27 This healing can only be worked, by a universal and artificial language capable, by the conciseness and abundance of its expression, of involving the excellencies of every other; for in the passage of more than three millenia each language hath received so distinct a character, from the national genius of the many excellent spirits who have spoken and written therein, that it is now not possible to transliterate a profound truth from one speech to another, without somewhat changing the originarie sense: thus the philosophy of the Greek, which is the clearest language for subtile thought, loses as much by being expressed in Latin, the best language for distinct curt commandments, as in modern Italian, which is best for mellifluent courtierlike urbanity.
28 Only a multiverbal logopandocy can express without distorting the Dialogues of Plato, Laws of Justinian, Romances of Ariosto, and what is still to be retrieved from the languages of East and West Indians, the Civil Aztecs, Toltecs, Japaneses and Chineses.
29 I have devized this new language.
30 If widely adopted it will speed the traffick of human thought as greatly as modern navigation hath speeded traffick in commodities; for like the mercantile fleet which brings the potato, coffee, pepper, ginger, sugar and tobacco from the Americas to Europe and the Orient, and Oriental silks, muslins, tea and opium to the Americas and Europe, and European clocks, printing presses and gunpowder to everywhere, my new speech will carry the Christian message of salvation with the new European learning into pagan and heathen nations, while instructing us in the arts and sciences whereby these nations have also reconciled themselves to the Loving Wisdom of God and His Mighty Depute, Nature.
31 And truly, it is a harmonious dictat of Jehovus (he bit his lip, God, I swiftly added) that an inhabiter of Brittain should divize this language, for these Islands, which to Greeks were the last land and Ultima Thule before the arctick Pole, and to Romans an unruly colony on the verge of intransitive Ocean, is now the amphitheatrickal centre and meridial point between the cradeling paradise of mankind in the East, and those new Atlantises, some not found or founded yet, which await us in the West.
32 He aroze and paced the chamber before saying, that he himself was too inchanted by exotick learning not to be sympathically stirred by my over-splendid esteem of it, but he must open his heart to me with the words of Ecclesiastes, the preacher: For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. Which truth is also to be evinced trifold from the oldest book of Holy Writ, from the life of individual men, and from universal history.
33 Genesis shows the Satanic snake flattering our first mother with falsely gorgeous hopes until, by the filching of an apple and breaking of a law, sin, sadness and new knowledge all enter the world together, the fall of man being a fall into knowledge of his own wilful division from Goodness.
34 Individual men are condemned to repeat this tragedy, for when suckling at the breast they will never be so purely happy again, as is testified by their blissful faces and tiny erected penes.
35 Universal history repeats this tragedy: the most notorious modern instance (which he viewed less complacently than myself) being Don Conquistadore’s disclosure that the world held two more continents than the ancients knew, which uncovery brought slaughter, slavery and the Spanish inquisition to several proud nations; and to Europe so much silver and gold that the common currency hath ever since lost value, thus placing more and more oeconomies in the hands of usurors, and bringing also to Europe that disease of the generative root which makes men rot and bleed at the centre of their most poignant desires and pleasures.
36 He ended by saying, I am no friend of ignorance, but concur with Christ and Socrates in condemning as vainglory all knowledge that does not encourage right conduct, and since a language is but an instrument conveying unto us things good to be known, should a great linguist pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet if he have not studied the solid things in them, as well as the words and lexicons, he is less truly learned than a yeoman or tradesman competently wise in his mother dialect only.
37 To this I responded courteously, that what he said was correct: words are indeed the instruments by which men denote things, but in being so used they become also the instruments by which we discover, and shape, and share our passions.
38 It follows from this, that a bad man cannot describe his reasons in good language without betraying himself.
39 It is inexactness of signification which permits false rhetoric to confuse causes with effects, accidents with intentions, abstracts with particulars, thereby provoking (to the corrupt rhetorician’s advantage) misled passions in the heart of the malinformed hearer, who may also pass these wrong passions to others by parroting the ear-catching phrase whereby he first received them.
40 My new speech cannot be abused in this way; liars, using it grammatically, will at once contradict themselves or place within the listener’s head ample evidence for their own speedy undoing; the greedy and vicious may not disguise their passions in it, and will be compelled to dissemble their vices under cloud of unsocial dumbness.
41 As for the variedly virtuous, the vocabulary of each will fluctuate to exactly fill the altering bounds of their experiential knowledge, growing more colourful or more austere as their passions wax or wane, but each passion clearly correlated by a thoughtword to the unique state and thing which is its cause and aim.
42 Even fools will talk wisely in my new language for they will lack the materials to do otherwise.
43 He stared at me then asked sharply how such a language was devized?
44 By grammatical logarithms, said I, for each letter in my alphabet of twenty-five consonants and ten vowels, hath the value of a number linking it to a class of things (in the case of the consonants) or class of actions (in the case of the vowels).
45 The student of my language is taught very few and simple words, and these as example only, for he is given (to be metaphorickal) the bricks wherewith any word he needs may be builded, besides a grammar by which these words may be swiftly presented to the understanding of an instructed fellow.
46 This allows an educated man to bestow upon anything he encounters in the universe a name entirely different from any other, yet so intelligible that a well taught child of ten years can, from that name alone, even if it signifies a thing of which the child hath had no previous knowledge, imagine at once the form, colour, material, weight, bigness, usefulness or danger of the signified thing, and conceive it so accurately that, if the thing be artificial, the child can at once construct an accurate replica, provided only that he hath possession and mastery of the requisite tools.
47 This significant nomenclature would hugely benefit the art of wars; for if (as is the French custom) a new recruit received a nom de guerre, and it were in my new diction, so short a name as Kohudlitex or Palipugisk, whispered to a commander at a review of troops, would let him know a soldier’s rank, regiment, age, birthplace, ancestry and character, and inable him to address that man with that familiarity which inspireth true loyaltie and devotion, when manifested by the nobility toward uttered in such nonsounding things as silence, or tears.