In the Land of Invented Languages

itself in its actions, consisting in its having power of applying itself to the doing or not doing]

and [a completed action of operation of the mixed mechanical type of putting things nearer together or farther asunder, with reference to the capacity of fluid bodies such as are supposed to be contained in something]

of [spiritual actions of the understanding and judgment of the speculative type such as do concern the various exercise of our understanding about the truth and falsehood of things, with respect to secondary judging of the truth, found as to the consequence of it in respect of other things to be concluded from it, or to follow upon it].

The [general transcendental of that which in any way contributes to the producing of an effect]

for this is [augmentative transcendental of the opposite of mixture]

we do not [spiritual action of understanding concerning primary judgment of the special type proceeding from intrinsic causes]

what [transcendental, namely of those more universal and comprehensive terms which fall under discourse relating to those beings which are truly such, or those which our senses mistake for beings]

the [compages or frame of the whole creation]

is.

 

Got that?

Whether or not Wilkins’s language could improve your ability to reason (and I have my doubts), it would certainly do little for your ability to communicate. What had seemed so exciting a possibility when presented in sketch form—a language of concepts rather than words!—turned out to be less exciting in its fully realized form. Wilkins’s project effectively put an end to the era of the universal philosophical language. He produced something brilliant and valuable. As a study of English at a particular moment in time, it is remarkable. His work gave rise to the thesaurus, to new methods of library classification, and to the taxonomy of the natural world later perfected by Linnaeus. But as a language, it was simply unusable.

It seemed clear to me (manifestly so), as I emerged from my long weekend with An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, that Wilkins had performed another valuable service in taking the philosophical language idea as far as it could go. He had shown that it was a ridiculous idea. And so the idea could be put to rest.

But, alas, it would not be. History forgets. The philosophical language idea persisted, and would from time to time plant itself in the minds of ambitious types who had never heard of Wilkins. The graveyard of invented languages is littered with their efforts.

But even those who had heard of Wilkins were not always deterred. They thought the idea was good, but Wilkins had just done it wrong. Leibniz thought that he could do it right, but he never figured out how. And 180 years after Wilkins’s death, Ro-get, in the introduction to his thesaurus, expressed the hope that his classification scheme would lay the groundwork for a universal philosophical language. He was familiar with Wilkins’s work, but declared it, in true thesaurus-writer fashion, to be “too abstruse and recondite for practical application.”

I wondered if any of those who thought they could do better than Wilkins ever tried their hand at a “practical application” of his system. It is easy to take issue with his tables or his grammatical apparatus or his general view of the universe. You barely have to look at any of these things before you can find something to criticize. But if you sit down and make a sincere attempt to use the language, you discover the really important flaw, not in his language, but in the whole idea of a philosophical language: when you speak in concepts, it’s too damn hard to say anything.

People find something very comforting about the notion that words are the problem, not concepts. When words fail us, we tend to blame the words. We’ve all experienced the frustration of not being able to say what we mean to say. When we struggle with language, we have the sensation that our clean, beautiful ideas remain trapped inside our heads. We accuse language of being too crude and clumsy to adequately express our thoughts. But perhaps we flatter ourselves.

Sometimes we do find the words to express an idea, and only then realize what a stupid idea it is. This experience would suggest that our thoughts are not as clean and beautiful as we would like to believe. Instead of blaming language for failing to capture our thoughts, maybe we should thank it for giving some shape to the muddle in our heads.

I’m no philosopher, and I am not qualified to make claims about whether thought is possible without language (although I think it is), or whether there may be other means than language by which we can give shape to the muddle (sure, why not?). I’m just saying that when it comes to expressing ourselves, we need some fuzzy edges, a chance to discover what we’re trying to say even as we say it. We should be grateful to our sloppy, imperfect languages for giving us some wiggle room.

To be fair, Wilkins didn’t assume our thoughts were as organized as his language. But he did assume there was a truth “out there” that his language could help us to see “by unmasking many wild errors, that shelter themselves under the disguise of affected phrases.” His system would help us learn to think clearly. To know the word would be to know the thing. We would be able to see everything for what it was. And if we suspected something wasn’t what it seemed, we could call it what it was—the serous and watery purgative motion (from the guts downward) of the consistent and gross parts of a male, hollow-horned, ruminant, cloven-footed beast.

The “language as mathematics” idea, as we will see, had a resurgence in the late 1950s, another era of science and computation. It would be used as a tool of inquiry and experiment, a way to discover how language might work, how our minds might work.

But the goals of the seventeenth-century language inventors went beyond that. They were after a cure for Babel. They wanted a real, working language that people could use. They neglected, however, to think much about usability.

Except for poor George Dalgarno. Remember him? The stubborn schoolmaster whose disagreements with Wilkins had resulted in the end of their collaboration? He wanted to keep the number of root words in his language to a minimum. He wanted them organized in verses that were easy to memorize. Wilkins pushed for philosophical perfection. Dalgarno pushed back for usability. They came to an impasse.

Dalgarno left Oxford for a few months to work alone. He returned to find that scholarly interest was now solely focused on Wilkins’s emerging project. His own work was ignored or undermined by accusations that he was plagiarizing from Wilkins. In his disappointment he resolved to “make haste to cast it lyke an abortive out of my hands.”

But instead, “after bemoaning myself and my unfortunate labors I made all haste possible.” He worked frantically, hoping to beat Wilkins to publication. In his anxiousness, his confidence faltered. He reorganized his root words, doing away with the mnemonic verses and replacing them with a hierarchical table of the type Wilkins had argued for. His list of root words grew. But he clung to his principles by presenting a method to aid memorization (a sort of word-association strategy that he doesn’t elaborate on very much), and he was sure to emphasize that he did not provide root words for the enormous range of natural species (like he knew Wilkins would). He instead promoted his compounding strategy (for example, elephant = largest whole-footed beast; coal = mineral black fire).

Dalgarno managed to publish Ars signorum (The Art of Signs) in 1661, seven years before Wilkins’s Philosophical Language came out. His rush to publication went unrewarded. The one detailed review he received mocks him for his poor skills in Latin, implies that his benefactors supported him only because they felt sorry for him, and concludes by using his own language to call him n?kpim s?fa (the greatest ass).

Because of Dalgarno’s haste and his obvious discomfort with some of the Wilkins-influenced features he had decided to adopt, Ars signorum was, in fact, kind of a mess. And a great deal harder to figure out how to use than Wilkins’s system ultimately was. But Dalgarno deserves credit for having been unique in at least thinking about the usability of his language in practical terms. The other language inventors of the time had their heads in the philosophical clouds. They assumed that if you got your theory of concepts right, the language would automatically be easy to learn and to use. Dalgarno, ever the teacher, gave a little more