This idea was revived at the dawn of the seventeenth century, after the discovery of Chinese ideograms, which were the same in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (though pronounced differently), for these different peoples referred to the same concepts. The same thing, it was said, happens with numbers, where different words refer to the same mathematical entity. But numbers possessed another attractive aspect: independently of the variety of languages, all peoples (or very many of them) indicated them with the same cipher or character.
The idea that began to circulate, especially in Anglo-Saxon circles, inspired by the Baconian reform of knowledge, was this: postulate a priori a system of semantic universals, assign to each semantic atom a visual character or a sound, and you will have a universal language. As for the grammar, it would be a question, according to the project, of reducing the declensions or the conjugations themselves in order to derive the various elements of speech from a same root, indicating them with diacritical signs or some other criterion of economy.
The first idea of a universal character appeared in Francis Bacon and was to produce in England an abundant series of attempts, of which we would mention only those of George Dalgarno, Francis Lodwick, and John Wilkins. These inventors of languages, which will be called philosophic and a priori, because they were constructed on the basis of a given philosophical view of the world, no longer aimed merely at converting the infidel or recovering that mystic communion with God that distinguished the perfect language of Adam but rather at fostering commercial exchange, colonial expansion, and the diffusion of science. It is no accident that most of these attempts were linked to the work of the Royal Society in London, and many of the results—apparent failures—of these utopists contributed to the birth of the new scientific taxonomies.
But this project, even if abundantly stripped of the mystic-religious connotations of earlier centuries, had another feature in common with the yearned-for perfect language of Adam. It was said of Adam that he had given “proper” names to things, the names that the things should have as they expressed their nature. In earlier centuries and still in the heyday of the occult and the kabbalistic speculations of the seventeenth century (consider, above all, Athanasius Kircher), this kinship between names and things was understood in terms of onomatopoeia, on the basis of far-fetched etymologies. To give an idea of the flavor of these ways of thinking, it suffices to quote Estienne Guichard (L’harmomie étymologique des langues, Paris: Le Noir 1606), where, for example, the author shows how from the Hebrew word batar was derived the Latin synonym dividere (147). Shuffling the letters, the word becomes tarab, and from tarab derives the Latin tribus, which then leads to distribuo and finally to dividere. Zacen means “old”; transposing the radicals one gets zanet, whence the Latin senex, and with a subsequent shift of letters comes zanec, whence in Oscan casnar, from which the Latin canus would be derived (247).
In subsequent attempts, the criterion of correspondence, or isomorphism between word and thing, is, by contrast, “compositional”: the semantic atoms are named arbitrarily, but their combination is motivated by the nature of the designated object. This criterion is similar to that followed by chemistry today: calling hydrogen H, oxygen O, and sulphur S is surely arbitrary, but calling water H2O or sulfuric acid H2SO4 is motivated by the chemical nature of these compounds. If either the order or the nature of the symbols were altered, another possible compound would be designated. Naturally this language is universal because, while each people indicates water with a different linguistic term, all are able to understand and write chemical symbols in the same way.
The search for a priori philosophic languages and the impassioned debates and rejections they inspired are evidenced by those pages in Gulliver’s Travels where Swift imagines an assembly of professors bent on improving the language of their country. The first project, you will recall, was to abbreviate speech, reducing all polysyllables to monosyllables and eliminating verbs and participles. The second tended to abolish all words completely, because it was quite possible to communicate by displaying things (a difficult project because the so-called speakers would be obliged to carry with them a sack containing all the objects they planned to mention).
But even earlier the subject of the philosophic language had rightfully entered the literary genre of seventeenth-century utopias. For that matter, already in the Basel edition (1518) of More’s Utopia, published by Pieter Gilles, there was an illustration with writing in the language of that ideal island; Godwin spoke of the possible language of the Selenites in his Man in the Moone (1638); and Cyrano de Bergerac mentioned other-planetary languages on several occasions, both in Les estats et les empires de la lune (1657) and Les estats et les empires du soleil (1662).
Still, if we want two models of language that echo the a priori philosophical language of the Utopians, we must turn to two novels narrating journeys in the Austral Land, La Terre australe connue (1676), by Gabriel de Foigny, and L’Histoire des Sevarambes (1677–1679), by Denis Vairasse. Here, I will delve only into the first, which to me seems particularly instructive, because, as often happens with good caricatures, the parodistic deformation reveals some essential features of the caricatured object.
La Terre australe connue is naturally a work of the imagination. In distant, unknown lands an ideal community is supposedly discovered. In this ideal community the language, too, is ideal, and it is interesting to remark that Foigny writes in 1676, after the three significant a priori philosophic language projects have appeared: Lodwick’s Common Writing (1647), Dalgarno’s Ars Signorum (1661), and Wilkins’s Essay towards a Real Character (1668).
Foigny’s exposition, precisely because it is incomplete and a burlesque, takes up only a few pages of his ninth chapter, rather than the 500 (in folio!) of Wilkins’s, the most voluminous and complete of all the projects of that century. Yet is worth taking Foigny’s into consideration because, for all its terseness, it illustrates the advantages and limitations of a philosophic language. It reveals and magnifies—as only a parody can—the flaws of its models, but, as they are magnified, the better we are able to distinguish them.
In order to better understand Foigny it is useful to refer to Figure 11.1, where I try to extrapolate from his text a sort of Austral dictionary, along with some grammatical rules. Because the author is often reticent, I have inferred some rules from examples, while others remain unspecific (thus, for example, of thirty-six accidentals, I have been unable to reconstruct only eighteen).
Foigny’s Austral inhabitants,
to express their thoughts, employ three modes, all used in Europe: signs, voice, and writing. Signs are very familiar to them, and I have noticed that they spend many hours together without speaking in any other way, because they are ruled by this great principle: “that it is useless to employ several ways of action, when one can act with few.”
Figure 11.1
So they speak only when it is necessary to express a long series of propositions. All their words are monosyllabic, and their conjugations follow the same criterion. For example, af means “to love”; the present is la, pa, ma; I love, thou lovest, he loves; lla, ppa, mma; we love, you love, they love. They possess only one past tense, which we call the perfect: lga, pga, mga, I have loved, thou hast loved, etc.; llga, ppga, mmga, we have loved, etc. The future lda, pda, mda, I will love, etc., llda, ppda, mmda, we will love, etc. “To work,” in the Austral language, is uf: lu, pu, mu, I work, thou workest, etc.; lgu, pgu, ragu, I have worked, etc.
They have no declensions, no article, and very few words. They express simple things with a single vowel and compound things through vowels that indicate the chief simple bodies that make up those compounds. They know only five simple bodies, of which the first and most noble is fire, which they express with a; then there is air, indicated with e; the third is salt, indicated with o; the fourth, water, which they call i; and the fifth, earth, which they define as u.
As differentiating principle they employ the consonants, which are far more numerous than those of the Europeans. Each consonant denotes a quality peculiar to the things expressed by the vowels, thus b means clear; c, hot; d, unpleasant; f, dry, etc. Following these rules, they form words so well that, listening to them, you understand immediately the nature and the content of what they signify. They call the stars Aeb, a word that indicates their compound of fire and air, united to clarity. They call the sun Aab, birds are Oef, sign of their solidity and their aeriform and dry matter. Man is called Uel, which indicates his substance, partly aerial, partly terrestrial, accompanied by wetness. And so it is with other things. The advantage of this way of speaking is that you become philosophers, learning the prime elements, and in this country, nothing can be named without explaining at the same time its nature, which would seem miraculous to those unaware of the secret that they use to this end.
If their way of speech is so
