the capacity, without divine intervention, to understand one another
better by joining together not over land, not over a tower, but over
language. (Even the people Israel, he pointed out on numerous
occasions, were now among the scattered, and if they were going to
claim any authentic, modern identity, they, too, needed to take the
matter of language into their own hands.) Perhaps the language of
Adam was given by God, but the language that would rescue Adam’s
and Eve’s heirs from their worst impulses would be a very human
thing.
2. West of Babel
Zamenhof’s radically humanist revision of the “curse” of Babel sets
him apart from the history of language invention in Western
Europe, where Babel’s curse was taken to be the doom of linguistic
difference. To reverse this “curse” was not only to dream of
language which was divine and perfect; it was also to dream of
human beings capable of perfect understanding—beings who are
different from us.
The most audacious of those who sought to reverse the “curse” of
Babel yearned for God’s own language, for words empowered to
speak the universe into being. Others imagined secret, esoteric
languages that were the preserve of initiates: kabbalistic acrostics,
numerology, and anagrams; the gnostic “magic languages” of
Paracelsus and the Rosicrucians; the divine “signatures” perceived in
nature by the seventeenth-century German mystic Jacob Boehme.
Still others invented devices, symbols, and meta-languages designed
to mediate between human beings and the words they failed to
grasp. Umberto Eco’s The Search for the Perfect Language surveys a
millennium of such inventions, among them that of Ramon Llull (ca.
1230–1315), a Franciscan who asked himself what language might
best propound the truth of Scripture to infidels. 1 Starting with
logical propositions rather than glyphs and words, Llull selected
nine letters and four figures, combined them into questions,
compounded questions into subjects, and multiplied subjects into
propositions. Using only these elements and the engine of
combination, Llull’s Ars Magna purported to generate 1,680 logical
propositions, a repertoire from which one might choose a few key
points to which an infidel would, without translation, necessarily
consent. Such propositions would have a kind of liquidity from
culture to culture, on which the truth could skip like a stone. By
“truth,” of course, Llull meant his truth, not the infidel’s. That Llull
died at the hands of the Saracens may suggest that something more
than revelation was lost in translation.
In the early modern period, language needed to do more than
propound truths; it needed to translate a host of others to European
interlopers in Asia, Africa, and the Americas—merchants and
governors as well as missionaries. Llull’s Saracen “infidel” was
displaced by the Chinese, Hindus, Native Americans, and Africans.
Polyglot Bibles became the model for massive polyglot dictionaries
called polygraphies. The frontispiece of Cave Beck’s Universal
Character of 1657 features a table around which three men in various
national costumes are seated: a Dutch burgher, a mustachioed and
turbaned Indian, and an African in a toga. On the right stands a
native of the New World in a grass skirt and a Carmen Miranda–
esque headpiece, who salutes in the universal sign for “Hey, no
problem!” His long spear, its tip resting idly on the floor, is
conspicuously flaccid, to assure us that he’s checked his aggression at
the door.
Meanwhile, the printing press, less than a century after its
invention, scattered projects and programs for language reform all
over Europe, many of which had germinated in newly emerging
scientific societies. After the restoration of the British monarchy in
1660, several members of the new “Royal Society of London for the
Improvement of Natural Knowledge” were spurred to invention by
the legacy of Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626). Bacon’s profound
intuition, as he put it in The Advancement and Proficience of Learning
(1605), was that “words are the footsteps of reason”—written, not
spoken, words. Bacon held that written words could do more than
simply refer to speech; they could refer directly to thought itself.
Though Zamenhof was an autodidact when it came to philosophy
and linguistics, his invention of roots that referred to ideas rather
than words is remarkably consonant with Bacon’s call for the
invention of “real characters.”
Thus with Bacon, philosophical rather than divine truth became
the desideratum of language projects. Invoking Chinese ideograms,
arbitrary signs that “expresse neither Letters, nor Words, but Things,
and Notions,” Bacon imagined characters that would represent
thoughts with a philosophical rigor exceeding that of words.
Moreover, Bacon believed Chinese characters to be universally
legible among the peoples of Asia. Not only would “real characters”
mean the same thing to one Briton and her neighbor; they would
also be legible to people speaking different tongues—in fact, to all
peoples and nations. The use of “real characters,” in short, would
grant Europe what Bacon believed Asia already had: a way of
communicating without resort to translation, with characters that
could be entrusted to convey thought itself. What Bacon didn’t
realize was that legibility across cultures did not imply that
characters were understood identically among cultures. As soon as
characters were interpreted as words, their philosophical purity was
compromised.
Such was the problem with the boldest attempt to answer Bacon’s
call, that of John Wilkins (1614–1672), the first secretary of the
Royal Society (and Oliver Cromwell’s brother-in-law). Wilkins was a
man of large ambitions, undertaking to develop a comprehensive,
“pansophic” system of knowledge. Devoting five years to his
pansophic obsession, Wilkins tried to tabulate all knowledge in the
form of concept trees split by distinctions based on sensory data. In
the case of animals, his taxonomies are recondite but effective; but
to define tickling via rigorous concept trees was another story.
Tickling, in Wilkins’s view, was a titillation (rather than a piercing)
entailing “dissipation of the spirits in the softer parts by a light
touch” (as opposed to “distention or compression of parts” or
“obstruction in nerves or muscles”), and which while light is
nonetheless painful (unlike actions that “satisfy appetites”), and
which is a corporeal action addressed to “sensitive bodies” (as
opposed to “vegetative” or “rational” ones), an action absolute
(rather than relative) and peculiar to living creatures (as opposed to
an action imitative of the gestures of creatures).
In Wilkins’s Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical
Language—a tome measuring two feet by one foot—“real characters”
finally appear in Section III. Here Wilkins rendered in strange