Ptydepe is a fictional artificial language featuring in Czech playwright Václav Havel's 1966 play The Memorandum. The play concerns the events that unfold when Ptydepe is introduced as the new official language of an unspecified organization. In Czech, the word has become widely used in the meaning of incomprehensible bureaucratic jargon, or newspeak intending to hide its true meaning.
Ptydepe was constructed along strictly scientific lines, with...
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Ptydepe is a fictional artificial language featuring in Czech playwright Václav Havel's 1966 play The Memorandum. The play concerns the events that unfold when Ptydepe is introduced as the new official language of an unspecified organization. In Czech, the word has become widely used in the meaning of incomprehensible bureaucratic jargon, or newspeak intending to hide its true meaning.
Ptydepe was constructed along strictly scientific lines, with none of the messiness and ambiguity of natural languages. Havel's younger brother, computer scientist Ivan M. Havel, helped in its design. In order to be able to express precisely all the subtle and easily-misunderstood nuances of natural language, Ptydepe has an extraordinary large vocabulary. Another problem of natural language that Ptydepe was intended to eliminate is the frequent similarity of unrelated words, or homonyms. To entirely avoid the possibilities for confusion that arise with homonyms and similar unrelated words, Ptydepe was...
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