( This post was written as a response to the original post of the thread "Book idea: early history of conlanging" on the Almea forum of this website.)
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=276
I am a scholar of the history and prehistory of conlanging. I have wrote some about it recently here and pointed towards my writings on it on my websites and facebook groups.
PROBABLY MANY CONLANGS OF THE PAST HAVE NOT SURVIVED
The reality of the history of conlanging is probably quite different from the picture you present. Probably there have been many conlangs, all over the world, throughout history and prehistory but very few have survived because of the universal sense of their triviality. You see, before the printing press, and such, copying texts was mostly done by hand and laborious. So I have uniquely encountered across many historic and ancient texts many references to books and other writings which are probably decayed and otherwise awaiting us buried underground, especially in deserts, and perhaps some fathoms below. Among these many writings are no doubt conlangs, from what conlangs and such I have discovered.
Let me say just a bit on this now, and from memory.
"RITUAL LANGUAGES" ARE CONLANGS AND LIKE THEM
Across the modern ethnographic literature there are record of things generally called "ritual languages" which are sometimes conlangs and sometimes like conlangs. These are languages, dialects, or jargons which are used by shamans for lore and ritual, as among obscure jungle or Asian steppe peoples. Sometimes the men will have such a language for lore and initiation. But it's mostly a shaman (priest, priestess, etc) thing so far as I can see. Like Dongba Symbols except not "written" or visual. These varyingly conlang archaic and parallel words to those words in the language used by their people.
What come to mind is the possible Tangut "ritual language", perhaps in its calendar text, and those poetic and epic mythic texts in "Stories, Myths, Chants, and Songs of the Kuna Indians". But there are many other examples I cannot recall so well just now.
"LANGUAGE GAMES" ARE LIKE CONLANGS
And then there are also "language games", of which we have some recorded from all over the world. These, akin to poetry, are also like conlanging (language invention). Everyone plays these but they are especially associated with children in the academic literature and perhaps otherwise. And this would make sense, children are forever playing with toys and rehearsing and somehow internalizing all things which they have encountered. Yet when childhood is over, adults seldom do this. "Yet in the sleep of grown-up's, what dreams may come: Must give us pause.""
CONLANG SURVIVALS FROM THE PAST
Then we also have a few other survivals from across time. There's the one or two different systems of Cryptic Egyptian Hieroglyphic, there's "The Armenian Twin Manuscript" in the British Museum from c 1300s Europe (on my academia.edu account, Larry Rogers Logographic, discussed). Then there's the better-known Codox Rohonc and The Voynich Manuscript and a few other works which I can't remember just now but list and discuss elsewhere. Emesal comes to mind but I very much think it is a cognate language to Sumerian, as "gender languages" or "gender language variants" always strike me as far more similar to "eachother" than Emesal is to Sumerian. Was it especially associated with a specific cult? That is possible. As always, comparatively search the ethnographic literature.
( I will continue but will submit this now lest it should be lost and my enthusiasm for repetition face depletion for surrepetition. )
Now, it just so happens that I am very skilled in using comparative anthropology to make guesses as to what the likely unwritten reality was for any given thing, though some things in particular.
So the evidence from my vast survey of comparative anthropology and ethnology is that there's been tons and tons and tons of conlangs and such, since time immemorial, but they just were not recorded because they were considered trivial or because writing was not at hand.
I have discovered in my surveys of ancient lore a number of documents (usually medieval) recording alphabets and other writing systems, or ideas of writing systems, which are not to be found anywhere else. This further bespeaks of many lost books and even written languages, consistent with what I said above.
WHAT WILL BECOME OF THIS AGE'S CONLANGS?
And what will become of all the current conlangs and similar things in the future? Someone should be making pdf's of all this and putting them multiple places online and setting successors about the work of perservation. For in time, all this too is likely to be lost, even if printed out, even if printed or engraved "on plates of gold".
I am actually happily also a specialist in the study of the oldest and most obscure of written languages: Epigraphic languages and writings. From the tropical Khmer Empire of c 800s to 1300s Southeast Asia aka Indo-China, we have about 1,000 texts of one or two pages each, and these are all that remains of accounts of vast libraries of this empire, no doubt many Hindu and later Buddhist classics in Sanskrit, Pali, Old Khmer, and no doubt other languages such as those found in the hidden cave library of Dunhuang along the Silk Road.So all this could come to nothing or very little as well.
And perhaps part of what perserved the conlang of St. Hildegaard was that she was canonized a saint. And many writings of saints are no doubt lost to the ages by the usual means of wartime destruction or accident. Look at the volumes and volumes we have of writings by St. Augustine from c 400s North Africa: And how few read them today, and how expensive and inaccessible are the only known modern side by side bilingual presentation of this work. Yet even St. Augustine's Confessions - no, it is among his letters, laments how fewer and fewer in his day have access to the great libraries of writings in Phoenician (Punic, as of Carthage). Among which, we know, was an account of the Phoenician circumnavigation of the entrity of Africa and of the discovery of the gorilla, whose name in English seems to trace back to some ancient African language recorded first in that short surviving account.
CONLANGS WILL BE MUCH MORE CELEBRATED IN THE FUTURE
But I think, myself, that rather the next 500-1000 years will see all our works cherished, saved, and celebrated. For I suspect that modern technology will allow all foreign languages to become much more accessible for everyone around the world, via readily accessible glosses and the future dissemination of ideas and interest in language science. So we will be as renaissance men, then, lights in what is otherwise regarded as a dark and backward time, like DaVinci doing drawings of helicopters seems to us today. No doubt many scoffed at the ideas of the great genius DaVinci and even nobles were sometimes eager to do him a bad turn. For what is a scholar in the eyes of most people? We see how Archimedes met his end: The rest of his life was no doubt not so much different from the scholars and "pseudo-scholars" of our own day, the world's population being so much greater than it ever has been, though at least only by numbers.
( So I count you all as great unsung scientist heroes of a past which of a hypothetical and anticipated future. And I was correct in my prediction some 10 years ago of an approaching global calamitous pandemic, so hey. )
Or it may be that our own works on conlangs will mostly be lost and then a future generation's works will be perserved for a long time.
Or perhaps I am entirely wrong in my optimistic predictions. The future is unpredictable and in some ways horrific. We can have some sense of it by studying history and prehistory and comparative anthropology, yet very few do, even among those professional scholars upon whom most rely for knowledge beyond our own trades.
LOGOGRAPHIC WRITING SYSTEMS ARE LIKE CONLANGS
One of the most elaborate things like conlangs to exist are those surviving and known hieroglyphic writing systems aka logographic writing systems. Of which I myself am a pioneer. (This is my absolute #1 specialty as a scholar. ) I am perhaps the first to realize through a unique comparative study the great depth of reflection upon language, and other ideas, to be contained, and probably to be contained, within the various orthographic complexities of these writing systems all from c 2500 BC and the very inventions of writing worldwide. Yet will any ever attain to the discoveries which I have made? Or will I ever be able to make them accessible?
Yet we see among the many lost books of the ages, many references to such books which were the result of a lifetime of labor. Such as that book on bee keeping refered to in either Pliny's Natural History or Virgil's Georgics (I forget).
There is perhaps not greater source of ancient commentary upon language and its many puns and nuances than in the 50 or so known logographic writing systems, and especially the very earliest and most complex, which were most aware of their own original principals and freedom of expression and creation.
But it's all just like ancient science and wisdom and then puns and ideas about how languages work which are surprising but not entirely NOT what you would expect for times like c 2500 BC. Still, I think it's all a really big deal, given my understanding of what all else we have from ancient or even historical times.
WHERE TO FIND LISTS OF CONLANGS FROM THE DEEP PAST
And then to drain my mind on this just a bit more, I've found in a number of places online and in books lists of various historic conlangs and such. But few have studied them in great depth, aside from myself. And there are few academics to do major works on historic conlangs. And sometimes their work is very disappointing. Even me, with all the time and effort I have put into studying this - Would you believe it? - there are some places of scholars at which I receive a cold welcome and am not celebrated even in my own day. Together, I remind you, with all my many students and readers, whom I represent wherever I go. I come to write the history of conlanging - yet am in some places not fawned upon, even by conlangers. It is true, I assure you. You may cry freely if you wish, it is a lamentable concept if you will not admit its reality. I would offer you a handkerchief if I could and some words of consolation.
ANCIENT AND MODERN WRITTEN LANGUAGES ARE LIKE CONLANGS
Much can be learned by studying any one of these. And even by studying what we increasingly have accessible from such ancient languages as Sumerian (our special study this summer, all my students and I), though they are not conlangs. Yet ancient written languages - and modern languages, I think to a lesser extent, notably show signs of being artificial and the product of careful planning as well as its opposite. Great ancient written languages like Sanskrit, Mayan Hieroglyphic, or Egyptian Hieroglyphic show signs of being artificially made to satisfy speakers of related languages from realms sometimes in concord but always to be appeased and appealed to thereby. Like Ancient Esperanto's, though far more like actual spoken languages for paradigmatic complexity and irregularities.
THE LOST CONLANGS OF THE PAST WERE PROBABLY NOT SO SOPHISTICATED;
SOME FURTHER SUMMARY OF LIKELY HISTORIC AND PREHISTORIC LINGUISTICS
Yet it also should be said that surviving ancient conlangs and such are far less sophisticated than modern products because their grasp of comparative global grammar was far less than ours. Modern language science is way ahead of anything before 1800.
No doubt in Ancient Rome there were grammars of languages from all over the empire, including many language isolates we have no idea about today. But the degree to which anyone really figured out how these grammars probably work was far less than what people have accomplished by today. All over the world, the emphasis of civilizations was just to focus on a few written languages and not to pay much attention to all the others. There is a certain simplicity to the concept.
I also do think we have accounts from all over the world of people becoming fluent in the languages of other people, with the help of teachers, and even outside of childhood. How they did this without modern language science, though, we can guess.
I don't think we have any surviving works from Ancient Rome about foreign language grammar speculation. Not even for Coptic. We do have examples of interlinear glossed texts from the ancient world, I think worldwide, so there were probably many but few have survived. So we have examples of such things, including bilingual and polyglot side by side text presentations, as the heptaglot book of Psalms now at the Vatican.
What we have of "ritual languages" is impressive in some ways but not impressive in other ways.
THE LIMITS OF THE MODERN WORLD FOR SCHOLARSHIP AND ENCOURAGEMENT
I, though, know much of ancient writings and still prefer them greatly over these our modern works of greater scientific sophistication. Yet I try to be as close to the cutting edge as I can be, realizing the great ignorance of others in my own day and in the past without use of comparative language science and comparative anthropology.
With modern science, unprecedentedly huge (and wonderful) population sizes, and technology, we can do much! Yet there is also much we lack and the bad effects of "groupthink" and such weigh down upon us all. We have the technology to access and make accessible the attested and likely reality of all of human and hominid and universe existence - yet often we discourage this, acting as if it's already been covered by professors and academics when they only study a small percentage of what can be studied. Written works by non-professionals and non-scientists are often not welcomed, even where they are made available free online.
MORE OF WHAT HINDERS THE STUDY OF MODERN AND HISTORIC CONLANGS
So, at the one time, we would take interest in such things as lost and obscure modern and historic conlangs. And at the same time, we would discourage their presentation or study, or those who specialize in such things and make the same clear.
But who is there, anywhere on the internet, to carefully read anything that someone else has written, especially if it is of any length at all, beyond more than a sentence?
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Note: I prefer to call "linguistics" as "language science" to avoid the common vernacular confusion of "linguistics" with "polyglotism". Likewise, I would consider some to be "language scientists". And I have a special relish for the irony that the name of the discipline of "linguistics" is so semantically opaque and confusing for non-specialists in that field. And so you can see the value of studying the invention and critical evaluation of language and terminology. To which I would add and also greatly recommend the study of writing systems.
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Image: I made a title image for this post. It's based on Silent Film text images.
Music: Here's a song of which this reminds me.
Citizen King - Better Days, maybe late 1990s.
"Genre: Alternative rock, alternative hip hop" (thus spake Wikipedia)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87nJoBSfQ_Q
