A Genealogy of Freudenthal’s Lincos, Part I: Looking up from the ruins of Babel

This article is the first part of a two-part series, aiming to provide a short introduction to the intellectual history and genealogy of Hans Freudenthal’s Lingua Cosmica. This first part aims to describe the many predecessors to Lincos, from the various attempts to create a “philosophical language” in the 17th century to the rise of mathematical logic in the 20th century. From Eden to England In the 17th century, English intellectuals in Oxford found themselves thinking a lot about language. They lived in a Europe dominated by a small number of powerful monarchies and republics. Nationalistic sentiments began to arise, which naturally posed a problem: if a British merchant wanted to trade textiles in a Flemish market with a French counterpart, what language should they all speak? The prestige and power of France in the European chessboard meant that, for a long time, and much to the chagrin of the English, French was seen as the common language of the educated elites all over the continent, essentially being the universal language of diplomacy and court life across Europe. Furthermore, language had been a problem especially for those merchants and navigators who were venturing out to far-off lands to set up what were quickly becoming Europe’s vast colonial empires. Apart from trade, colonial settlement and the exploitation of resources, one major preoccupation for conquistadores, settlers and colonists was introducing (or coercing) Indigenous people to Christianity, which could be quite difficult in the absence of a common tongue. At this point in time, Latin had been the language of choice of learned men for more than a millennium, but it admittedly had many drawbacks. First, as a dead language, Latin was often cumbersome and difficult to adapt to the new discoveries and concepts introduced by the quick advancements of science. Second, Latin had been long associated with the Catholic Church, which was an obvious problem in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation. Third, Latin was not a level playing field: Frenchmen, Italians, and Spaniards have a much easier time learning it, while for Englishmen, Dutchmen, and Poles it can be much more of a struggle. Prominent British philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626), in his Novum Organum (1620), argued in favour of a linguistic reform aimed at dissolving the idola fori, i.e. misunderstandings arising from the vagueness and ambiguity associated with common speech. Another significant influence on the British debate was Czech intellectual Jan Amos Komenský (1592-1670), known in English as John Amos Comenius. Comenius had a rather turbulent life: a committed Moravian Protestant, he was forced to go through a journey of exile across much of Europe. During his many travels, he took a keen interest in language and the way languages are taught and learned, dedicating much of his work to these topics. This would lead him to write some of the earliest and most influential textbooks dedicated to the teaching of languages, such as the Janua Linguarum Reserata (“The Door of Languages Unlocked”, 1631) and the Orbis Pictus (“The World Depicted”, 1658, the earliest widely used children’s textbook with pictures). Comenius was a deep believer in the idea that every man should have access to education, and that universal education, especially when it came to language, could be the key for a general reform of society. Comenius’ ambition was especially evident in a text written in 1641, during a visit to London. The Via Lucis Vestigata & Vestiganda (“The Way of Light, Followed and to be Followed”) is an intellectual manifesto describing a utopian society, unified by a perfect universal government managed by a world council, where a universal language, known as Panglossia, is spoken. Figure 1. Excerpt from an 1882 English language edition of Comenius’ Orbis Pictus (p. 52). Source: Internet Archive. It is therefore no surprise that it was then, in the mid-16th century, and there, in England, that the notion of a priori philosophical languages was invented. The idea of a “perfect” or “universal” language had been explored before, but it was often characterized as an attempt to rediscover or reconstruct the “original” language, the primeval tongue spoken by Adam and Eve in Eden and by all humans before Babel, from which all other languages descended. Biblical Hebrew, of course, was long seen as the prime candidate for such a role. However, after many decades of investigation, scholars were forced to admit that many languages shared very few or no traits with Hebrew, leading to the conclusion that Adam’s language had been irredeemably lost. Undeterred, prominent members of the Royal Society fashioned themselves a role as the Adams of the new age: creators of humanity’s new perfect language. Influenced by (their understanding of) Chinese ideograms and Egyptian hieroglyphs, people such as John Wilkins (1614-1672), George Dalgarno (1616-1687) and Francis Lodwick (1619-1694), among others, set out to design their prototypes of the coming universal language. The one thing all their projects had in common is that they would refer to things using what they called real characters – i.e., phonemes and graphemes which would somehow express the essence of the referred thing, describing exactly what it is. If a word is written in a real character, one would always be able to infer its meaning from the structure of the word itself. This is in contrast with natural languages: the English word “dog”, by itself, tells me nothing about what a dog is. The only way to know that the word “dog” refers to dogs is looking it up in a dictionary or have someone else explain it to me. In other words, the fact that the word “dog” is used to refer to dogs is entirely arbitrary. It was believed that a real character, once constructed, would fix this arbitrariness inherent to natural language. In a philosophical language, i.e. a language based on a real character, the word denoting dogs would somehow, entirely by itself and with no need of prior knowledge, communicate to its user and listener sufficient information to understand what a dog is. The idea was thus to create a system in which every conceivable notion could be univocally associated with a word, its real character, and every real character was univocally associated with a notion, in a way that one could always derive the former from the latter and vice versa. To achieve this goal, every project for a philosophical language of the era had two components: A set of signs denoting basic, primitive notions; A series of compositional rules which could allow the creation of words and sentences starting from the set of primitive notions. The first and foremost task was therefore to create, independently from natural languages, a “grammar of ideas”: a system in which all conceivable concepts could be organised and indexed. Usually, such a grammar was organised with a tree-like structure. Taking Wilkins’ Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668) as our guide, let us say we want to construct a real character for “cat”. First of all we must divide all possible knowledge into primitive notions, which Wilkins, following Aristotelian tradition, called genera. Each genus was assigned a syllable: for example, the syllable Zi was assigned to the genus of beasts (i.e. land-dwelling animals that are not exanguious). All letters denoting beasts, in Wilkins’ philosophical language, thus begin with Zi. Second, the genera were subdivided into numbered lists of differences. Regarding animals, today we may be tempted to use some kind of taxonomical criterion borrowed from evolutionary biology, but no such thing was available in Wilkins’ time.1 The differences within the genus of beasts are thus given by Wilkins as follows: Whole-footed beasts (e.g. horses and mules), Cloven-footed beasts (e.g. sheep and giraffes), Clawed beasts not rapacious (e.g. monkeys and rats), Rapacious beasts of the cat-kind (e.g. cats and tigers, but curiously also bears), Rapacious beasts of the dog-kind (e.g. dogs and foxes, but also armadillos), Oviparous beasts (e.g. crocodiles and serpents).2 Wilkins then used an ordered series of consonants (B, D, G, P, T, C, Z, S, N) to denote each of these differences: in our example (“cat”), a member of the fourth difference is needed, so so the fourth consonant of the series is required. Zip is then the word used to denote all “rapacious beasts of the cat-kind”. Finally, all the species, i.e. individual members, of our differences, were enumerated using another series of letters (this time vowels and diphthongs: α, a, e, i, o, u, y, yi, yu) to denote each one of them. Since the species “cat” appears in fourth place in our list of “rapacious beasts of the cat-kind”, we need the fourth vowel: our desired word for “cat” is thus Zipi.