In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [9]
He claimed to have completed a full description of his language, but the manuscript pages had been destroyed when they were appropriated for “posterior uses” by the opposing army after he was taken prisoner at the battle of Worcester. Seven pages from the preface, however, were rescued from under a pile of dead men in the muddy street (thus, “gold out of dung”).
Urquhart was such a shockingly self-aggrandizing hack that some scholars have concluded that he must have been joking. He had earlier published a genealogy of his family, placing himself 153rd in line from Adam, and a book on mathematics, which an “admirer” (who happens to use words like doxologetick and philomathets) said explained the subject in so clear and poetic a manner that it conferred the ability to solve any trigonometry problem, no matter how difficult, “as if it were a knowledge meerly infused from above, and revealed by the peculiar inspiration of some favourable Angel.”
The book in question begins:
Every circle is divided into three hundred and sixty parts, called degrees, whereof each one is sexagesimated, subsexagesimated, resubsexagesimated, and biresubsexagesimated.
Ah, the voices of angels. Though Urquhart did have a sense of humor (in fact, he died from laughing too hard at the news that Charles II had been restored to the throne), he was no satirist. If you take the time to beat your way through his suffocating prose, you will find quite earnest (and humorless) proposals.
It is easy to mistake his universal language proposal for satire because it appeared at a time when such proposals were the latest thing. Seventeenth-century philosophers and scientists were complaining that language obscured thinking, that words got in the way of understanding things. They believed that concepts were clear and universal, but language was ambiguous and unsystematic. A new kind of rational language was needed, one where words perfectly expressed concepts. These ideas were later satirized by Swift in Gulliver's Travels, when Gulliver visits the “grand academy of Lagado” and learns of its “scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever.” Since “words are only names for things,” people simply carry around all the things they might need to refer to and produce them from their pockets as necessary.
Gulliver observes especially learned men “almost sinking under the weight of their packs, like pedlars among us; who, when they met in the streets, would lay down their loads, open their sacks, and hold conversation for an hour together: then put up their implements, help each other to resume their burthens, and take their leave.”
This scenario illustrates a major problem with the rational language idea. How many “things” do you need in order to communicate? The number of concepts is huge, if not infinite. If you want each word in your language to perfectly express one concept, you need so many words that it will be impossible for anyone to learn them all.
But maybe there was a way around this problem. After all, by learning a few basic numbers and a system for putting them together, we can count to infinity. Couldn't the same be done for language? Couldn't we derive everything through a sort of mathematics of concepts?
This was a tremendously exciting idea at the time. In the seventeenth century, mathematical notation was changing everything. Before then, through thousands of years of mathematical developments, there was no plus sign, no minus sign, no symbol for multiplication or square root, no variables, no equations. The concepts behind these notational devices were understood