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 internation communication among scholars, but envisioned for use by diplomats, travelers, and merchants as well. Unlike many universal language schemes, it was meant merely as an auxiliary to — not a replacement of — the existing languages of the world.
Contents |
Charachters
Wilkin's "Real Character" is an ingeniously constructed family of symbols corresponding to an elaborate classification scheme. This classification was developed at great labor by Wilkins and his colleagues, and was intended to act as building blocks for the universe's every possible thing and notion. The Real Character is emphatically not an orthography in that it is not a written representation of oral speech. 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 at all; each reader might, if he wished, read out the text in his or her own tongue. Inspiration for this approach came in part from (partially mistaken) accounts of the Chinese writing system.
Language
Later in the Essay Wilkins introduces what he calls his "Philospophical Language," which assigns phonetic values to the Real Characters, should it be desired to read text aloud without using any of the exisitng national languages. (The term philosophical language is an ill-defined one, used by various authors over time to mean a variety of things; most of the description found at the article on "philosophical languages" applies to Wilkins' Real Character on its own, even excluding what Wilkins call his "Philosophical Language")
For convenience, the following discussion blurs the distinction between Wilkins' 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 botanical section of the essay was contributed by John Ray, and Robert Morison's criticism of Ray's work began a prolonged conflict between the two men.[1]
Legacy
George Edmonds attempted to improve Wilkins' Philosophical Language by reorganizing its grammar and orthography while keeping its taxonomy. His proposed improvements were published in 1855 as A Universal Alphabet, Grammar, and Language, Comprising a Scientific Classification of the Radical Elements of Discourse: and Illustrative Translations from the Holy Scriptures and the Principal British Classics: to which is Added, A Dictionary of the Language.
Jorge Luis Borges wrote a critique of Wilkins' philosophical language in his essay El idioma analítico de John Wilkins (The Analytical Language of John Wilkins). He compares Wilkins’ classification to the fictitious Chinese encyclopedia Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, expressing doubts about all attempts at a universal classification. Modern information theory also suggests that it is a bad idea to have words with similar but distinct meanings also sound similar, because mishearings and the resulting confusion would be much more prominent than in real-world languages. In The Search for the Perfect Language, Umberto Eco catches Wilkins himself making this kind of mistake in his text, using Gαde (barley) instead of Gαpe (tulip).
The Essay also proposed ideas on weights and measure similar to those later found in the metric system.[2][3]
More modern a-priori languages are Solresol, Arahau and Ro.
Literary importance
In Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, Daniel Waterhouse spends considerable time supporting the development of Wilkin's classification system.
References
- ^ Vines, Sydney Howard (1913). "Robert Morison 1620—1683 and John Ray 1627—1705". in Oliver, Francis Wall (ed.). Makers of British Botany. Cambridge University Press. p. 21.
- ^ Reproduction and transcription of a short section of the original document
- ^ John Wilkins invents the meter
External links
Sources
Steven Pinker, 'Words and Rules', Phoenix, 1999
|
||||||||||||||
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
