AUI (constructed language)

aUI (IPA: [auːiː]) is a philosophical, a priori language created in the 1950s by W. John Weilgart, Ph.D. (March 9, 1913 – January 26, 1981; born Johann Wolfgang Weixlgärtner,^[2] and also known as John W. Weilgart^[3]), a philosopher and psychoanalyst originally from Vienna, Austria. He described it as "the Language of Space", connoting universal communication, and published the fourth edition of the textbook in 1979;^[3] a philosophic description of each semantic element of the language was published in 1975.^[4]

As an effort toward world "peace through understanding", it was Weilgart's goal to clarify and simplify communication. Ultimately, it was his experiment in facilitating more conscious thinking in that it is built from a proposed set of primitive, possibly universal elements that are designed to reflect a motivated, mnemonic relationship between symbol, sound, and meaning. In his psychotherapy work, he sometimes used client-created aUI formulations to reveal possible subconscious associations to problematic concepts.^[5] aUI can also be considered an experiment in applied cognitive lexical semantics, and Weilgart originally envisioned it serving as an international language.