Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
Description
By John Wilkins.
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Wikipedia
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, it was meant merely as an auxiliary to — not a replacement of — existing "natural" languages.
[edit] Wilkins' scheme
Wilkin's "Real Character" is an ingeniously constructed family of symbols corresponding to an elaborate classification scheme developed at great labor by Wilkins and his colleagues, which was intended to provide elementary building blocks from which could be constructed 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, give voice to the text in his or her own tongue. Inspiration for this approach came in part from (partially mistaken) accounts of the Chinese writing system.
Later in the Essay Wilkins introduces his "Philospophical Language," which assigns phonetic values to the Real Characters, should it be desired to read text aloud without using any of the existing 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 called 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 Essay also proposed ideas on weights and measure similar to those later found in the metric system.[1][2] 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.[3]
[edit] 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."[4] (Umberto Eco notes[5] that Wilkins himself made such a mistake in the Essay, using Gαde (barley) where apparently Gαpe (tulip) was meant.)
George Edmonds sought to improve Wilkins' Philosophical Language by reorganizing its grammar and orthography while keeping its taxonomy.[6] More recent a priori languages (among many others) are Solresol and Ro.
Jorge Luis Borges discusses Wilkins' philosophical language in his essay El idioma analítico de John Wilkins (The Analytical Language of John Wilkins), comparing Wilkins’ classification to the fictitious Chinese encyclopedia Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge and expressing doubts about any attempt at a universal classification.
In Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, character Daniel Waterhouse spends considerable time supporting the development of Wilkins' classification system.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Reproduction and transcription of a short section of the original document
- ^ John Wilkins invents the meter
- ^ 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.
- ^ Albert Léon Guérard, A Short History of the International Language Movement, 1921, pp.90-92
- ^ The Search for the Perfect Language
- ^ 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, 1855.
[edit] Further reading
- E.N. da C. Andrade, The real character of bishop Wilkins. Ann. Science, Vol. 1, Iss. 1 (January 1936), pp. 4-12
- Steven Pinker, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language, 2000
[edit] External links
Annotations
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Wilkins, John, 1614-1672.
An essay towards a real character, and a philosophical language. By John Wilkins D.D. Dean of Ripon, and Fellow of the Royal Society.
London : printed for Sa: Gellibrand, and for John Martyn printer to the Royal Society, 1668.[20], 454, [162] p., [4] leaves of plates, 1 table : ill. ; 2⁰. [A]² a-d² B-3M⁴, 3a⁴ 3A-3S⁴ 3T⁴(-3T4). Leaf 3M4 is blank.
“An alphabetical dictionary, wherein all English words according to their various significations, are either referred to their places in the philosophical tables, or explained by such words as are in those tables” ([162] p. at end) has a separate dated title page and register
Order-to-print on leaf [A]1v: ‘Monday 13th. of April. 1668. At a meeting … Ordered, That the Discourse presented … be Printed by the Printer to the Royal Society. Brouncker Presi.’
Wing (CD-ROM, 1996), W2196PL 2356, Purchased: http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1668/05/15/