Early modern Europe’s other real characters

ABSTRACT

Histories of the early modern artificial language movement have focused not unreasonably on a series of ambitious, seventeenth-century language planners who set out to design ‘real characters’ or ‘universal languages’. However, there were also practitioners working in fields like music, mathematics, and chemistry who likewise aspired to develop new, more systematic nomenclatures or notations, often also in the hope that such tools would designate things instead of words. Because histories of the artificial language movement do not usually address such projects or do so only insofar as these projects pertain to arguments about the language planners, their nomenclatures and notations constitute early modern Europe’s ‘other’ real characters. This article surveys three cases in which individuals who are not typically considered representatives of the artificial language movement sought to design newer, more systematic means of communication. It compares and contrasts their approaches with those of well-known language planners, both in terms of how they designed their symbols and what they understood their symbols’ primary function to be. In so doing, this article also proposes to reframe the history of the early modern artificial language movement by situating the more famous language planners within a wider and more varied intellectual milieu.

KEYWORDS:

• Early modern
• real character
• universal language
• mathematical notation
• music notation
• chemical notation

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my fellow contributors to this special issue, David Cram, Kelly McCay, and Petr Pavlas, for their perceptive feedback at several stages of this article’s development. I presented an early version of the argument developed in this article at a meeting of the New York City History of Science Workshop, and I am also grateful for the attendees’ insightful suggestions. Finally, I remain indebted to Pamela Smith and David Lurie for their unflagging encouragement and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Because this passage benefits from an accurate, roughly contemporaneous English translation of Bacon’s original Latin text, I have cited that translation here. All other translations in this article are my own. This passage and all other passages written in early modern English have been normalised according to contemporary standards of spelling, punctuation, and formatting. I have however retained original spellings for titles of works.

² A list of only book-length treatments of the subject from the past century would include but would by no means be limited to: Berger (1946); Rossi (1960); Cornelius (1965); Salmon (1972); Knowlson (1975); Cohen (1977); Slaughter (1982), Pombo (1987); Strasser (1988); Subbiondo (1992); Stillman (1995); Eco (1997); Dalgarno (2001); Maat (2004); and Lewis (2007); and Fleming (2016).

³ Scholars studying the language planners’ proposals often distinguish between schemes designed only to be ‘universal’ characters or languages and those designed to be ‘real’ or ‘philosophical’ ones as well (e.g., Slaughter 1982: 1–3; Lewis 2007: xii). However, this distinction did not particularly concern the early modern people surveyed in this article, so the distinction will not be here enforced.

⁴ Lacking any sources on Hérigone’s early life, historians generally infer that he was Basque, as ‘Hérigone’ appears to be a Gallicisation of the Basque surname now often spelled ‘Hirigoyen’ or ‘Irigoyen’.

⁵ The Cartesian expression (i.e., a² + b² = c²), in which most people today learn the Pythagorean theorem, had not yet been developed. Furthermore, during the early modern period, it was not entirely clear whether or to what extent algebraic tools ought to be used in presenting elementary geometry.

⁶ For more on the novelty of Hérigone’s new method of demonstration, see: Descotes (2006); Massa-Esteve (2008); Massa-Esteve Maria (2010); and Mellado-Romero (2022).

⁷ Given that authors did not necessarily design their own title pages, it is uncertain whether Hérigone, Hérigone’s publisher, Henry le Gras, or someone else working in the latter’s printing house, settled on this characterisation.

⁸ For more on Salmon’s life and the controversy over his Essay, see: Wardhaugh, (2013a) and (2013). For further discussion of Salmon’s proposal as a ‘universal language’, see: Lawrence (1993).

⁹ The universal character that Salmon refers to as having been ‘late … invented’ is likely Wilkins’ real character, which had been published only four years prior in 1668. Nevertheless, although he refers to proposals for ‘universal characters’ on several occasions, he does not specifically mention the language planners by name.

¹⁰ For more on the history of eighteenth-century efforts to reform chemical nomenclature, the plan of the Méthode de nomenclature chimique, and its reception, see: Crosland (1962); Bensaude-Vincent and Abbri (1995); and Lefèvre (2018).

¹¹ The suffix -ate in the new nomenclature indicated, among other things, the presence of oxygen.

¹² Guyton et al. did not then recognise the existence of acids that do not contain oxygen (e.g., hydrochloric acid).

¹³ James St. John published an English translation of the Méthode in 1788, which is useful for studying the transmission and reception of Lavoisier et al’.s ideas. However, because St. John insinuated his own views into his translation too liberally at times, for this article, I have opted to translate passages from the Méthode myself.

¹⁴ It bears mention that early modern claims to the lack of systematicity in older notations or languages often ignored the systematic features that those notations sometimes did possess. Such oversight was sometimes unintended, sometimes strategic, but always rhetorically useful.

¹⁵ Hassenfratz and Adet also used letters from the names for organic compounds to distinguish their symbols, as, at the time, they could not be distinguished further according to composition.

¹⁶ See Crosland (1962) and O’Neil (2021).

Additional information

Funding

This article is based in part on research supported by the Social Sciences Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Science Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Sean O’Neil

Sean O’Neil is a historian of science and early modern Europe with a particular research focus on information visualization. He is currently a Teaching Assistant Professor in and the Assistant Director of the Core Humanities Program at the University of Nevada, Reno. His book-in-progress is titled The Art of Signs: Symbolic Notation and Visual Thinking in Early Modern Europe. Email: [email protected].