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"The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" (Spanish: "El idioma analítico de John Wilkins") is a short essay by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, first printed in ''
La Nación ''La Nación'' () is an Argentine daily newspaper. As the country's leading conservative newspaper, ''La Nación''s main competitor is the more liberal '' Clarín''. It is regarded as a newspaper of record for Argentina. Its motto is: "''La Nac ...
'' 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 John Wilkins, (14 February 1614 – 19 November 1672) 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. Wilkins is one of the ...
's proposal for a
universal language 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 ...
and of the representational capacity of language generally. In it, Borges imagines a bizarre and whimsical (and fictional) Chinese taxonomy later quoted by Michel Foucault, David Byrne, and others.


Summary

Borges begins by noting John Wilkins's absence from the 14th edition of the '' Encyclopædia Britannica'' and makes the case for Wilkins's significance, highlighting in particular the universal language scheme detailed in his '' An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language'' (1668). Wilkins's system decomposes the entire universe of "things and notions" into successively smaller divisions and subdivisions, assigning at each step of this decomposition a syllable, consonant, or vowel. Wilkins intended for these conceptual building blocks to be recombined to represent anything on earth or in heaven. The basic example Borges gives is "''de'', which means an element; ''deb'', the first of the elements, fire; ''deba'', a part of the element of fire, a flame." Examining this and other second-hand examples from Wilkins's schemehe did not have access to Wilkins's actual work, but based his comments on ''others comments on itBorges believes he finds "ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies", concluding "it is clear that there is no classification of the Universe not being arbitrary and full of conjectures." He fancifully likens Wilkins's classification scheme to a "certain Chinese encyclopedia," likely fictitious, but attributed to
Franz Kuhn Franz Walther Kuhn (10 March 1884 – 22 January 1961) was a lawyer and a translator chiefly remembered for translating many Chinese novels into German, most famously the '' Dream of the Red Chamber''. Biography Kuhn studied law at the Univers ...
, called the ''
Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge ''Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge'' ( es, link=no, Emporio celestial de conocimientos benévolos) is a fictitious taxonomy of animals described by the writer Jorge Luis Borges in his 1942 essay "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" ( ...
'', said to divide animals into "(a)those that belong to the Emperor, (b)embalmed ones, (c)those that are trained, (d)suckling pigs, (e)mermaids, (f)fabulous ones, (g)stray dogs, (h)those that are included in the present classification, (i)those that tremble as if they are mad, (j)innumerable ones, (k)those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l)others, (m)those that have just broken a flower vase, (n)those that look like flies from a long way off." Borges's point is the arbitrary nature of such taxonomies, regardless of whether they form a language or just a way of understanding and ordering the world. He challenges the idea of the universe as something we can understand at all"we do not know what thing the universe is"much less describe using language. While considering Wilkins's effort naïve, Borges ultimately praises the ambition of a universal language and admits that Wilkins's word for salmon, ''zana'', could (for someone well-versed in Wilkins's language) hold more meaning than the corresponding words in conventional languages, which are arbitrary and carry no intrinsic meaning. He says that, "Theoretically, it is not impossible to think of a language where the name of each thing says all the details of its destiny, past and future."


Commentary and uses by others

Michel Foucault attributes the inspiration for his '' The Order of Things'' to Borges' "Celestial Emporium" passage and "the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought ... breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things..." Foucault is disturbed less by the ''Emporium's'' arbitrariness than by the idea that such a classification might be intelligible to someone or some culture, then discusses the ways cultures make sense of the world by drawing relationships between things, expressed through language. What Borges did, according to Foucault, was to highlight the importance of the "site" of order by taking it away, asking in what context the ''Celestial Emporium'' might make sense. The ''Emporium'' has often been used as a shorthand for the subversion of traditional,
rational Rationality is the quality of being guided by or based on reasons. In this regard, a person acts rationally if they have a good reason for what they do or a belief is rational if it is based on strong evidence. This quality can apply to an abili ...
notions of order. The artist and musician David Byrne has created an art work, "The Evolution of Category", that shows a hierarchical tree based on this mythical taxonomy.


See also

*
Artificial language Artificial languages are languages of a typically very limited size which emerge either in computer simulations between artificial agents, robot interactions or controlled psychological experiments with humans. They are different from both constr ...
*
Characteristica universalis 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, scienti ...
*
Episteme In philosophy, episteme (; french: épistémè) is a term that refers to a principle system of understanding (i.e., knowledge), such as scientific knowledge or practical knowledge. The term comes from the Ancient Greek verb grc, ἐπῐ́σ� ...
* George Dalgarno * Rene Descartes, whom Borges mentions as someone else who had worked on a universal language.


References


External links

*
The Analytical Language of John Wilkins
' - English translation by Lilia Graciela Vázquez *

' - English translation by Will Fitzgerald *

' - English translation by Douglas Crockford {{DEFAULTSORT:Analytical Language of John Wilkins Works by Jorge Luis Borges Philosophy of language Constructed languages 1952 essays