It seems an amazing number of mathematicians have created artificial languages. Not to be outdone by Newton, G.W.Leibniz made one too. Others included Bertrand Russell and Janos Bolyai. Possibly some more who my or may not have been famous mathematicians (perhaps only their names coincided). Newton's had something to do with John Wilkins (1614-1672) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wilkins one of the founders of the Royal Society and a friend of Newton's, who constructed and published "philosopher's language." In most languages, words are just random sequence of syllables. There is no connection between the syllables and the meaning. Wilkins was going to change that. In his system, the syllable-sequence told you a great deal about the meaning, so if you heard a new word, you'd know immediately what it meant (or pretty close). It worked via a giant decision-tree classifying everything. E.g. animal or vegetable? Mammal or reptile? Large or small mammal? (I just made those up, but you see the idea.) You walk down the decision tree from the root to reach your word. Each step, you utter a syllable describing which tree-child you are going to. When you hit a tree leaf, that is a thing ("elephant") and you have the word for it. Sounded like a nifty idea, but it never caught on. It was a pain to memorize the giant decision tree and many actual things could have been described by many paths, not just one, in the tree, and which one was "correct" was arbitrary. Plus maybe we humans are pre-wired to *like* random syllable sequences. Plus, I think it would be annoying to read (say) a geology book and a hell of a lot of words all begin the same. Other artificial languages include Laadan, the feminist language designed to save us from male language domination; musical-tone languages; Aeo, the all-vowel language; Dritok, the language made entirely of chipmunk sounds; and a language with only "positive words" to encourage positive thinking. 500-1000 artificial languages have been made. Almost all entirely ignored. Opinions on lojban differ with some claiming it is way easier to learn that real languages (plus better), while others contend trying to construct lojban sentences "is like doing long division in your head" and that very few can do it at reasonable speed and correctness rate. -- Warren D. Smith http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking "endorse" as 1st step)