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Copyright 2003 Leo J. Moser.
Jeffrey Henning had asked some time back about what data I had on Bala-i-balan. I said I could report little.
Recently, and for some obscure reason, I decided to go back onto Auxlang for a while and while there, a thread asked: Why were most conlangs constructed by Europeans? So I sent in some of what I had on Bala-i-balan. Not much to it.
Incidently, I have a variety of (rather inconclusive) data, some came from reading Bausani long ago, and more on a mailing list via Ivan, but most of the info I have seen comes from files sent me by Charles George Haberl at Harvard, who was leaving for Turkey to teach. This includes Silvestre de Sacy materials. What I know does not add up to a great deal, but more than Jeffrey currently has.
What I sent on Auxlang was roughly:
QUOTE:
We must not forget that the very first language to be constructed in toto from disparate linguistic sources was not the work of a European, but rather of a Persian.
Called Bala-i-balan, the language was presumably created sometime in the 1500s, the name of the creator is unknown. He seems to have been an Islamic mystic, possibly a member of a Sufi sect, and to have lived in the area that we would now call Central Asia, then under Persian control. His ethnic origins may well have been from among one of the Turkic tribal groups of the region. There are some who call him Muheddin-though on little evidence, as far as I can determine.
The texts in Bala-i-balan are religious and poetic in nature. The vocabulary is primarily a posteriori, with obvious use of words inspired by Persian, Turkish and Arabic. The grammar seems based primarily on Turkish, with some Arabic overtones. It was written in the local form of the Arabic alphabet.
There may well have been a religious group or sub-sect that actively used Bala-i-balan to write mysical poetry-and perhaps one of the reasons for the language was to hide that content from those who might call it heresy.
A dictionary of the Bala-i-balan language (with texts) is in Paris at the Bibliotheque Nationale. It seems to be only copy anywhere, and it has never been fully translated from the Persian. It has been there for centuries.
The fact that Bala-i-balan is not mentioned in Islamic sources or found in Islamic libraries may suggest that the language was subsequently banned and/or it users charged as heretical.
Bala-i-balan had three vowels (a i u) with both long and short forms.
The name Bala-i-balan evidently was pronounced:
ba'l-a-i-bal-an
Which breaks down into:
ba'l- language (with a long a, a macron would clarify)
a of (equivalent to the Persian ezafe)
i the (the definite article)
bal to revive, give life, create
an (particle to mark a participle)
As a consequence, Bala-i-balan means: The Language of the Reviver-perhaps even of the Creator.
END QUOTE
There was no response from anyone on Auxlang.
References
BAUSANI, A., 1970. Geheim- und Universalsprachen: Entwicklung und Typologie. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. [Ed. italian ampliata: Le lingue inventate: linguaggi artificiali, linguaggi segreti, linguaggi universali. Roma: Ubaldini, 1974.]
On BalaiBalan, pp. 86-97 in Bausani, Alessandro (1974), Le lingue inventate. Roma: Ubaldini. idem, pp. 234-238 in East and West 4:4 (1954). Rome.
DE SACY, Silvestre, 1813. Kitab asl al-maqasid wa fasl al marasid, Le capital des objets recherchés et le chapitre des choses attendues, ou Dictionnaire de l'idiome Balaïbalan. Notices et extraits des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Impériale [Paris], 9: 365-396. Note: By tracking the de Sacy book, it should be possible to find a better
citation of the book in Persian. Some de Stacy material is bilingual (French and Persian). I have seen some xeroxes of pages.
The author of the language is listed in some bibliographies as Mohyieddin (c.1480) but I have doubts about the accuracy of the name. The language name comes out Balaibalan / Bala-i-Balan / Balaïbalan / etc.
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