In order to better understand Foigny it is useful to see table 1 where I try to extrapolate from his text a sort of Austral dictionary, along with some grammatical rules. Because the author is often reticent, I have inferred some rules from examples, while others remain unspecific (thus, for example, of thirty-six accidentals, I have been able to reconstruct only eighteen).
Foigny’s Austral inhabitants,
to express their thoughts, employ three modes, all used in Europe: signs, voice, and writing. Signs are very familiar to them, and I have noticed that they spend many hours together without speaking in any other way, because they are ruled by this great principle: “that it is useless to employ several ways of action, when one can act with few.”
So they speak only when it is necessary to express a long series of propositions. All their words are monosyllabic, and their conjugations follow the same criterion. For example, af means “to love”; the present is la, pa, ma: I love, thou lovest, he loves; lla, ppa, mma: we love, you love, they love. They possess only one past tense, which we call the perfect: Iga, pga, mga, I have loved, thou hast loved, etc.; llga, ppga, mmga, we have loved, etc. The future lda, pda, mda, I will love, etc., llda, ppda, mmda, we will love, etc. “To work,” in the Austral language, is uf: lu, pu, mu, I work, thou workest, etc.; lgu, pgu, mgu, I have worked, etc.
SIMPLE BODIES a — fire
e — air
i- water
o — salt
u — earth
QUALITIES (ai — calm)
b — clear
c — hot
d — nasty
f — dry
g — bad
h — low
j — red
l — wet
m — desirable
n — black
p — sweet
q — pleasant
r — bitter
s — white
t — green
x — cold
z — high
ACTIONS AF to love
UF to work
MORPHOLOGICAL SIGNS l — I
p — you
m — he/she/it (plural when doubled)
g — past
d — future
VERBAL FORMS LA, PA, MA I love, Thou lovest, He loves
LLA, PPA, MMA We love, You love, They love
LGA, PGA, MGA I have loved, Thou hast loved, He has loved
LLGA, PPGA, MMGA We have loved, You have loved, They have loved
LDA, PDA, MDA I will love … etc.
LLDA, PPDA, MMDA We will love … etc.
EXAMPLES OF COMPOUND WORDS
AEB stars (FIRE + AIR + CLEAR)
AAB sun (FIRE + FIRE + CLEAR)
OEF birds (SALT + AIR + DRY)
UEL man (EARTH + AIR + WET)
AF to love (FIRE + DRY)
LA I love (the secretion that love produces in us)
PA thou lovest (lover’s sweetness)
EB clear air
IC hot water
IX cold water
AF dry fire
ES white air
IPM sweet and desirable apple
IRD nasty and unpleasant fruit
TABLE 1
They have no declensions, no article, and very few words. They express simple things with a single vowel and compound things through vowels that indicate the chief simple bodies that make up those compounds. They know only five simple bodies, of which the first and most noble is fire, which they express with a; then there is air, indicated with e; the third is salt, indicated with o; the fourth, water, which they call i; and the fifth, earth, which they define as u.
As differentiating principle they employ the consonants, which are far more numerous than those of the Europeans. Each consonant denotes a quality peculiar to the things expressed by the vowels, thus b means clear: c, hot; d, unpleasant; f, dry, etc. Following these rules, they form words so well that, listening to them, you understand immediately the nature and the content of what they signify. They call the stars Aeb, a word that indicates their compound of fire and air, united to clarity. They call the sun Aab, birds are Oef, sign of their solidity and their aeriform and dry matter. Man is called Uel, which indicates his substance, partly aerial, partly terrestrial, accompanied by wetness. And so it is with other things. The advantage of this way of speaking is that you become philosophers, learning the prime elements, and in this country, nothing can be named without explaining at the same time its nature, which would seem miraculous to those unaware of the secret that they use to this end.
If their way of speech is so admirable, even more so is their writing … and though to us it seems very difficult to decipher them, custom makes the practice very simple.
Instructions in the manner of writing follow; here vowels are indicated with dots marked in different positions, while the thirty-six consonants of the alphabet are little strokes that surround the dots and are recognized by their angles. Foigny mentions these graphic devices, obviously making fun of similarly complicated systems, such as, for example, Joachim Becher’s Character pro notia linguarum universalis, which proposes a form of notation capable of completely muddling the reader’s ideas. He then continues, citing composites that can be achieved:
For example: eb, clear air; ic, hot water; ix, cold water; ul, damp earth; af, dry fire; es, white air. … There are another eighteen or nineteen, but in Europe we have no consonants corresponding to them.
The more you consider this way of writing, the more you will discover secrets worthy of admiration: b means clear; c hot; x cold; l wet; f dry; n black; t green; d nasty; p sweet; q pleasant; r bitter; m desirable; g bad: z high; h low; j red; a joined with i, calm. The moment a word is spoken, they know the nature of what it denotes: to indicate a sweet and desirable apple, they write ipm; nasty and unpleasant fruit is ird. I cannot explain all the other secrets that they understand and reveal in their letters.
The verbs are even more mysterious than the nouns. For example, they write and pronounce af, to say “to love”; a means fire, f means the scorching caused by love. They say la to mean “I love,” which means the secretion that love produces in us; pa, “thou lovest,” sign of the lover’s sweetness; lla, “we love,” the double ll indicating the number of persons; oz means “to speak,” the letter o standing for salt, which seasons out speech, while z indicates the inhaling and exhaling necessary to speech.
When a child is being taught, the meaning of all the elements is explained to him, and when he unites them, he learns both the essence and the nature of all the things he is saying. This is a wonderful advantage both for the individual and for society, because, when they have learned to read, as they always do by the age of three, they understand at the same time all the characteristics of all beings.
In this language the single letters are chosen arbitrarily, and each refers to a simple notion or to a thing. When compound entities are denoted, however, the syntax of expression appears isomorphic with reference to the content. Assuming that stars are a compound of fire and clear-colored air, the syntagm aeb expresses “naturally” the nature of the thing. The expression is isomorphic to the content, to such a degree that changing one element of the expression denotes a different content. In fact, aab does not mean stars; it means sun because (in the astronomy of the Austral Land) the sun is obviously a double, clear fire. In this sense the language of real characters is distinguished from the natural languages where, if month means a length of time, the relationship between noun and notion (or thing) in both cases is entirely arbitrary. In other terms, if, by mistake, we write catt, this does not indicate, say, a cat with an extra leg, whereas, if in the Austral language you write, or say, icc instead of ic, probably you want to indicate water not hot but boiling hot.
As I said earlier, the system recalls the language of chemical formulas: if you write H2Au instead of H20, in theory you indicate a different chemical compound. But here the first drawback of the system crops up. In chemistry, the system remains, so to speak, open (accommodating neologisms) in case an absolutely new compound has to be named, but the acceptance of the neologism is conditioned by the system of the content. Because in nature the number of known or admitted compounds is limited, one may confidently read H2Au as a mistake, a misspelling, as it were. But in the Austral language, what happens if one runs into the syntagm al? Must one admit the possibility that there exists a “wet fire”?
A problem of this sort emerged in connection with the semantic universals that Ramon Lull subjected to combinations and permutations, where the free combination of letters could theoretically produce an utterance repellent to the philosophical bases of the system into which it was introduced (or, in other words, a heretical utterance, such as “truth is false” or “God is lascivious”). But in these cases Lull considered null the theologically unacceptable combination. This also occurred because the letters denoted metaphysical entities that, in the realm of the theology of reference, were precisely defined. Bonitas est magna means that Goodness is great, but as Goodness was already defined in this way, it was impossible to conceive of its opposite, Bonitas est mala (Goodness is evil). Likewise the ars did not contemplate the possibility of metaphorical expressions or even of periphrases. The primitive terms employed defined the entire universe of
