Philosophy proposal

John Wilkins' Analytical Language

I see that the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica has omitted the article on John Wilkins. The omission is justifiable if we recall its trivi­

ality (twenty lines of mere biographical data: Wilkins was born in 1614;

Wilkins died in 1672; Wilkins was the chaplain of the Prince Palatine,

Charles Louis; Wilkins was appointed rector of one of the colleges of Ox­

ford; Wilkins was the first secretary of the Royal Society of London; etc . )

b u t inexcusable if w e consider Wilkins' speculative work. He was full of

happy curiosity: interested in theology, cryptography, music, the manufac­

ture of transparent beehives, the course of an invisible planet, the possi­

bility of a trip to the moon, the possibility and the principles of a world

language. He devoted a book to this last problem: An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (6oo pages in quarto, 1668 ) . Our National Library does not have a copy; to write this note I have consulted

The Life and Times of john Wilkins by P. A. Wright Henderson (1910 ) ; the Worterbuch der Philosophie by Fritz Mauthner ( 1924); Delphos by E. Sylvia Pankhurst ( 193 5 ) ; and Dangerous Thoughts by Lancelot Hogben (1939 ) .

All o f us, a t one time o r another, have suffered through those unappeal­

able debates in which a lady, with copious interjections and anacolutha, as­

serts that the word luna is more (or less) expressive than the word moon. Apart from the obvious comment that the monosyllable moon may be more appropriate as a representation of a simple object than the disyllabic luna, nothing can be contributed to such discussions; except for compound

words and derivatives, all the languages in the world ( not excluding Johann

Martin Schleyer's Volapiik and Peano's romantic Interlingua) are equally

inexpressive. There is no edition of the Royal Spanish Academy Grammar

that does not ponder "the envied treasure of picturesque, felicitous, and ex­

pressive words in the riches of the Spanish language," but that is mere

boasting, with no corroboration. Meanwhile, that same Royal Academy

230 J O R G E L U I S B O R G E S

produces a dictionary every few years in order to define those words . . . .

In the universal language conceived by Wilkins in the middle of the

seventeenth century, each word defines itself. Descartes, in a letter dated

November 1619, had already noted that, by using the decimal system of nu­

meration, we could learn in a single day to name all quantities to infinity,

and to write them in a new language, the language of numbers;' he also pro­

posed the creation of a similar, general language that would organize and

contain all human thought. Around 1664, John Wilkins undertook that

task.

He divided the universe into forty categories or classes, which were

then subdivided into differences, and subdivided in turn into species. To

each class he assigned a monosyllable of two letters; to each difference, a

consonant; to each species, a vowel. For example, de means element; deb, the first of the elements, fire; deba, a portion of the element of fire, a flame. In a similar language invented by Letellier ( 185 0 ) , a means animal; ab, mam­ malian; abo, carnivorous; aboj, feline; aboje, cat; abi, herbivorous; abiv, equine; etc. In that of Bonifacio Sotos Ochando (1845) , imaba means build­ ing; imaca, brothel; imafe, hospital; imafo, pesthouse; imarri, house; imaru, country estate; imedo, post; imede, pillar; imego, floor; imela, ceiling; imago, window; bire, bookbinder; hirer, to bind books. ( I found this last census in a book published in Buenos Aires in 1886: the Curso de lengua universal [ Course in Universal Language] by Dr. Pedro Mata.)

The words of John Wilkins' analytical language are not dumb and arbi­

trary symbols; every letter is meaningful, as those of the Holy Scriptures

were for the Kabbalists. Mauthner observes that children could learn this

language without knowing that it was artificial; later, in school, they would

discover that it was also a universal key and a secret encyclopedia.

Having defined Wilkins' procedure, we must examine a problem that is

impossible or difficult to postpone: the merit of the forty-part table on

which the language is based. Let us consider the eighth category: stones.

Wilkins divides them into common (flint, gravel, slate ) ; moderate ( marble,

amber, coral ) ; precious (pearl, opal); transparent (amethyst, sapphire); and

insoluble (coal, fuller's earth, and arsenic). The ninth category is almost as

1Theoretically, the number of systems of numeration is unlimited. The most complex ( for use by divinities and angels) would record an infinite number of sym­ bols, one for each whole number; the simplest requires only two. Zero is written o, one 1, two 10, three 1 1 , four 1 0 0 , five 101, six 1 1 0 , seven 1 1 1 , eight 1 00 0 . . . . It is the invention of Leibniz, who was inspired (it seems) by the enigmatic hexagrams of the I Ching.

J 0 H N W I L K I N S A N A L Y T I C A L L A N G U A G E 2J1

alarming as the eighth. It reveals that metals can be imperfect (vermilion,

quicksilver); artificial (bronze, brass) ; recremental (filings, rust) ; and natu­

ral ( gold, tin, copper) . The whale appears in the sixteenth category: it is a vi­

viparous, oblong fish. These ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies

recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia

called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the em­

peror; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs;

(e) mermaids; ( f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included

in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) in­

numerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's-hair brush;

(1) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies. The Bibliographical Institute of Brussels also exer­

cises chaos: it has parceled the universe into 1,000 subdivisions, of which

number 262 corresponds to the Pope, number 282 to the Roman Catholic

Church, number 263 to the Lord's Day, number 268 to Sunday schools,

number 298 to Mormonism, and number 294 to Brahmanism, Buddhism,

Shintoism, and Taoism. Nor does it disdain the employment of heteroge­

neous subdivisions, for example, number 179: "Cruelty to animals. Protec­

tion of animals. Dueling and suicide from a moral point of view. Various

vices and defects. Various virtues and qualities."

I have noted the arbitrariness of Wilkins, the unknown (or apocryphal)

Chinese encyclopedist, and the Bibliographical Institute of Brussels; obvi­

ously there is no classification of the universe that is not arbitrary and

speculative. The reason is quite simple: we do not know what the universe

is. "This world," wrote David Hume, "was only the first rude essay of some

infant deity who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame perfor­

mance; it is the work only o f some dependent, inferior deity, and is the ob­

ject o f derision to his superiors; it is the production of old age and dotage in

some superannuated deity, and ever since his death has run on . . . " ( Dia­ logues Concerning Natural Religion V [1779 ] ) . We must go even further, and suspect that there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense of that ambi­

tious word. If there is, then we must speculate on its purpose; we must

speculate on the words, definitions, etymologies, and synonymies of God's

secret dictionary.

The impossibility of penetrating the divine scheme of the universe can­

not, however, dissuade us from planning human schemes, even though it is

clear that they are provisional. Wilkins' analytical language is not the least

remarkable of those schemes. The classes and species that comprise it are

232 J O R G E L U I S B O R G E S

contradictory and vague; the artifice of using the letters of the words to

indicate divisions and subdivisions is undoubtedly ingenious. The word

salmon tells us nothing; zana, the corresponding word, defines (for the per­ son versed in the forty categories and the classes of those categories) a scaly

river fish with reddish flesh. (Theoretically, a language in which the name of

each being would indicate all the details of its fate, past and future, is not

inconceivable.)

Hopes and utopias aside, perhaps the most lucid words written about

language are these by Chesterton: "Man knows that there are in the soul

tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless than the col­

ors of an autumn forest . . . . Yet he seriously believes that these things can

every one of them, in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and

unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and

squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really pro­

duce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory

and all the agonies of desire" ( G. F. Watts [1904] , 8 8 ) .

[1942] [EW]