In the Land of INVENTED LANGUAGES (8 page)

Wilkins's scheme for forming pronounceable words follows the same plan. “Dog” is
zitα
:

and “wolf” is
zitαs
.

The words of both Dalgarno's and Wilkins's systems direct you to a position in a table, but only in Wilkins's case does that position
mean something. Dalgarno's word for “light,”
BAG
, shows you where in his verses the word “light” may be found (stanza 1, line 1, word 5), but it does not tell you what light is.
Zitα
, on the other hand, gives you a definition of a dog: a clawed, rapacious, oblong-headed, land-dwelling beast of docile disposition.

A word in Wilkins's language doesn't
stand for
a concept; it
defines
the concept. So, to return to the important business at hand, what is the definition of “shit”? Where might I find it in Wilkins's tree of the universe? Wilkins does provide an index to his tables, where you can look up specific English words and find out where they fall in the hierarchy. If you look up, say, “rabble,” you will find written next to it RC.I.7 (relations, civil > political relations of rank > of the lower sort, in the aggregate). Sometimes the word directs you to another word; if you look up “parsimony,” it will tell you to see “frugality” (which then directs you to Man. III.3—manners > virtues relating to our estates and dignities > in regards to keeping as opposed to getting). But “shit” doesn't appear in the index, nor does “feces.” So I set out to find it by figuring out its true definition. To begin, I turned to what seemed to be the most promising category for my quest, number XXX, “Corporeal Action.” But I did not find what I was looking for. The concepts included in this category ranged from quite general (living, dying) to quite specific (itching, stuttering). I noted that some of them, contrary to the indications of their category title, didn't seem very corporeal (editing, printing) or very action-like (dreaming, entertaining). But this category did include the concept politely known as coition, listed along with a colorful collection of synonyms: “coupling,” “gendering,” “lie with,” “know carnally,” “copulation,” “rutting,” “tread,” “venery.” The word for all this, by the way, is
cadod
(a corporeal action > belonging to sensate beings > of the kind concerning appetites and the satisfying of them > relating to the preservation of the individual > as regards the desire of the propagation of the species).

Figure 6.1: Category XXXI (Motion), subcategory IV (Purgation)

Sexual matters being a bit above my level of dictionary maturity, I continued my search in the next category, number XXXI, “Motion.” After skimming past the first three subcategories (animal progression, modes of going, and motions of the parts), which rather haphazardly encompassed everything from “swimming” to “ambling” to “yawning,” I came to subcategory IV, purgation, where I found: “Those kinds of Actions whereby several animals do cast off such excremetitious parts as are offensive to nature.” This was a seven-year-old boy's dream catalog of bodily function, and it bears reproducing in its entirety (see figure 6.1).

What a window on the past! How interesting to note that people once talked of “breaking wind upwards,” or that you could just as well “neeze” as sneeze. How much less distant three hundred years ago seems when one realizes that then, too, people said “snot” and “puke.” And there it was, not just “shiting,” but a fascinating array of alternatives, which, being the scholar that I am (immaturity notwithstanding), sent me to the
Oxford English Dictionary
to look for origins and explanations.

“Muting,” for example, is a special word for “bird poop.” And “sir-reverence” used to mean “with all due respect” (from the Latin
salva reverentia
—“save [your] reverence”). People usually pull out “with all due respect” when they are about to drop some bad news, so I suppose the change of meaning came about after enough people, upon hearing the phrase, thought to themselves, “Oh, great. Here comes another pile of sir-reverence.”

Once I had located my target concept in the tables, I could finally piece together the word for it:

Cepuhws
. A serous and watery purgative motion from the consistent and gross parts (from the guts downward). That's how you say “shit” in Wilkins's language. By the time I figured it out, I was too tired to giggle.

Knowing What
You Mean to Say

E
ven though Wilkins's universe was supposed to be a more organized, rational place than the one I was living in, I sometimes found it disorienting. Animals could be categorized according to the shapes of their heads, their eating preferences, or their general dispositions. I didn't really understand why emotions were classified as simple (hope) or mixed (shame), or why tactile sensations could be active (coldness) or passive (clamminess). Entertaining was a bodily action, but shitting was a motion—so was playing dice. While things as different as irony and semicolon were grouped together (under discourse > elements), things as similar as milk and butter were placed miles apart (milk with the other bodily fluids in “Parts, General,” and butter with other foodstuffs in “Provisions”).

There is an absurdity to Wilkins's categorization of the universe that was best highlighted in an article by Borges titled “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”:

Borges's point is not to ridicule Wilkins's attempt to impose a pattern on the universe (he later concedes that Wilkins's is “not the least admirable of such patterns”), but to call attention to the hopelessness of all such attempts.

“It is clear,” he says, “that there is no classification of the universe not being arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what thing the universe is.”

I thought it would be appropriate, in a slyly ironic way, to attempt a translation of these lines into Wilkins's language.

This translation was no simple matter. The sentiment expressed in these lines is quite correct. In Wilkins's tables I found arbitrariness and conjecture all around. He did not know (as we do not) what thing the universe is. But he took a heroic stab at it. Over the four days I worked on my translation, sly irony gave way to surprised admiration. As a language of its own, Wilkins's work was unusable, but as a study of meaning in English it was brilliant.

I started by looking up the word for “clear.” Where, in the universe of ideas, might this one fall? What does “clear” mean, in the grand scheme of things? Well, lots of things. In the index I found over twenty-five options listed. Do you mean “not mingled with another”? Then see “simple.” Do you mean “visible”? Then see “bright,” “transparent,” or “unspotted.” Do you mean “as refers to men”? Then see “candid.” Do you mean “not hindered from being passed through”? See “accessible” or “empty.” Do you mean in the sense of “clear weather”? That would be El.VI.1 (elements > condition of the air > being transparent). “Not guilty”? That's RJ.II.6 (relations, judicial > concerning proceedings > decision regarding party's lack of transgression).

Near the end of the list I found the particular sense of “clear” that I was after: “not hindered from being known.” This entry referred me to two possibilities, “plain” or “manifest.”

So I turned to the entry for “plain.” It referred me to many senses I could reject—“simple,” “mean,” “homely,” “frank,” “flat-lands”—but two offerings seemed promising: “not obscure” and, once again, “manifest.” I was hovering over the right meaning area now, re-spotting landmarks and getting oriented.

“Not obscure” was located in the tables at D.III.9 (discourse > complex grammatical notions > concerning the form or signification of words, with regard to their understandability). Figure 7.1 shows that section of the table (presented with the first eight sub-subcategories condensed).

Here, as in the table of bodily functions provided in chapter 6, words are followed by a list of synonyms. Wilkins considered synonymy to be one of the defects of natural language—a rational language should be free from redundancy; it should have one word for one meaning. A particular position in his table of concepts would be represented by a single word, and he intended all of the synonyms listed along with it to be covered under the same word. For example, the word for position 9,
big
(pronounced “biguhw,” D =
bi
, III =
g
, 9 =
uhw
) would be used for this particular sense of “plain,” as well as for the synonyms that follow it—“evident,” “perspicuous,” “clear,” “express,” “obvious.”