Date 1516 Writing system Utopian alphabet | ||
Purpose constructed languageUtopian Sources Influenced by Greek, Latin, and Hebrew | ||
The Utopian language is the language of the fictional land of Utopia, as described in Thomas More's Utopia. A brief sample of the constructed language is found in an addendum to More's book, written by his good friend Peter Giles. Pretending to be factual, the book does not name the creator of the language; both More and Giles have been alternately credited, with Giles often thought to have designed the alphabet.
Contents
Grammar
Although some words in Utopian show different forms corresponding to different cases in the Latin translation, there is no evidence of a consistent relationship between form and meaning, as can be seen from the following comparison of the nominal, pronominal, and adjectival case forms:
There are only four verbs in the Utopian poem, and these also show no evidence of a correspondence between form and function:
Writing system
Utopian has its own 22-letter alphabet, with letters based on the shapes of the circle, square, and triangle. These correspond almost exactly to the 23-letter Roman alphabet used in the 16th century, lacking only z. The letters f, k, q, and x only appear in the alphabet, not in the Utopian text.
Examples
The only extant text in Utopian is a quatrain written by Peter Giles in an addendum to Utopia:
Vtopos ha Boccas peu la chama polta chamaan.Bargol he maglomi baccan ſoma gymno ſophaon.
Agrama gymnoſophon labarembacha bodamilomin.
Voluala barchin heman la lauoluola dramme pagloni.
It is translated literally into Latin as:
Utopus me dux ex non insula fecit insulam.Una ego terrarum omnium absque philosophia
Civitatem philosophicam expressi mortalibus
Libenter impartio mea, non gravatim accipio meliora.
This, in turn, is translated into English as follows:
The commander Utopus made me into an island out of a non-island.I alone of all nations, without philosophy,
have portrayed for mortals the philosophical city.
Freely I impart my benefits; not unwillingly I accept whatever is better.
Armed with these translations, it is possible to deduce the following vocabulary:
In accordance with 16th-century typographical custom, the letters v and u marked a distinction in position, not sound; v was used at the beginnings of words and u elsewhere, but the same letters could represent the sounds of either u or v. Analysis of the metre of the verse shows, however, that the reader was expected to read Vtopos as Utopos, voluala as volvala, and lauoluola as lavolvola.
More's text also contains Utopian "native" terms for Utopian concepts.