Could Glosa Be Spoken BCE? [closed]

Question

From the rough draft of Interglossa in 1943 came Glosa, from the Greek word meaning "tongue". But it's not clear when Interglossa ended and when Glosa began.

What IS clear about Glosa is that it is an intended mix of Greek and Latin, which makes sense to me, considering that both Greek and Roman cultures have had such an impact on our modern culture that it's challenging to know where one ends and the other begins, especially in the realm of science, from which Glosa was aiming at.

That said, considering that Glosa is inspired by Greek and Latin, both of which are Mediterranean in location, I have to ask--could Glosa have been invented and spoken before the Common Era?

Answer 1

Short answer: NO.

Medium answer: MAYBE, with a time machine.

The basic issue here is one of chicken and egg and which came first. While, with chickens, we really do not and can not actually answer that question, on account of it being philosophical...

With languages, and especially with invented languages, and most especially with a posteriori invented languages, we can answer the question, and that answer is NO. The rationale is fairly straightforward:

• Glosa is an invented language; it is based on Interglossa, another invented language: it can not, therefore, have existed prior to its antecedent (this is what it means to be an a posteriori invented language)
• Interglossa itself is grammatically, and as I understand it from a quick glance, an a priori invented language, though its lexicon is taken from Greek and Latin as you say: although its grammar could have (probably) been invented at about any time in history, its lexicon can not have existed before the Latin and Greek languages existed
• Greek & Latin are the natural languages upon which Interglossa and eventually Glosa are based; without both of these languages existing, neither of the later invented languages could be made.

As you can see, anything made using a pre-existing component can not antedate the existence of that component. You can't be born before your parents were born; a modern smart gadget can not be made before there is a network for it to be smart in, or the plastics or computer components it's made from.

Reality Check:

The final piece to the puzzle is the actual idea of inventing a language in the first place. While it's true that the divine Claudius was something of a neographer, having invented a few novel letters for the alphabet, we don't really have any evidence for anyone making languages on their own at that early date. The first invented language we have evidence for is Lingua Ignota, and that appears in the 1200s as an ecstatic religious & spiritual extension of Latin.

A few centuries later, we start to see people deliberately and systematically creating new languages, and these were what we now call philosophical languages.

Interglossa and Glosa are what we call International Auxiliary Languages, and they arose during a time when Europeans were struggling with national identities, when the world was becoming smaller (due to rapid communications with telegraph and telephone) and the mass movements of peoples. The idea of the IAL can only exist when people not only recognise the validity of other people's nationality (and the national languages spoken in those countries) but also the validity of the need for true understanding between peoples of differing nationalities & languages.

The earliest sensible time frame for something like Glosa to be devised is therefore in the mid to late 1800s. And of course, this would mean that Interglossa's invention would have had to be moved back also to the mid 1800s or so.

Answer 2

• "It is not clear when Interglossa ended and when Glosa began":

  The official position of Glosa.org, as given in History Behind Glosa, Wendy Ashby and Rainer Asenkerschbaumer, 2006, is that Glosa was developed from around 1960 to 1972 by Ron Clark and Wendy Ashby.

  I cannot resist quoting a truly sidereal fragment from that document, illustrating the profound level of linguistic ignorance of the authors:

  A few further and trivial changes were introduced after this date, and as Hogben was no longer available to approve these modifications, they considered it better to re-name the language to GLOSA (the Greek for tongue, language). The single “S” emphasises that the language is now fully phonetic.

  • The Greek word for "language" is γλῶσσα, glōssa. Note the double "s" and the long "o"; they are actually pronounced long "o" and double "s". There is no word **γλόσa in Greek.

  • All spoken languages are phonetic, as opposed to sign languages. Presumably the authors of the pamphlet wanted to say that the language is written phonemically; but, first, there is no relationship between a language and any of the writing systems used for writing it, and, second, it is not true. The official grammar of Glosa states that qu and kw make the same sound, as do x and ks, as do i and y. (Why would such prescriptions be considered part of the grammar of a language only Glosa.org knows; pour la bonne bouche, Glosa.org does not consider it worthwhile to explain whether Glosa words have a dynamic stress like in Spanish or English, or they don't, like in French, or where the stress may fall...)

• Glosa is [...] is an intended mix of Greek and Roman

  "Greek" is a language. "Roman" is an ethnonym; the language spoken by the Romans is called Latin. Glosa is not at all a mix of Greek and Latin. It is as different from Greek and Latin as three European amateurs could make it.

  • Glosa is an isolating language; Greek and Latin are highly inflected fusional languages.

  • As an isolating language, Glosa expresses assigns syntactic meaning to word order. Latin is notorious for having almost completely free word order, and Greek is not far from that.

  • Glosa accepts only coördinative nominal compounds (or so it would appear from the official "grammar", which does not even know that what it is describing is called coördinative nominal compounds), whereas (1) Greek has a very much larger freedom of making compound words, e.g., ἀντισυμμαχέομαι, antisymmachéomai, "to be helped (in battle) in return", and (2) Latin does not like compounds at all.

  • Glosa has very limited word derivation, using only "about twenty" suffixes; both Greek and Latin have ample derivation systems, and moreover they prefer prefixes.

  • There is nothing is Glosa which even looks like the elaborated indirect speech subsystems of Greek and Latin.

  • Glosa does not have vocalic quantity, whereas both Greek and Latin do. Glosa apparently does not like double consonants, whereas both Greek and Latin do. (The inventors of the language, being native speakers of English, did not even consider that Greek and Latin geminates represent a real phonetic phenomenon; simple and double consonants are phonemically distinct in both Greek and Latin: compare Latin anus and annus.)

• Could Glosa have been invented and spoken before the Common Era

  In principle, yes, of course, Glosa does not use logic or mathematics or technology which were unavailable in the Classical world.

  In practice, no, not at all, no way.

  For an ancient Greek or Roman, Glosa would appear as a very very exotic language, which, strangely, uses words reminiscent of Latin and Greek; maybe that's how a newly acquired barbarian slave would first attempt to speak when learning proper human speech.

  The ancient Greeks and Romans did not even know what an analytic isolating language may be; they did not even know that their languages were synthetic fusional languages, because all the languages they knew were synthetic fusional languages. A Greek or a Roman inventing an analytic isolating language would be as improbable as an European amateur inventing an ergative-absolutive polysynthetic language.

  (Not to mention that Glosa uses phonemes, e.g., /tʃ/, which do not exist in Greek or in Latin.)

Anyway, spoken constructed languages are very much a late modern phenomenon. They just didn't do that in the antiquity. They didn't need to: because everybody who was of any importance had Greek, from Iberia in the west to the Indus in the east; Greek was the language of culture and international communication, much like English is used today; and in any town larger than a village you could find somebody who understood Greek.