Arika Okrent - In the Land of Invented Languages

This demand for conceptual precision makes Wilkins’s language very hard to use. Before you can say anything, you have to know exactly what you mean to say. I never realized what an imprecise word “clear” was until I tried to translate it into Wilkins’s concepts. I learned that what I meant to say was “manifest” (or rather bebuhw ), and for that I give him credit. He did an impressive job of unpacking and analyzing the many senses of the words. But I couldn’t imagine carrying on a conversation using these unpacked senses. If the word “clear” is imprecise, it is mercifully so. And not necessarily to the detriment of meaning. “It is clear that…” carries with it a bit of transparent glass, the bright ring of a bell, a sunny day, a candid conversation, an uncluttered table. Bebuhw has left these senses separately imprisoned in their own categories, and it seems the poorer for it.

My translation of the rest of the words proceeded along the same lines of my “clear” experience: muddled confusion punctuated by flashes of insight. A few words lent themselves to an easy translation (“universe”—“the compages or frame of the whole creation” ), but most of them were as difficult as “clear.” The more I worked on “arbitrary,” “reason,” and “simple,” the more slippery and ungraspable they became.

Once I had decided where each word was placed in the tables, I had to figure out how to pronounce it. This should have been straightforward—each category, subcategory, and sub-subcategory provides a sound or syllable—and it would have been, if not for the addition of all sorts of complications. You have to add syllables or change letters depending on whether you want the noun or the adjective, and whether it’s active, passive, plural, and so on. Bebuhw , for example, must be changed into vebuhw if you want the adjective “manifest” (rather than the verb “is manifesting”).

Language, after all, is more than just a bag of words. The words have to be put together into sentences, and we need a way to keep track of what roles the words play in sentences—we need things like suffixes, prepositions, or word-order rules to tell us how the individual words are contributing to the big picture. Wilkins (unlike some of his modern successors) was quite aware of this, but his ideas on grammatical points like parts of speech don’t exactly match current linguistic ideas, and he doesn’t provide much explanation. All I had to go on in figuring out how to put words together (and put them into sentences) was the two example translations he provides—the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed. These don’t provide a very wide range of sentence types.

Latin was the model language for most ideas about grammar at the time, and some of Wilkins’s translation betrays a Latin influence. For example, “forgive us our trespasses” becomes “forgive to us our trespasses” (to show that “forgive” takes the dative case, which English doesn’t have). But in other ways his grammar is very English-like: He generally sticks to English word order. He uses the articles “a” and “the,” and prepositions like “of” and “for,” which you wouldn’t find in a language like Latin. Sometimes he does things that look like neither English nor Latin. “Lead us not into temptation” becomes “not maist-thou-be leading [marked for adjective active] us into temptation [‘trying’ marked for ‘corruptive’ sense],” and “he shall come to judge the quick and the dead” becomes “he shall-be coming [marked for adjective active] for judging [marked for noun of action] the living persons and the having-died persons.”

Well, I did the best I could. I hereby present you with, as far as I know, the first sentences to be written in Wilkins’s language in over three hundred years:

“ya vebuhw ya mi valba baguhs la al da mi ya cwapuhy na cwimbuh la caathuhw. al bad lo i ya vaguhyla: ay mi cwaldo oo baba al da ya”

Here is the word-by-word translation:

is manifest is no existing catalog of the universe no is arbitrary and filled of conjectures. the reason for this is very-simple: we no knowing which thing the universe is.

And here is what this translation means :

It is [a transcendental relation of action belonging to single things pertaining to the knowledge of things, as regards the causing to be known, being the opposite of seeming] that there is no [mixed transcendental relation of discontinued quantity or number concerning the position of things numbered, denoting their order, belonging either to things or to words]

of the [compages or frame of the whole creation]

which is not [having the quality of a spiritual action of the will belonging to the affections of the will in 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.”