Utopian language

A brief sample of the constructed language is found in an addendum to More's book, written by his friend Peter Giles.

Although some words in Utopian show different forms corresponding to different cases in the Latin translation, there is no evidence of a consistent relationship between form and meaning, as can be seen from the following comparison of the nominal, pronominal, and adjectival case forms: There are only four verbs in the Utopian poem, and these also show no evidence of a correspondence between form and function: Utopian has its own 22-letter alphabet, with letters based on the shapes of the circle, square, and triangle.

The only extant text in Utopian is a quatrain written by Peter Giles in an addendum to Utopia: It is translated literally into Latin as: This, in turn, is translated into English as follows: Armed with these translations, it is possible to deduce the following vocabulary: In accordance with 16th-century typographical custom, the letters V and u are a casing pair, not distinct letters: V was the capital form and u the lower case.

V~u represented a consonant or vowel depending on position, similar to y in modern English (e.g. nymph vs yellow).

Analysis of the metre of the verse shows that the reader was expected to read Vtopos as 'Utopos', uoluala as 'volvala' and lauoluola as 'lavolvola'.