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Kind: captions
Language: en

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For the first time ever, this week's guest video
uses art and animation.

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12tone is a channel about music theory

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that uses pen and paper,
and piano notes, and doodles of elephants,

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but today they are also talking about language.

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12tone: [beeps]!

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Hey, welcome to 12tone!
Or, to put that another way: [piano notes]!

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Ok, that may have sounded like
a nice but strange melody,

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but it was actually a sentence in
La Langue Musicale Universelle,

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or the Universal Musical Language,
also known as Solresol.

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Solresol was invented in the mid-19th century
by a French musician named Jean-François Sudre,

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who'd become fascinated with the idea of a
language made of music.

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His first attempt, which he called La Telephonie,
was fairly straightforward:

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He just took the French alphabet and assigned
each letter to a musical note.

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This wasn't really a new language, though.

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It was more like a code,

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and it found its home where most codes do:
the military.

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Sudre tried to sell his system to the
French Army and, later, the Navy,

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but despite early interest,
they never actually paid him for it.

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He even built a series of properly-tuned cannons

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in order to increase the volume of his transmissions,
but to no avail.

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Still, though, he wasn't about to
give up on his dream.

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Instead, he set his sights on an
even more ambitious task:

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A universal second language.

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His goal was to create a language that was
bound to no particular country,

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one that every person learned in addition
to their native tongue,

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allowing free communication
across cultural borders.

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But just converting French into a
musical code wasn't good enough for that.

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Sudre was going to have to invent a real language.

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To do this, he turned to a system of
musical notation known as solfège.

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This is that Do-Re-Mi stuff Julie Andrews
was singing about.

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Well, almost: In The Sound Of Music,
the notes are

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Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti, Do, which is
the English method,

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but most other countries in Europe
use "Si" instead,

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and since Sudre was French,
that's what he did.

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Anyway, having so few possible syllables presents
a fairly obvious problem.

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In English, it's hard to even guess how many
single-syllable words there are,

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but one estimate I found
puts it at roughly 7,000.

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Solresol, on the other hand, has 7.

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These are reserved for only the most basic
elements of communication,

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like "yes", "no", "and", and "the".

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Two-syllable words aren't much better: there's
49 possible combinations,

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used for things like pronouns, greetings,
and common descriptors like "good" and "bad".

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They're also used for conjugation:

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Solresol can't fit a bunch of different words
for each verb,

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so instead it has one verb form, the present,

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and then just uses a set of two-syllable words
to tell you about the tense.

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But where things get really interesting are
the larger words,

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which have the room to build in some structures.

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Three-syllable words are loosely divided into
groups of 6, based on the first two notes.

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Words starting with Sol-Si are based on
fun and games,

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including "run", "laugh", and "smile".

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Words starting with Re-La, on the other hand,

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are negative traits like
"misanthropy", "distrust", and "intolerance".

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At four syllables, he takes this concept to
a whole new level,

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breaking all the words up into seven groups,
called keys,

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based on their first syllable.

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The key of Do, for instance, is
all about humanity,

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including the body, mind, and spirit.

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The key of Re is for words
about the household and family,

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Mi is for actions and flaws,
Fa is for travel and war,

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Sol is for art and science,
La is for industry,

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and Si is for government.

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There's also a second set of keys
that come up

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when your word includes a note
repeated twice in a row,

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although their meanings are usually related
to the main key.

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And that's it.

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Sudre's language only went up to 4 syllables,

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with less than 3000 total words.

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The fifth syllable was left open for future
development, in case new words were needed,

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but by carefully removing things like
synonyms, tense, and parts of speech,

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which are managed exclusively through accents
rather than new words,

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he managed to squeeze quite a lot of meaning
into just those 3,000.

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Sadly, while Sudre's work made him famous,
at least in certain circles,

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it never repaid him for the time and money
he put into it.

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To quote the writer Paul Collins,

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"Solresol is, at heart, the philanthropic
effort of an idealist –

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"and the Brotherhood of Mankind does not issue
quarterly dividend checks."

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After Sudre's death, though, his wife Josephine
took up the cause,

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and the language started to pick up steam,

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with thousands of speakers and a society for
its preservation founded in Paris,

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culminating in 1902 with the publication of
a guide to its grammar

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by the head of the society, Boleslas Gajewski.

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But the dream of a true universal language
was fading,

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so preservationists focused on another of
Sudre's selling points: accessibility.

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You see, Solresol doesn't actually have to
be based on music.

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It's got seven characters, and can be grafted
onto any set of seven items,

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like the seven colors of the rainbow or,
more importantly, seven specific hand gestures.

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This meant that anyone who knew
the spoken language

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could easily learn it
as a sign language as well,

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making it an incredibly useful tool in communicating
with deaf people.

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Gajewski's guide emphasized this possibility,
but there was a problem:

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At the time, deaf education in Europe was
dominated by a philosophy called oralism,

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which is basically the idea that deaf people
should still learn to speak,

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and that teaching them sign languages
got in the way.

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To be clear, this is no longer considered
a reasonable approach, but for Gajewski,

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it meant that the language he loved was cut
off from the people it could help the most.

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So who knows, maybe if turn-of-the-century
educators in France

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had been a bit more forward-thinking,

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we'd all be speaking in notes right now.

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Probably not.

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But maybe.

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[piano notes]

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12tone: [beeps]!

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Go subscribe to them for more videos
like that one,

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I would recommend starting with their video
about the Imperial March from Star Wars.

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Next week: the last guest video,
which features a Canadian.

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[beeps]