A priori (languages)

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This is the article regarding constructed languages. For the "a priori" in epistemology, see a priori.

In the field of constructed languages, there are essentially two ways to arrive at a usable vocabulary:

One may draw on existing languages and use one of them exclusively with more or less subtle variations (eg Latino sine flexione), or use a mixture from various languages (e.g. Interlingua or Esperanto); these are called a posteriori constructed languages.

Alternatively, the vocabulary may be constructed completely from scratch -- these languages are called a priori constructed languages.

Examples of the latter are Ro, Solresol or Klingon.

In a more narrow sense, a priori constructed languages are those which 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 now as taxonomic languages.

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 (not to say "messy"). For example, "oranges" might be described as "red fruit". But since probably there is no category for "fruit", the term would need to be specified as "tree food", or something. Now, "tree" in itself would probably appear as "big plant", so -- at a minimum -- the word for "orange" would be the equivalent of "noun: red food from big plant". And this would still be ambiguous, because cherries would fit the same description...

The term a priori originally means from first (principles), as opposed to "starting from something that already exists."

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