Scientists and phil osophers worried about the abandonment of the lingua franca and the corresponding Babelization of science in the seven- teenth century, but they were mostly responsible for their own predicament. When Latin was still widely used in law, religion, and diplomacy, natural philosophers came to believe that the language was unfit to keep pace with advances in science and technology. A dead language, Latin was cumber- some, ridden with irregularities, ambiguities, redundancies, and syntactical complexities. It also lacked the necessary richness, logicality, and precision that natural philosophers demanded. For these reasons, vernaculars took the lead in the scientific world. And with the vernaculars came the Babelization of science.7
To cope with Babelization, some proposed to give Latin a last chance and translate the main scientific works into this language. Thus, Descartes' bene- factor, the friar and mathematician Mersenne, conceived of an academy in every country entrusted with this task, somewhat akin to the Toledo School of Translators in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.8 But these academies never came to be. Instead, scientific journals emerged. They tried to keep read- ers abreast of scientific progress by translating and publishing articles and book reviews from one vernacular into another. The French Journal de Sga- vans, established in 1665 under the sponsorship of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, was the first of its kind, and set a good example for other countries.9
Or, scholars could become multilingual, but this was deemed impractical. It would have required a reform of higher education, which still concentrated on instruction in classical languages. Also, languages were conceived in the seventeenth century as mere instruments for communication, rather than repositories of cultures or worldviews. Learning another language was con- sidered tantamount to tedious memorization of new words and grammatical rules. Progress in the study of nature required a concentration on nature it- self, rather than on the many ways different people arbitrarily referred to the same natural phenomena. Time and effort could be most efficiently invested in the improvement of the description or explanation of nature, not on its linguistic replication. Romanticism was still distant, and rather than view language diversity as a token of the endurance and creativity of the human race, scholars and the literati considered it a curse.
A third solution, championed by some of the most powerful minds of the era, was to invent a new language, more rational and suitable for communi- cation than Latin or existing vernaculars. That such a language could come to exist was already suggested in the utopian literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In his Utopia, originally published in 1516 in Latin, Thomas More had inhabitants speak a language that was rich, precise, per- fect, and pleasant to the ear. Jonathan Swift's Lilliputians in Gulliver's Trav- els used a language that was so well constructed and easy to learn that Gulliver could converse with the natives in three months.
Renewed interest in Chinese script reinforced the feasibility of a new lan- guage. Contemporaries knew that, although Chinese people spoke different languages, they could communicate in writing. It would be useful to have a similar script for Europeans. This was Francis Bacon's (1561-1626) proposaclass="underline" a language based on a system of "real characters," which conveyed the real essence of things and concepts, would solve the problem of international com- munication. A system of real characters would help solve another problem. Once we discovered, enumerated, and arranged all the basic, irreducible concepts that convey the essence of physical and non-physical phenomena, we could achieve an unequivocal transmission of meaning. A language of real characters would be the antithesis of natural languages, which were redundant, deliberately ambiguous, and full of inconsistencies and mean- ingless terms. By helping to distinguish between real and imaginary concepts— invented for the purpose of extending and elaborating futile theological or philosophical disputes—a language of real characters would accelerate knowledge.
There were others, however, who thought that a language based on real characters was out of the question. Such a language, argued Descartes, would require a previous and complete knowledge of the components of the world, a necessary prerequisite to differentiating between real and unreal charac- ters. In the absence of that knowledge, and without criteria to distinguish be- tween the irreducible or real and the not so real things, the whole project was inconceivable.
Despite Descartes' warning, more enthusiastic people got down to work and crafted artificial languages based on real characters. The most influen- tial of them came from members and friends of the Royal Society, such as George Dalgarno (1626-1687) and John Wilkins (1614-1672). Isaac Newton also outlined an international language, but, as with much of his writing, he did not publish his ideas.10 Dalgarno's proposal came first, with his Ars Sig- norum (1661). He divided physical experience into seventeen irreducible cat- egories, each denoted by a letter. Second and third letters conveyed further subdivisions of those categories. For example, the natural world was subdi- vided between animate and inanimate things. The former included plants or animals. Animals fell into the categories of aquatic, aerial, or terrestrial. Dal- garno placed human beings in a different category and then differentiated between terrestrial creatures with a cloven hoof and a single hoof, like a horse or "nnkv," in Dalgarno's vocabulary. Word order rules denoted when a word was a noun, an adjective, or an adverb, and special suffixes indicated verb tenses.
Wilkins's proposal resembled that of Dalgarno, his erstwhile collabora- tor. The Royal Society, which he helped to establish, had commissioned his work. In his Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668), Wilkins enlarged the number of irreducible categories to forty and increased the number of subdivisions. Wilkins also paid more attention to grammar, which he made a little more complex. Like Dalgarno's, Wilkins's language could be spoken. He published an alphabetical dictionary that first distinguished various meanings of English words to later refer to them by their exact location on the tables of real characters.
Significantly, this endeavor provided the basic infrastructure for a the- saurus; namely, a list of words, arranged by categories, distinguished by their meaning. In fact, Peter Roget's Thesaurus, first published in 1852, is a spinoff of these artificial language projects.
Leibniz surpassed Dalgarno and Wilkins, ambitious though they were, in his dreams about the content and goal of an artificial language. Leibniz aspired to curb the number of words and give them the precise and unequiv- ocal meaning that scholarly exchange and international communication demanded, but he had more ambitious ideas about the ultimate goal of an artificial language. In his youth, Leibniz had tried to create a set of real char- acters, but he gave up, since there was no way to be certain that things or con- cepts deconstructed could not be fractured yet further. This was a quite natural concern for the discoverer of infinitesimal calculus. Rather than a language based on real characters, intended to univocally represent meaning, he imag- ined one whose characters, or "primitives," represented basic reasoning op- erations. Combined in an algebraic fashion, this language of primitives, advanced for ease of calculations, would directly adjudicate between truth and falsity. Leibniz envisioned the construction of a logical language, an al- gebra of thought processes that could augment our reasoning capacities. (A similar research program emerged in the early twentieth century under the name of symbolic logic, which engaged Bertrand Russell, Couturat, and Peano, among others. We meet them later.)11