In the Land of INVENTED LANGUAGES (4 page)

Wilkins continued to work on perfecting his masterpiece, suffering with ever more frequent “fits of the stone.” In the summer of 1672 he sought a cure at Scarborough spa, but found no relief. In November, dying from “suppression of the Urine,” he told the friends and admirers who came to visit him for the last time that he was “prepared for the great Experiment” and that his only regret was that he would not live to see the completion of his language.

But he had seen it as complete as it ever would be. The king would not get around to learning it. The committee would never issue its report. Gradually, even Wilkins's close friends and collaborators would stop talking about it. No more scientific reports would be written in it. No more letters. There is no evidence that anyone ever used it again.

What happened? Did it get lost in the shuffle of history? A case of wrong time, wrong place? Or was there a problem with the language itself? There was only one way to find out. I settled in for a long weekend with
An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language
. I emerged blinking and staggering, unsure of whether any word in any language meant anything at all.

A Calculus
of Thought

W
ilkins's project was the most fully developed of all the many linguistic schemes hatched in his day. Language invention was something of a seventeenth-century intellectual fad. Latin was losing ground as the international lingua franca, and as the pace of advancement in philosophy, science, and mathematics picked up, scholars fretted about the best way to propagate their findings. Talk of universal language was in the air. It was not the first time. The search for a cure for Babel was as old as the story of Babel, but the cure proposed before this point usually involved the discovery of the original language of Adam as crafted by God. Now, in the throes of the scientific revolution, people started to think that perhaps a solution could be crafted by man.

It seems that any self-respecting gentleman of the day could
be expected to have some sort of universal language up his sleeve. Of all the works published on the idea during this time, the one with my favorite title is by Edward Somerset, the second Marquis of Worcester:
A Century of the Names and Scantlings of Such Inventions as at Present I Can Call to Mind to Have Tried and Perfected, Which (My Former Notes Being Lost) I Have, at the Instance of a Powerful Friend, Endeavoured Now in the Year 1655, to Set These Down in Such a Way as May Sufficiently Instruct Me to Put Any of Them in Practice
.

There among his inventions ingenious (the steam engine), overly optimistic (an unsinkable ship), and fanciful (“a floating garden of pleasure, with trees, flowers, banqueting-houses, and fountains, stews for all kinds of fishes, a reserve for snow to keep wine in, delicate bathing places, and the like”) is a mention of “an universal character methodical and easie to be written, yet intelligible in any language.” He doesn't, however, say much more about it.

Another gentleman inventor, who never missed a chance to say more about anything, was the eccentric Scotsman Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty. He made a name for himself as the English translator of Rabelais, and not, as he had hoped, as the inventor of “a new idiome of far greater perfection than any hitherto spoken.” In a characteristic display of his excessive lack of humility, he likened his universal language to “a most exquisite jewel, more precious than diamonds inchased in gold, the like whereof was never seen in any age.”

He described his language as a sort of arithmetic of letters by which every single thing in the universe could be given a unique name that, through a simple computation, showed you its exact and true definition. What's more, every word meant something
read both backward and forward—or in any permutation of the letters. He published two works on this language:
Ekskubalauron
, or “Gold out of Dung,” in 1652; and
Logopandecteision; or, An Introduction to the Universal Language
in 1653. (He was an avid coiner of exotic Greco-Latin-based terms, often taken to—to use a phrase of his—
quomodocunquizing
, or “any-old-waying,” extremes.) Both of these works include an indictment of natural languages for their gross imperfections and a trumpeting of praise for the solution that he had devised. But he never gets around to the details. The remainder of the first work is taken up with an invective against greedy Presbyterians and a history of Scotland. The largest part of the second work consists of a chapter-by-chapter complaint against the “impious dealing of creditors,” “covetous preachers,” and “pitiless judges” who were compounding his money troubles.

He claimed to have completed a full description of his language, but the manuscript pages had been destroyed when they were appropriated for “posterior uses” by the opposing army after he was taken prisoner at the battle of Worcester. Seven pages from the preface, however, were rescued from under a pile of dead men in the muddy street (thus, “gold out of dung”).

Urquhart was such a shockingly self-aggrandizing hack that some scholars have concluded that he must have been joking. He had earlier published a genealogy of his family, placing himself 153rd in line from Adam, and a book on mathematics, which an “admirer” (who happens to use words like
doxologetick
and
philomathets
) said explained the subject in so clear and poetic a manner that it conferred the ability to solve any trigonometry problem, no matter how difficult, “as if it were a knowledge meerly infused from above, and revealed by the peculiar inspiration of some favourable Angel.”

Ah, the voices of angels. Though Urquhart did have a sense of humor (in fact, he died from laughing too hard at the news that Charles II had been restored to the throne), he was no satirist. If you take the time to beat your way through his suffocating prose, you will find quite earnest (and humorless) proposals.

It is easy to mistake his universal language proposal for satire because it appeared at a time when such proposals were the latest thing. Seventeenth-century philosophers and scientists were complaining that language obscured thinking, that
words
got in the way of understanding
things
. They believed that concepts were clear and universal, but language was ambiguous and unsystematic. A new kind of rational language was needed, one where words perfectly expressed concepts. These ideas
were
later satirized by Swift in
Gulliver's Travels
, when Gulliver visits the “grand academy of Lagado” and learns of its “scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever.” Since “words are only names for things,” people simply carry around all the things they might need to refer to and produce them from their pockets as necessary.

Gulliver observes especially learned men “almost sinking under the weight of their packs, like pedlars among us; who, when they met in the streets, would lay down their loads, open their sacks, and hold conversation for an hour together: then put up their implements, help each other to resume their burthens, and take their leave.”

This scenario illustrates a major problem with the rational language
idea. How many “things” do you need in order to communicate? The number of concepts is huge, if not infinite. If you want each word in your language to perfectly express one concept, you need so many words that it will be impossible for anyone to learn them all.

But maybe there was a way around this problem. After all, by learning a few basic numbers and a system for putting them together, we can count to infinity. Couldn't the same be done for language? Couldn't we derive everything through a sort of mathematics of concepts?

This was a tremendously exciting idea at the time. In the seventeenth century, mathematical notation was changing everything. Before then, through thousands of years of mathematical developments, there was no plus sign, no minus sign, no symbol for multiplication or square root, no variables, no equations. The concepts behind these notational devices were understood and used, but they were explained in text form. Here, for example, is an expression of the Pythagorean theorem from a Babylonian clay tablet (about fifteen hundred years before Pythagoras):

And expressed a little more abstractly by Euclid a couple millennia later:

And Copernicus, over fifteen hundred years after that, taking advantage of the theorem to solve the position of Venus:

This is how math was done. The clarity of your explanations depended on the vocabulary you chose, the order of your clauses, and your personal style, all of which could cause problems. Here, for example, is Urquhart, in his “voices of angels” trigonometry book, doing something somehow related to the Pythagorean theorem—it's hard to tell:

It is possible to do mathematics like this, but the text really gets in the way.
Wait, which sides are squared? What is taken out of what? What was that thing three clauses ago that I'm now supposed to add to this thing
? Late-sixteenth-century scientists who were engaged in calculating the facts of the universe had a sense that the important ideas, the truths behind the calculations, were struggling against the language in which they were trapped. The astronomer Johannes Kepler had turned to musical notation (already well developed at that time) in an effort to better express his discoveries
about the motions of the planets, yielding “the harmony of the spheres.” But musical notation could only go so far. The development of mathematical notation in this context was nothing short of revolutionary.

The notational innovations of the seventeenth century—symbols and variables instead of words, equations instead of sentences—not only made it easier to keep track of which thing was which in a particular calculation; they also made it easier to see fundamental similarities and differences, and to draw generalizations that hadn't been noticed before. In addition, the notation was universal; it could be understood no matter what your national language was. The pace of innovation in science accelerated rapidly. Modern physics and calculus were born. It seemed that the truth was finally being revealed through this new type of language. A tantalizing idea took hold: just imagine what might be revealed if we could express all of our thoughts this way.

But how do you turn the world of discourse into math? Three primary strategies emerged from the competitive flurry of schemes whipped up by this challenge, two so superficial they allowed the illusion of success (leaving the egos of the authors undisturbed), and one so ambitious that those who attempted to implement it could only be humbled by the enormity of the task it revealed.

The first strategy was to simply use letters in a number-like way. When you combine the letters or do some sort of computation with them (the nature of that computation being very vaguely described), you get a word and—voilà!—a language. This was Urquhart's approach. He had tried a version of this strategy in his trigonometry book when he assigned letters to concepts, such as
E
for “side” and
L
for “secant,” and then formed words out of the letters to express statements like
Eradetul
, meaning “when any of the sides is Radius, the other of them is a Tangent, and the Subtendent
a Secant.” He thought a similar approach could be used to make precise, definition-containing words for everything in the universe. All you needed was the right alphabet, and he claims to have devised one so perfect that not only can it generate distinct words for all possible meanings, but the words for stars will show you their exact position in the sky in degrees and minutes, the words for colors will show their exact mixture of light, shadow, and darkness, the names of individual soldiers will show their exact duty and rank. What's more, in comparison with all other languages, it produces the best prayers, the most elegant compliments, the pithiest proverbs, and the most “emphatical” interjections. And besides all that, it is the easiest to learn. He stops short of claiming that it whitens your teeth and cures impotence, but he might as well have. His claims can't be disproved, because he doesn't provide any examples.