The search for a priori philosophic languages and the impassioned debates and rejections they inspired are evidenced by those pages in Gulliver’s Travels where Swift imagines an assembly of professors bent on improving the language of their country. The first project, you will recall, was to abbreviate speech, reducing all polysyllables to monosyllables and eliminating verbs and participles. The second tended to abolish all words completely, because it was quite possible to communicate by displaying things (a difficult project because the so-called speakers would be obliged to carry with them a sack containing all the objects they planned to mention).
But even earlier the subject of the philosophic language had rightfully entered the literary genre of seventeenth-century utopias. For that matter, already in the Basel edition (1518) of More’s Utopia, published by Pieter Gilles, there was an illustration with writing in the language of that ideal island; Godwin spoke of the possible language of the Selenites in his Man in the Moone (1638); and Cyrano de Bergerac mentioned other-planetary languages on several occasions, both in Les estats et les empires de la lune (1657) and Les estats et les empires du soleil (1662).
Still, if we want two models of language that echo the a priori philosophical language of the Utopians, we must turn to two novels narrating journeys in the Austral Land, La Terre australe connue (1676), by Gabriel de Foigny, and L’Histoire des Sevarambes (1677–1679), by Denis Vairasse. Here, I will delve only into the first, which to me seems particularly instructive, because, as often happens with good caricatures, the parodistic deformation reveals some essential features of the caricatured object.
La Terre australe connue is naturally a work of the imagination. In distant, unknown lands an ideal community is supposedly discovered. In this ideal community the language, too, is ideal, and it is interesting to remark that Foigny writes in 1676, after the three significant a priori philosophic language projects have appeared: Lodwick’s Common Writing (1647), Dalgarno’s Ars Signorum (1661), and Wilkins’s Essay towards a Real Character (1668).
Foigny’s exposition, precisely because it is incomplete and a burlesque, takes up only a few pages of his ninth chapter, rather than the 500 (in folio!) of Wilkins’s, the most voluminous and complete of all the projects of that century. Yet is worth taking Foigny’s into consideration because, for all its terseness, it illustrates the advantages and limitations of a philosophic language. It reveals and magnifies—as only a parody can—the flaws of its models, but, as they are magnified, the better we are able to distinguish them.
In order to better understand Foigny it is useful to refer to Figure 11.1, where I try to extrapolate from his text a sort of Austral dictionary, along with some grammatical rules. Because the author is often reticent, I have inferred some rules from examples, while others remain unspecific (thus, for example, of thirty-six accidentals, I have been unable to reconstruct only eighteen).
Foigny’s Austral inhabitants,
to express their thoughts, employ three modes, all used in Europe: signs, voice, and writing. Signs are very familiar to them, and I have noticed that they spend many hours together without speaking in any other way, because they are ruled by this great principle: “that it is useless to employ several ways of action, when one can act with few.”
Figure 11.1
So they speak only when it is necessary to express a long series of propositions. All their words are monosyllabic, and their conjugations follow the same criterion. For example, af means “to love”; the present is la, pa, ma; I love, thou lovest, he loves; lla, ppa, mma; we love, you love, they love. They possess only one past tense, which we call the perfect: lga, pga, mga, I have loved, thou hast loved, etc.; llga, ppga, mmga, we have loved, etc. The future lda, pda, mda, I will love, etc., llda, ppda, mmda, we will love, etc. “To work,” in the Austral language, is uf: lu, pu, mu, I work, thou workest, etc.; lgu, pgu, ragu, I have worked, etc.
They have no declensions, no article, and very few words. They express simple things with a single vowel and compound things through vowels that indicate the chief simple bodies that make up those compounds. They know only five simple bodies, of which the first and most noble is fire, which they express with a; then there is air, indicated with e; the third is salt, indicated with o; the fourth, water, which they call i; and the fifth, earth, which they define as u.
As differentiating principle they employ the consonants, which are far more numerous than those of the Europeans. Each consonant denotes a quality peculiar to the things expressed by the vowels, thus b means clear; c, hot; d, unpleasant; f, dry, etc. Following these rules, they form words so well that, listening to them, you understand immediately the nature and the content of what they signify. They call the stars Aeb, a word that indicates their compound of fire and air, united to clarity. They call the sun Aab, birds are Oef, sign of their solidity and their aeriform and dry matter. Man is called Uel, which indicates his substance, partly aerial, partly terrestrial, accompanied by wetness. And so it is with other things. The advantage of this way of speaking is that you become philosophers, learning the prime elements, and in this country, nothing can be named without explaining at the same time its nature, which would seem miraculous to those unaware of the secret that they use to this end.
If their way of speech is so admirable, even more so is their writing … and though to us it seems very difficult to decipher them, custom makes the practice very simple.1
Instructions in the manner of writing follow; here vowels are indicated with dots marked in different positions, while the thirty-six consonants of the alphabet are little strokes that surround the dots and are recognized by their angles. Foigny mentions these graphic devices obviously making fun of similarly complicated systems, such as, for example, Joachim Becher’s Character pro notia linguarum universalis (1661), which proposes a form of notation capable of completely muddling the reader’s ideas. He then continues, citing composites that can be achieved:
For example: eb, clear air; ic, hot water; ix, cold water; ul, damp earth; af, dry fire; es, white air.… There are another eighteen or nineteen, but in Europe we have no consonants corresponding to them.
The more you consider this way of writing, the more you will discover secrets worthy of admiration: b means clear; c hot; x cold; l wet; f dry; n black; t green; d nasty; p sweet; q pleasant; r bitter; m desirable; g bad; z high; h low; j red; a joined with i, calm. The moment a word is spoken, they know the nature of what it denotes: to indicate a sweet and desirable apple, they write ipm; nasty and unpleasant fruit is ind. I cannot explain all the other secrets that they understand and reveal in their letters.