Music & ConLangs: The Endnotes

Solresol, Esperanto, Karinthy, Swift, & Defoe some extra linguistic tidbits about constructed languages, connected to our video about Music ()

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Welcome to the Endnotes, where I put all the fun facts I can’t fit into the main videos! Today, some extra bits of information from my video about music — and if you haven’t seen that yet, click on the card.

In that video we explored some of the overlaps between music and language. There have also been numerous philosophical discussions about whether music itself can be described as a language. From a certain perspective, music, and indeed all art, can be described as a language as it conveys emotional meaning. But can music alone, without reference to a spoken language, be used to convey referential meaning? Well some have tried, and this takes us into the world of constructed languages or conlangs. In 1827 musician Jean-François Sudre devised a system using the do-re-mi note names to construct an artificial language called Solresol. In addition to making up words from those do-re-mi syllables, those words could be expressed purely musically through the tones they represent. Of course you’d have to have perfect pitch to be able to decode the message. And to transmit messages over long distances Sudre envisioned a kind of musical foghorn to play the notes very loudly, and he called this contraption a telephone, from Greek roots tele meaning literally “far” and phone “voice, sound”. So Sudre coined the word telephone decades before Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone as we know it in 1876. Sudre wasn’t alone in this idea. In his 1916 novel Voyage to Faremido, Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy, whose other claim to fame was to advance the notion of the six degrees of separation, described a similar language made up of the note names with all the syllables intoned at the correct pitch. Karinthy’s novel was in fact intended as a sort of continuation of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, in which Gulliver travelled the world encountering strange foreign cultures and compared them to his own, as Swift’s way of satirizing European society. Swift was the premiere satirist of his age, and at the centre of London literary circles in the early 18th century, rubbing elbows with other such notable figures as Alexander Pope and Daniel Defoe, and was also well known for his satirical pamphlet A Modest Proposal that criticized England’s appalling treatment of Ireland by using the metaphor of the English literally eating the Irish and treating them as livestock. Fellow pamphleteer Defoe also engaged in political arguments and got himself in a bit of trouble for one called The Shortest Way with Dissenters which attacked Tory treatment of the religious dissenters by, again, satirically suggesting that they should all be exterminated. Unfortunately his pamphlet was taken literally at first, and he was fined, pilloried, and imprisoned, leading many such as Swift to shun him from polite company. An earlier friend of Defoe, Francis Lodwick, was an early pioneer of constructed artificial language, creating his own universal alphabet, and continuing the work on clergyman and natural philosopher John Wilkins’s proposal for a universal language. Sounds a lot like Esperanto, doesn’t it? Not surprising as Lodwick’s work inspired Polish medical doctor Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, who even seems to have gone to the length of switching from using the name Lejzer to Ludwik in honour of Francis Lodwick, to create the constructed language Esperanto.

As always, you can hear even more etymology and history, as well as interviews with a wide range of fascinating people, on the Endless Knot Podcast, available on all the major podcast platforms as well as our other YouTube channel. Thanks for watching!