An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (London, 1668) is the best-remembered of the numerous works of John Wilkins, in which he expounds a new universal language, meant primarily to facilitate international communication among scholars, but envisioned for use by diplomats, travelers, and merchants as well. Unlike many universal language schemes of the period, it was meant merely as an auxiliary to—not a replacement of—existing natural languages.[citation needed]
One of the aims of the Essay was to provide a replacement for the Latin language, which had been the international language of scholars in Western Europe by then for 1000 years.[1]Comenius and others interested in international languages had criticisms of the arbitrary features of Latin that made it harder to learn, and Wilkins also made such points.[2] A scheme for a lingua franca based on numerical values had been published by John Pell (1630); and in his 1640 work Mercury or the Secret Messenger (1640) Wilkins had mentioned the possibility of developing a trade language.[3]
Seth Ward was author with Wilkins of Vindiciae academiarum (1654), a defence of the Commonwealth period of the Oxbridge university system against outsider reformers. In it Ward put forward a related language scheme, though differing from the Essay of Wilkins in some significant ways.[4] Ward's ideas derived from a number of sources, such as Cyprian Kinner who was a follower of Comenius, Ramon Lull, and Georg Ritschel. They went on to influence George Dalgarno as well as Wilkins.[5]
There was immediate interest in the Essay; Wilkins is said to have regarded his work only in terms of a proof of concept.[6] But in the medium term enthusiasm for this kind of constructed language declined. The problem of a universal language remained as a topic of debate.[4]
Composition and influences
The stimulus for Wilkins to write the Essay came from the Council of the Royal Society, in 1662. The work was delayed by the Great Fire of London of 1666, which destroyed some of it in draft.[7]
The book was written by Wilkins, assisted by John Ray, Francis Willughby, and others. An influence was the Ars Signorum of George Dalgarno.[8] Also influential, as Wilkins acknowledged, was The Ground-Work or Foundation Laid ... for the Framing of a New Perfect Language (1652) by Francis Lodwick.[9]
Structure
The work is in five parts, of which the fourth contains the discussion of the "real character" and "philosophical language". The third deals with "philosophical grammar" (universal grammar). The last part is the "alphabetical dictionary".[10] It was compiled by William Lloyd.[11]
Wilkins's scheme
Sample of the "real character" from the Essay. Joseph Moxon created the symbols for the printing of the book.
Wilkins's "Real Character" is a constructed family of symbols, corresponding to a classification scheme developed by Wilkins and his colleagues. It was intended as a pasigraphy, in other words, to provide elementary building blocks from which could be constructed the universe's every possible thing and notion. The Real Character is not an orthography: i.e. it is not a written representation of spoken language. Instead, each symbol represents a concept directly, without (at least in the early parts of the Essay's presentation) there being any way of vocalizing it. Inspiration for this approach came in part from contemporary European accounts of the Chinese writing system, which were somewhat mistaken.
Later in the Essay Wilkins introduces his "Philosophical Language", which assigns phonetic values to the Real Characters. For convenience, the following discussion blurs the distinction between Wilkins's Character and his Language.
Concepts are divided into forty main Genera, each of which gives the first two-letter syllable of the word; a Genus is divided into Differences, each of which adds another letter; and Differences are divided into Species, which add a fourth letter. For instance, Zi identifies the Genus of "beasts" (mammals); Zit gives the Difference of "rapacious beasts of the dog kind"; Zitα gives the Species of dogs. (Sometimes the first letter indicates a supercategory—e.g. Z always indicates an animal—but this does not always hold.) The resulting Character, and its vocalization, for a given concept thus captures, to some extent, the concept's semantics.
The Essay also proposed ideas on weights and measure similar to those later found in the metric system.[citation needed] The botanical section of the essay was contributed by John Ray; Robert Morison's criticism of Ray's work began a prolonged dispute between the two men.[13]
Related efforts, discussions, and literary references
The Essay has received a certain amount of academic and literary attention,[citation needed] usually casting it as brilliant but hopeless.
One criticism (among many) is that "words expressing closely related ideas have almost the same form, differing perhaps by their last letter only...[I]t would be exceedingly difficult to remember all these minute distinctions, and confusion would arise, in rapid reading and particularly in conversation."[14] (Umberto Eco notes[15] that Wilkins himself made such a mistake in the Essay, using Gαde (barley) where apparently Gαpe (tulip) was meant.) However, others claim that natural languages already have such minute differences, and that to assume that such differences would be indistinguishable would be to claim that natural languages fail at this.
George Edmonds sought to improve Wilkins's Philosophical Language by reorganizing its grammar and orthography while keeping its taxonomy.[16] More recent a priori languages (among many others) are Solresol and Ro.
A thesaurus, sometimes called a synonym dictionary or dictionary of synonyms, is a reference work which arranges words by their meanings, sometimes as a hierarchy of broader and narrower terms, sometimes simply as lists of synonyms and antonyms. They are often used by writers to help find the best word to express an idea:
...to find the word, or words, by which [an] idea may be most fitly and aptly expressed
An international auxiliary language is a language meant for communication between people from different nations, who do not share a common first language. An auxiliary language is primarily a foreign language and often a constructed language. The concept is related to but separate from the idea of a lingua franca that people must use to communicate. The study of international auxiliary languages is interlinguistics.
John Wilkins was an Anglican clergyman, natural philosopher, and author, and was one of the founders of the Royal Society. He was Bishop of Chester from 1668 until his death.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1668.
The year 1668 in science and technology involved some significant events.
George Dalgarno was a Scottish intellectual interested in linguistic problems. Originally from Aberdeen, he later worked as a schoolteacher in Oxford in collaboration with John Wilkins, although the two parted company intellectually in 1659.
The alphabet of human thought is a concept originally proposed by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz that provides a universal way to represent and analyze ideas and relationships by breaking down their component pieces. All ideas are compounded from a very small number of simple ideas which can be represented by a unique character.
Universal language may refer to a hypothetical or historical language spoken and understood by all or most of the world's people. In some contexts, it refers to a means of communication said to be understood by all humans. It may be the idea of an international auxiliary language for communication between groups speaking different primary languages. A similar concept can be found in pidgin language, which is actually used to facilitate understanding between two or more people with no common language. In other conceptions, it may be the primary language of all speakers, or the only existing language. Some religious and mythological traditions state that there was once a single universal language among all people, or shared by humans and supernatural beings.
A philosophical language is any constructed language that is constructed from first principles, sometimes following a classification. It is considered a type of engineered language. Philosophical languages were popular in Early Modern times, partly motivated by the goal of revising normal language for philosophical purposes. The term ideal language is sometimes used near-synonymously, though more modern philosophical languages such as Toki Pona are less likely to involve such an exalted claim of perfection. The axioms and grammars of the languages together differ from commonly spoken languages.
Francis Lodwick FRS was a pioneer of a priori languages.
Philosophy and literature involves the literary treatment of philosophers and philosophical themes, and the philosophical treatment of issues raised by literature.
The Latin term characteristica universalis, commonly interpreted as universal characteristic, or universal character in English, is a universal and formal language imagined by Gottfried Leibniz able to express mathematical, scientific, and metaphysical concepts. Leibniz thus hoped to create a language usable within the framework of a universal logical calculation or calculus ratiocinator.
Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge is a fictitious taxonomy of animals described by the writer Jorge Luis Borges in his 1942 essay "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins".
La ricerca della lingua perfetta nella cultura europea (The Search for the Perfect Language (the Making of Europe); trans. James Fentress) is a 1993 book by Umberto Eco about attempts to devise an ideal language. The writing is essayistic and uses the myth of Babel as a paradigm for connecting linguistic and social practices. Emphasizing that the quest for a perfect language has never been devoid of ideological motivation, Eco outlines some objections to the idea and suggests that an International Auxiliary Language, such as Esperanto, is a more realistic project. He points out that the impossible quest has had some useful side effects (taxonomy, scientific notations etc.) but dwells mostly on exotic proposals. Lengthy passages are devoted to Dante, Lull, Kircher, various 17th-century authors and a few less well-known names from later times. The contemporary project for a politically and culturally unified Europe provides the perspective for a more serious consideration of the theme.
A character is a semiotic sign, symbol, grapheme, or glyph – typically a letter, a numerical digit, an ideogram, a hieroglyph, a punctuation mark or another typographic mark.
George Edmonds was an English teacher, lawyer, and scholar. He is principally remembered for his book A Universal Alphabet, Grammar, and Language. He was also a reforming journalist and leading Radical.
A constructed language is a language whose phonology, grammar, orthography, and vocabulary, instead of having developed naturally, are consciously devised for some purpose, which may include being devised for a work of fiction. A constructed language may also be referred to as an artificial, planned or invented language, or a fictional language. Planned languages are languages that have been purposefully designed; they are the result of deliberate, controlling intervention and are thus of a form of language planning.
Thomas Pigot (1657–1686) was an English cleric, academic and Fellow of the Royal Society. He is known for work in acoustics, and as a committee member for the Society's universal language project.
Cyprian Kinner was a Silesian educator and linguist. He has been described as the bridge between the projects of 17th-century Europe concerned with a universal language, and those concerned with a philosophical language. He has also been called a pioneer of faceted classification.
"The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" is a short essay by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, first printed in La Nación on 8 February 1942 and subsequently published in Otras Inquisiciones (1937–1952). It is a critique of the English natural philosopher and writer John Wilkins's proposal for a universal language and of the representational capacity of language generally. In it, Borges imagines a bizarre and whimsical fictional Chinese taxonomy later quoted by Michel Foucault, David Byrne, and others.
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