As far back as we can tell, there have been thousands of natural languages spoken by humans the world over—7,102 today, according to a recent authoritative count. So why are there also hundreds and hundreds of invented languages? What niche are they intended to fill? And why did so few of them make it out of the works of their inventors? In this seminar we will approach these questions by looking at languages invented by philosophical taxonomists during the Enlightenment, by internationalists in the late 1800s, by simulationists in the 1900s; we will take a look at online communities of language inventors to understand what makes them tick, and see how invented languages and their inventors are portrayed in the media. To get the most out of all this we will also have to talk about the properties of natural languages: how they are structured, how they are used, how they change over time, and why there are so many of them.
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