Music is an interesting language. With various notation systems, and with or without vocal input, music has evolved to serve as a mode of expression. It has been used to construct settings, convey moods, and set an atmosphere for whichever scene the composer and musicians desire to create. The typical octave has a total of 12 chromatic notes — unless you count in quarter tones in which there would be 24 in an octave. From these notes, over several octaves, thousands, if not, millions of songs and compositions have been made over millennia, and yet, there still exists many more yet to be composed.

But there is a time when music was used as a basis of constructing a language. This is not inherently unique, as languages such as the whistled Spanish of Silbo Gomero, and the possibility for Pirahã to be hummed are examples of how some musical concepts have been used throughout humanity. Phonemic tones also form another example, where the relative pitch of a phoneme can mean different things if they were pitched higher, lower, or anything else. But imagine a language that did not use a relative tone; instead, it uses an absolute tonal system, one based on the solfege that has dominated western music for centuries.

Enter Jean-François Sudre. Born in Albi, southern France in 1787, he was a violinist, a music teacher, and a composer. But above these, he was most well known for creating a language based on music. He, alongside similar-minded musicians, wanted to develop a method of transmitting language through the medium of music. Starting in 1827, and continuing onto his death in 1862, Jean-François Sudre worked on this language, which he called Solresol, or langue musicale universelle. His book, while publicised over the years he had been working on, was also published in 1866, 4 years after his death.

Although the chromatic scale has 12 notes in an octave, Sudre decided to use only 7 of them — the notes C D E F G A B. These formed a tonal system of seven phonemic tones, without any tonal contours like the rising or falling tones we see in some natural tonal languages. But, these were also the only 7 syllables of the language, derived directly from the names of each note in the solfege — do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti. An interesting thing about Solresol is, word formation was limited to a maximum of 5 syllables per word. Furthermore, to prevent the confusion between when one word starts and when a word ends, rests between each word were required, functioning as “spaces” between words in languages like English. This made Solresol have a maximum of around 11000 words, while substantially smaller than many lexical inventories of various languages, are still sufficient to function in more basic communication.

Solresol boasts a wide array of writing systems to represent its language. It could be represented using the Latin alphabet, musical notation on a staff, as numerals with 1 representing “do” and 7 representing “si” or “ti” (the former is preferred), as colours of the rainbow, manual signs (remember the solfege mnemonic?), and even coloured flags. A stenographic script has also been invented by Vincent Gajewski, who popularised the language. These signs were based on the hand mnemonic of the solfege, and are joined together following the stroke direction of the syllable. Double syllables were indicated by a line through them.

Word formation is interesting. Single syllable words, of which only 7 exist, one for each existing syllable in the language, were mainly affirmative words like “:yes”, negative words like “not”, conjunctions like “and”, “or”, the conditional word “if”, the definite article “the”, and the word “to”. For 2-syllable words, repeated syllables were tenses, while other words included pronouns, basic particles, and basic words like “good” (fala) and “good night” (misi).

3-syllable-long words with repeated syllables largely consisted of numbers, days, months, temperature and weather terms. Other words included those words which were common in use during the early 19th century. 4-syllable-long words were classified into 7 categories for words without repeating syllables. These largely included words of arts, sciences, industry, and even concepts. Words with repeating syllables included terms for religion, sickness or ailments, and even magistrates. 5-syllable words, the longest possible, mainly consisted of plants, animals, and minerals. Word categories could also be distinguished by the rinforzando, where the syllable is sort of “stressed”.

While the animate words formed were initially implying those of the male sex, requiring modifications like vowel lengthening to represent the female sex, modern translations prefer to cut these modifications out, using the neutral terms instead.

If the concept of using music to invent a language is not unique enough already, here is another unique characteristic. Solresol words can be reversed to flip the meaning of the original word, aka form the antonym. For example, while fala means “good”, the reverse, lafa, means “bad”. But not all words can be reversed, which makes this pattern a little confusing.

Solresol has a rather typical grammar. With a subject-verb-object word order, and adjectives coming after the noun they modify, and tenses preceding verbs, Solresol has a rather rigid grammar. Plural forms are formed by lengthening the vowel of the last syllable. However, question formation poses a rather confusing challenge. Interrogative questions seem to be formed without the personal pronoun in the question. But Gajewski ignored this original system Sudre proposed, and suggested putting the subject after the verb when forming the question. With no irregular verbs, nouns, or adjectives, it seems that Solresol tries to make relatively effective use of its extremely constraint word formation rules and phonology.

While there are several limitations for the Solresol language, including its French influences particularly shining through in how it represents numbers, there still is a small community keeping this language relevant, with many of its resources available online. They also have a little translator for the more basic stuff there:

However, for a person who does not have perfect pitch, it can be rather difficult to tell which tone is which, which somehow conjures this image of two people with no perfect pitch trying to converse in Solresol and eventually failing. I can only imagine what would happen if two tone deaf people attempt to speak Solresol. Leaving you with this thought, this is where the introduction of Solresol comes to an end. I hope you have learnt a thing or two about the very first recorded attempt at creating a music-based constructed language, and perhaps the only attempt at doing so.