerable problems in categorizing the real world around it sensibly. The last couple of syllables may be arbitrary, to capture distinctions such as "apple" vs "pear" which do not fit simple categories.
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