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by Leo J. Moser
"Langue Nouvelle" was created by Faiguet de Villeneuve and published in Volume 9 of the French Encyclopedia (1765).
Regularity was clearly a goal of the makers of a-posteriori languages from the very beginning. This is apparent in the "Langue Nouvelle" entry in the famous French Encyclopedia.
The project is unfortunately only a sketch. There is only a very small vocabulary given. The article appears to have been designed primarily as an essay to stimulate further discussion. Yet it obviously influenced many a-posteriori projects well into the nineteenth century. For example, Pirro's "Universal Glot" published in 1868 (also in Paris), and then Volapuk, Esperanto, Ido, etc.
The verb "to give" as listed as:
French: ............... Langue Nouvelle:
Donner ................ donas
Avoir donne' ......... donis
Devoir donner ....... donus
Donnant ............... donont
One might see a relation here to Dr. Zamenhof's Esperanto project of 120 years later. When Zamanhof was young and first interested in such things, the Encyclopedia was far more current in the libraries of his Europe than are, say, books on Esperanto in much of the world today.
The Langue Nouvelle verb system had more detail than that shown above. Many forms were created by the use of particles, somewhat more like the case in Jespersen's Novial. Examples:
Nous soyans donne's .........} no sar dona
J'aurai e'te' donne' ..............} jo sur dona
Suis-je donne'? ..................} sa jo dona?
Latin, French and a-priori elements were fused in the project. Regularity was however rigorously stressed throughout. Ease of learning and precision of expression were basic goals.
Langue Nouvelle verbs were not altered to show person; pronouns performed this function..
The Langue Nouvelle pronoun had no case. Its common pronouns were:
I/me .................... = jo
we/us .................. = no
he/she/him/her...... = lo
you ...................... = vo
they/them............. = zo
There were no cases, such relations being shown by prepositions. The word "bi" was a special preposition for the genitive. The particle "bu" introduced the dative.
There were (apparently) no articles in Langue Nouvelle.
Plurals of Langue Nouvelle nouns were formed by adding -s:
the son = filo
the sons = filos
There was no gender in Langue Nouvelle. Note the "he/she" nature of the basic pronouns.
Nouns were formed from Langue Nouvelle verbs by adding -ou, pronounced as in French as [u]:
give=donas gift = donou
serve = servas service = servou
There was no declension of adjectives in Langue Nouvelle.
There were regularized suffixes, much as Esperanto. For example, the suffix for a larger version of the noun was -lé:
the house = manou
the mansion = manoulé
In sharp contrast to the generally a-posteriori nature of the remainder of the project, the numbers in Langue Nouvelle were strikingly a-priori. The pattern can be seen with:
4 = ga
7 = ma
10 = vu
17 = vuma
18 = vuni
40 = gavu
Ordinals numbers added -mu to the above:
fourth = gamu
eighteenth = vunimu
eightieth = nivumu
Faiguet addressed the issue of global "universality" head-on, saying that the project was not designed to meet the needs of all nations, but would be of value primarily to the learned societies (academies) of Europe.
In my opinion, his work deserves much more credit than it gets among all who are interested in designing "new" languages. Bodmer felt the same, see the quote below.
The Loom of Language
by Frederick Bodmer
Chapter XII Pioneers of Language Planning
"The efforts of the catalinguists were not stillborn. They continued to stimulate other speculations for fully a century. Diderot and D'Alembert, joint editors of the French Encyclopédie, alloted an article to the same theme. The author was no less a personage than Faiguet, Treasurer of France. Its title was Nouvelle Langue (1765). Though merely a sketch, it anticipated and outdistanced proposals for more than a hundred years later.
"Like his forerunners in England, Faiguet recognized the wasteful and irrational features common to Western European languages, and had enough historical knowledge to notice the analytical drift in the history of his mother tongue. The outcome was a highly regularized skeleton of grammar for a universal a posteriori language, i.e. one which shares features common to, and draws on, the resources of existing languages. In contrast to Faiguet's mother tongue, the New Language had no article and no gender-concord. The adjective was to be invariant, as in English or, as the designer says, a sort of adverb. Case-distinction, which has disappeared in nouns of French and other Romances languages, made way for free use of prepositions.
"In all this Faiguet had a far better understanding of what is and what is not relevant than the inventor of Esperanto with its dead ballast of a separate object case and its adjective plural."
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