It is clear that we language professionals have a special passion for languages, which we share with many others. Even though these people may not work directly with them, they enjoy knowing the existence of other languages, their configuration, and of course, learning them. Language learning is an activity that holds a huge cultural aspect and helps strengthen bonds between different communities. Although tools that help bridge this gap through technology are currently rising in popularity, it has been proven that individual or guided language learning is highly beneficial for exercising the brain, training memory, improving motivation and working on self-confidence. It is therefore not surprising that language teaching continues to be an important business activity that is of interest to many people and that a number of companies opt for in order to improve the profile of their staff, by consolidating for example their knowledge of common business languages, such as English, German or Chinese.
In this regard, one of the types that people are most attracted to due to their uniqueness are artificial and fictional languages, which we discuss in greater detail in our article Fictional languages. The truth is that, although we are used to typical examples, which include a large number of real attempts to create unified languages by combining elements from different language systems or other languages that have been created specifically for fictional communities in film and literature, when we talk about these types of creations we automatically think of language systems that are very similar to those we use on a day-to-day basis. However, there is a curious case of an artificial language that is truly surprising. Although it can be represented in writing, it does not have indivisible phonetic correspondences or derivative lexical or morpheme families. Rather, it only has seven well-known syllables and, if we wanted to and had the ability, we could sing it or only use musical instruments to “speak” it. Curious yet? The artificial language we have unearthed from hidden history is “Solresol”.
This language was created by the 19th century French violinist and music professor, Jean-François Sudre, 60 years before the well-known Esperanto language. He essentially designed a universal language closely linked to music that only used the seven musical notes do, re, mi, fa, sol, la and si as the graphical symbols in writing. In order to form words, these musical notes simply had to be combined as syllables in different orders and following a series of alterations to provide additional meaning. For example, the feminine is formed by elongating the last vowel. So sila, the word for “boy”, is written as silaa for “girl”. When reproduced musically, this final note is briefly elongated. In parallel, in order to form the plural, the full syllable of the word in question is elongated both verbally and musically. Of course, as it only has seven practical syllables, the resulting vocabulary cannot contain an abundance of synonyms. As a result, only a limited dictionary of interlinguistic correspondences which, according to linguists of the time, meant it was impossible to spread solresol as a language to be studied. However, this opinion did not stop Jean-François, who dedicated himself to traveling throughout France in 1824 and 1825 with two students, Ernest Deldevez and Charles Lasonneur. While Jean-François played the violin, his two young companions would translate the music into French. Strangely enough, this piqued the interest of the militia, who thought that this language could be used a military code, and offered to sponsor the project. However, they imposed a single condition: reduce the number of compositional musical notes from seven to four, which is the number that can be played on the bugle.
The project continued for a time, but the militia slowly lost interest and stopped providing financial support. By then, Jean-François had already perfected this model which he renamed téléphonie and returned to the seven musical notes. Nevertheless, he succeeded in publishing a grammar book containing 2660 words with some basic concepts of emphasis. For example, the same word can be used as a noun, verb, adjective and adverb. In order to differentiate between the grammatical categories, one simply needs to look at the accent placement: nouns are accented on the first syllable (mílasi, love), adjectives are accented on the penultimate syllable (dosído, useful), while adverbs are accented on the last syllable (solsiré, happily).
While it is an interesting proposal, the truth is that there are a number of shortcomings in its application as a natural, lexically rich and adaptable language, not to mention the difficulty in decoding meaning as a result of only having seven interrelated phonetic elements. If one thing is true though, solresol joins a group of astonishing artificial languages born from the intellect of great creative minds that sought to revolutionize the way in which we communicate.
Ref. de la imagen: https://sp.depositphotos.com/vector-images/pentagrama-musical-decorativo.html
