Stilemi ricorrenti nelle grammatiche delle lingue pianificate a vocazione universale: Uno studio semiotico

Latino sine Flexione, Lingua Ignota, Lingua Romana, Ido, Occidental, Interlingua: the lexicon, syntax, and morphology of these “planned lan- guages” show that it is impossible to plan the invention of a language from scratch: “planners” are doomed to consciously or unconsciously, systematically or unsystematically, base their linguistic “invention” on the language(s) they already know. That occurs not only through imita- tion but also through opposition: the phonetics of Klingon (one of the languages of Star Trek), for instance, was planned so as to contrast the main rules of English phonetics, in order to sound particularly “alien”. The paper points out the main combinatorial “moves” through which most planned languages are “invented”; furthermore, it seeks to uncover the “semiotic ideology” of most of these “inventions”: linguistic entropy is a negative socio–cultural trend, but Babel can be reversed, precisely through the planning of a language whose main structure relies on the common features of a whole family of languages. The dialectics be- tween this semiotic ideology and the one which, on the opposite, sees Babel as a natural condition of humanity, are particularly emphasized.