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David Salo comes on to talk about his historical research into George Dalgarno’s Lingua Philosophica, a 17th century philosophical language. We discuss the features of Dalgarno’s work, a little of how it compares to other work of the time and also its influence on the history of conlanging.
Top of Show Greeting: Lingua Philosophica (translated and read by David Salo)
Links and Resources
- Linguifex article
- The Works of George Dalgarno (19th century reprint of Dalgarno’s work)
Gray Richardson
What an awesome Conlangery episode, and how very timely! (for me at least). I just bought a couple of books on Dalgarno: “Philiosophical Languages in the 17th Century: Dalgarno, Wilkins & Leibniz” (by Jaap Maat) and “George Dalgarno on Universal Language” (by David Cram & Jaap Maat). I’m particularly excited about the 2nd one, because it contains an English translation of Dalgarno’s “Ars Signorum” — which I am not sure has been translated before from the original Latin. In fact, the book has a bilingual, parallel translation—with the Latin on one page and the English on the facing page. I had only seen the Latin version previously, which you can kind of glean what it’s about by skimming, but I don’t really know Latin hardly at all, so could not really appreciate the finer points. And it’s one reason why Dalgarno is not better known, compared to Wilkins, who published his “Philosophical Character” later—but in English, which has made it a little more accessible to folks over the centuries.
Both of the books above contain a lot of information about what all was going on with philosophical languages back during that time. Dalgarno and philosophical languages may have a pretty niche fan-base, but this stuff really floats my boat. It’s so cool to see Philosophical Languages getting some love on Conlangery!
Andrew J Smith
Unrelated to the topic, but: on the Wiktionary, the foreign word of the day for March 9, 2017 is tlahtoāni, which I immediately recognized as one of William’s examples in whichever episode. I just thought I’d mention it.