An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language

The best remembered of the numerous works of John Wilkins was "An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language" (London, 1668), in which he expounds a new universal language for the use of philosophers. This includes ideas later taken up as the metric system. [ [http://blogs.mirror.co.uk/scienceandtech/mikeswain/july07/metric.htm A very British measurement] ] [ [http://blog.plover.com/physics/meter.html John Wilkins invents the meter ] ]

In the essay, Wilkins defines his "real character", which is a new orthography for the English language that resembles shorthand, and his "philosophical language" which is based on an early classification scheme or ontology (in what would later become the computer science meaning of the term).

Wilkins proposed a method of encoding words so that every concept would have a unique 'non-arbitrary' name. All concepts are divided into forty main "Genus"es, 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 words thus encode some of the semantics of their meanings into their spelling. Such a priori languages were inspired by accounts of how the Chinese writing system worked.

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 Classificaion 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).

More modern a-priori languages are Solresol, Arahau and Ro.

References

External links

* [http://www.crockford.com/wrrrld/wilkins.html The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, by Jorge Luis Borges]
* [http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/WilkinsTranslationShort.pdf An Essay Toward a Real Character and a Philosophical Language] - Of Measure
* [http://www.omniglot.com/writing/arahauvarf.php Arahau as a New Speedtalk]
* [http://reliant.teknowledge.com/Wilkins/ full text of the work]

Sources

Steven Pinker, 'Words and Rules', "Phoenix", 1999