A priori (languages)

This is the article regarding constructed languages. For other uses of the term "a priori", see a priori.

In the art of language construction, there are two ways to build a usable vocabulary. One possibility is to create words completely from scratch; these languages are called a priori (i.e., from first (principles)) constructed languages, e.g., Ro, Solresol, and Klingon. Alternatively, language creators may draw on existing languages and use one of them exclusively with more or less subtle variations (e.g., Latino sine flexione) or use a mixture of various languages (e.g., Esperanto); these are called a posteriori constructed languages.

Some a priori constructed languages try to categorize their vocabulary, either to express an underlying philosophical system or to make it easier to memorize the completely new vocabulary. The first letter or syllable of a word may express the class (verb, noun, attribute), while the second may serve to classify the word in case as referring to something alive, dead, or artificial, and so on. These languages are more commonly known as taxonomic languages. Furthermore, though theoretically the meaning of any word can be deduced from a knowledge of the meaning of the individual syllables alone, taxonomic languages tend to be fairly awkward to use, because the classification schemes inevitably get very complex. For example, "apples" might be described as "red fruit". But since probably there is no category for "fruit", the term would need to be specified as something like "tree food". Moreover, "tree" itself would might appear as something like "big plant", so the word for "apple" could be the equivalent of "noun: red food from big plant" or something even more complex. In this case, the word would still be ambiguous, because, e.g., cherries fit the same description.

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