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ABSTRACT
The aim of this article is to re-examine the intellectual history of a principle central to seventeenth-century universal language projects. We call this principle ‘word as definition’. It is the requirement that every word in the dictionary of a new language should already be, by its shape, a definition of what it denotes: the root of the word would express the proximate genus and the affixes the specific difference. In Comenius, we find it first formulated in the Via lucis and later elaborated in the Panglottia manuscript. Besides the medieval and early modern mystical traditions, Johann Heinrich Bisterfeld and Marin Mersenne are key figures in the process of its emergence. In this respect, Comenius plays a role in the link between the ‘continental’ and the British approach to the problem of language reform.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 This article was written as part of the grant project LL 2320 ‘The Origins of Modern Encyclopaedism: Launching Evolutionary Metaphorology’ (TOME) supported by the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports and coordinated by the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague.
2 This is an important addition to Andreas Gardt’s note that ‘Comenius does not specify the notion of system’ (Gardt Citation1994, 225); he obviously does not feel any need to do so because the timplerian-keckermannian notion of system is in the seventeenth-century Reformed scholasticism so well established that the post-Ramist eclectics like Comenius may use it quite intuitively, without further reflection. For the conceptual history of ‘system’, see also Heßbrüggen-Walter (Citation2018); Hotson (Citation2020): ix et passim.
3 The principle illustrated by the last sentence is highly reminiscent of the full-fledged method applied to Hebrew in Alphabeti vere naturalis brevissima delineatio (1667) by Francis Mercury van Helmont (1614–1698).
4 Later, this idea will be typical of Leibniz’ project of philosophical language (Maat Citation2004, 267–390), but Leibniz considers algebra to be the ‘science of quantities’ only, i.e. subordinate to (and thus contained within) combinatorics, which is the ‘science of qualities’.
5 For a detailed discussion, see Mulsow (Citation2009).
6 There was a vast discussion on that topic in Early Modern Age as well as across European history (Borst Citation1957–1963).
7 While for the seventeenth-century ‘orthodox’ positions on universal language who aim at a priori philosophical languages (Dalgarno, Wilkins, et al.), the enumeration of common notions is a presupposition of the practicability of their lexical scheme, for ‘sceptical’ positions, the enumeration of common notions – if this expression makes sense at all – is not feasible (Ray, Boyle, at al.). Furthermore, the third and perhaps most interesting camp – the ‘radical’ position on universal language (Ward, Wallis, et al.) – in fact ‘believed that the invention of a new universal language (whether practicable or not) was the wrong way to set about achieving the more fundamental goals that the philosophically inclined projectors were aiming at’ (Cram Citation1994, 5). According to the ‘radical’ party, one of these more fundamental goals was to reduce the vast number of mental objects to a comparatively small number of common notions, for the purposes of ‘severe and strict reasoning’, as Andrew Paschall (1631–1696) put it, and not in order to create a new language (Cram Citation1994, 10).
8 Of course, this is a well-known biblical locus, widespread in early modernity, although apocryphal in the Protestant understanding. See Wisdom 11:20.
9 Adam Samuel Hartmann (1627–1691) was a bishop of the Unity of Brethren and Comenius’ collaborator in exile.
10 Rhodri Lewis, in his analysis of the Ground-Work (1652) of Francis Lodwick (1619–1694), notes that his lexicon of the universal language was intended to work by ‘ … apportioning properly defined vowel sounds to all the radical words, with “distinctionall additions” being made to these in the form of consonants to indicate the place of the word within the lexicon, the whole being an easily effable combination of radical words (vowels) and distinctions (consonants)’ (Lewis Citation2007, 61). Vlasta T. Miškovská-Kozáková comments the Ground-Work directly in relation to Comenius: ‘Lodwick enumerates in his introductory essay the disadvantages of existing languages and some of his objections are reminiscent of Comenius: there are too many different verb forms and too many differences in the inflection of nouns; in the derivation there is a bewildering variety of suffixes. Anomalies, so common in the existing languages, make the application of rules problematic. The same graphic symbols for different sounds often obscure the relationships between languages: the symbols should mean the same things everywhere, as digits do. … it remains to consider whether we have an explanation for Comenius’ and Lodwick’s similar view of the verb as the vehicle of agency, and thus a basis of the linguistic system. We have not an explanation’ (Miškovská-Kozáková Citation1974, 99–101).
11 For a useful overview of Comenius’ relation to the seventeenth-century language movement in England, see Přívratská (Citation1988).
12 In fact, they represent morphemes only.
13 Mersenne could not have been easily accused of irrationality and fantasising; at that time, he was already a highly respected scholar throughout Europe.
14 Panglottia (written 1658–1661) and its appendix Novae harmonicae lingvae tentamen primum (written probably in 1665), were salvaged for modern scholarship by Dmitrij Čiževskij (1894–1977), Ukrainian-German Slavist, who discovered them – together with the rest of Comenius’ huge but unfinished encyclopaedical work De rerum humanarum emendatione consultatio catholica – in Halle/Saale in the 1930s. The work was first published in 1966.
15 ‘Wilkinsii Polygraphia universalis. Comenii Polyglottis. Walisii Steganographia’.
16 ‘Adde conceptus Wilkinsii et Comenii de Panglottide seu lingua universali’.
17 Faceted classification is a method of information science, by which entities are not classified into fixed hierarchical taxonomy, such as the Porphyrian tree, but can be items subordinate to multiple categories at the same time.
18 If the genera were disjunct and at the same time two or more radical words designating them were joined together to form a related word, such a word would signify nothing, which Comenius fundamentally rejects.
19 Comenius illustrates the principle by two mathematical ratios. The first one is expanding a fraction: a : b = (a ⋅ n) : (b ⋅ n). The second one is multiplying the square of a fraction by two: ((a : b)2)2 = (a2 : b2)2 = a2+2 : b2+2
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Petr Pavlas
Petr Pavlas is a senior researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He has published three monographs and several studies on Comenius, the metaphorics of the book, and the idea of a perfect language. He is presently researching early modern encylopaedism and evolution of cognitive metaphors.