In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [27]
It had something, however, that for a time made Sudre the toast of Paris—or at least of Brussels. It had a performable gimmick. The syllables of his language were taken from the seven notes of the musical scale—do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si. His language could be sung, whistled, or played on a violin. When he invited the press to a demonstration of his Langue Musicale Universelle in 1833, they arrived to find not a lecture but a show—he played phrases on his violin while his students translated them into French. If the audience members weren't impressed, they were at least entertained. A year later, Sudre took his show on the road.
As his performances grew more elaborate, his fame grew. He would take phrases from the audience to translate into Solresol; he would perform translations not just with French but with multiple languages; he might even do a little singing. Since his language was fundamentally a method of translating phrases using seven units, there was no reason why he had to be limited to the seven units of the musical scale. He could translate using seven hand signals, seven knocks, the seven colors of the rainbow. In an especially impressive demonstration, he would blindfold himself and request that an audience member give one of his students a phrase to translate. The student would then silently approach Sudre, take his hand, and transmit the message by touch alone, using seven distinct locations on Sudre's fingers.
Sudre's performances earned him popular attention and praise. He filled large concert halls. He met the king and queen of England. Everyone knew his name.
However, hardly anyone knew his language. People liked the idea, but not enough to learn the system or, crucially, to fund his work. Solresol was generally regarded, to Sudre's great frustration, as an ingenious parlor trick.
As Sudre toured and struggled to make his mark, the world was changing in such a way that made the need for a universal language seem more pressing than ever. While the elites of previous eras had always had the opportunity to engage in international contact, industrialization was now bringing this opportunity to regular folks. The steamship, the locomotive, and the telegraph narrowed distances and expanded the range of communication situations a person might find himself in. Language barriers became that much more noticeable.
And schemes to overcome those barriers started to proliferate. But these schemes looked nothing like the old ones. Babibu and 123 and doremi gave way to un nuov kind of glot. The new crop of language inventors built upon the recognizable roots of European languages. They took a little Latin, a little Greek, spiced it up with some French and German and a splash of English. The resulting systems were much easier to learn than anything that had come before. You didn't have to know the whole order of the universe to be able to guess that nuov meant “new.”
So why hadn't anyone thought to do it that way before?
The idea to create a language out of existing languages wasn't completely new. An Arabic-Persian-Turkish mix called Balaibalan was designed sometime between 1400 and 1700 (the documents can't be reliably dated), probably for religious purposes. Projects aiming to create a Pan-Slavic language (using common Slavic word roots) for the promotion of Slavic ethnic unity had