''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.

Background

One of the aims of the ''Essay'' was to provide a replacement for the

Latin language Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

, which had been the international language of scholars in Western Europe by then for 1000 years. 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. A scheme for a ''

lingua franca A lingua franca (; ; for plurals see ), also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, link language or language of wider communication (LWC), is a Natural language, language systematically used to make co ...

'' 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. Seth Ward was author with Wilkins of ''Vindiciae academiarum'' (1654), a defence of the Commonwealth period of the

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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. 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. There was immediate interest in the ''Essay''; Wilkins is said to have regarded his work only in terms of a proof of concept. 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.

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 The Great Fire of London was a major conflagration that swept through central London from Sunday 2 September to Wednesday 5 September 1666, gutting the medieval City of London inside the old London Wall, Roman city wall, while also extendi ...

of 1666, which destroyed some of it in draft. The book was written by Wilkins, assisted by John Ray, Francis Willughby, and others. An influence was the ''Ars Signorum'' of George Dalgarno. Also influential, as Wilkins acknowledged, was ''The Ground-Work or Foundation Laid ... for the Framing of a New Perfect Language'' (1652) by Francis Lodwick.

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". It was compiled by William Lloyd.

Wilkins's scheme

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 An orthography is a set of convention (norm), conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, Word#Word boundaries, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and Emphasis (typography), emphasis. Most national ...

: i.e. it is not a written representation of

spoken language A spoken language is a form of communication produced through articulate sounds or, in some cases, through manual gestures, as opposed to written language. Oral or vocal languages are those produced using the vocal tract, whereas sign languages ar ...

. 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 Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...

. The ''Essay'' also proposed ideas on weights and measure similar to those later found in the

metric system The metric system is a system of measurement that standardization, standardizes a set of base units and a nomenclature for describing relatively large and small quantities via decimal-based multiplicative unit prefixes. Though the rules gover ...

. 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.

Related efforts, discussions, and literary references

The ''Essay'' has received a certain amount of academic and literary attention, 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... would be exceedingly difficult to remember all these minute distinctions, and confusion would arise, in rapid reading and particularly in conversation." ( Umberto Eco notes 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. More recent ''a priori'' languages (among many others) are Solresol and Ro. Jorge Luis Borges discusses Wilkins's philosophical language in his essay ''El idioma analítico de John Wilkins'' (''The Analytical Language of John Wilkins''), comparing Wilkins's classification to the fictitious Chinese encyclopedia '' Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge'' and expressing doubts about any attempt at a universal classification. In

Neal Stephenson Neal Town Stephenson (born October 31, 1959) is an American writer known for his works of speculative fiction. His novels have been categorized as science fiction, historical fiction, cyberpunk, and baroque. Stephenson's work explores mathemati ...

's '' Quicksilver'', character Daniel Waterhouse spends considerable time supporting the development of Wilkins's classification system.

Notes

External links

* (page images) * (transcription)
John Wilkins's Artificial Language, Austrian National Library, research blog

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