An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language

The best remembered of the numerous works of John Wilkins was An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (London, 1668), in which he expounds a new universal language for the use of philosophers.

Related Topics:
John Wilkins - London - 1668 - Universal language

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In the essay, Wilkins defines his "real character", which is a new orthography for the English language that resembles shorthand, and his "philosophical language" which is based an early classification scheme or ontology (in what would later become the computer science meaning of the term).

Related Topics:
Orthography - Shorthand - Classification scheme - Ontology - Computer science

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Wilkins describes a large number of possible concepts as single words by first dividing all reality into forty different categories, each assigned to a different syllable, then sub-dividing these categories into sub-categories, and so on.

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The resulting words thus encode some of the semantics of their meanings into their spelling.

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Such a-priori languages were inspired by accounts of how the Chinese writing system worked.

Related Topics:
A-priori language - Chinese writing system

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Jorge Luis Borges wrote a critique of Wilkins' philosophical language in his essay El idioma analítico de John Wilkins (The Analytical Language of John Wilkins).

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Borges's essay on the fictitious Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Recognition also expresses doubts about all attempts at a universal classification. Modern information theory also suggests that it is a bad idea to have words with similar but distinct meanings also sound similar, because mishearings and the resulting confusion would be much more prominent than in real-world languages.

Related Topics:
Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Recognition - Information theory

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More modern a-priori languages are Solresol and Ro.

Related Topics:
Solresol - Ro

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