Esperanto was not the first attempt at a universal language. There were a few ill-fated ventures throughout history. Mostly, they had the right idea, but simply did not connect with the human mindset.

My favorite example was Solresol, a curious language that used the seven notes of the musical scale. It came into existence a few years before Esperanto did, but was not quite as successful. Solresol used various combinations of the seven musical notes, called “syllables” in order to create nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech. If you truly wanted to, you could hum an entire Solresol sentence, or “speak” it on a piano or other instrument.

While it seemed like a good idea in theory, Solresol never fully caught on in popularity. One drawback to it was that there were not enough root words one could form in the Solresol system. While in Esperanto you know that any word that contains “vir-” has something to do with men or males, a Solresol word that contains the note “la” usually means a bunch of dissimilar things. Luckily, L.L. Zamenhof noticed this trend, and made Esperanto a highly consistent language!