Eduardo Benot's ideas on the construction of the universal language: brief notes

Abstract

We address the ideas on the construction of languages that were sustained by Eduardo Benot (1822-1907), whose curiosity about all linguistic matters did not remain alien to the contemporary debate on the subject. Such ideas have come to us thanks to a couple of short texts: a) an appendix added at the end of the Architecture of languages (1888-1891?) ("Projects of universal language", III, pp. 683-687), and b) the conference ("Memoria", 1892) presented to the Hispano-American Literary Congress (Madrid). While in the first of the texts cited Benot bets on "a common language of the learned people" based on the words of Latin etymology and a on a "very simple grammar" (Benot 1888-1891?: 686-7), taking as a model the catholic language of Alberto Liptay (1890), in the second text, on the other hand, questions the viability of a global language and, conditioned by the type of audience to which it is addressed, insists more on the convenience of continuing to cultivate the Castilian language as an instrument of fraternization among Hispanics, and to "prevent the corruption of the admirable elocutive system that unites us all with bonds of affinity" (Benot 1892: 261).