by Arika Okrent
Upright walking does not work, because, while it is a pretty distinguishing characteristic of man, it is not the distinguishing characteristic. Apes walk pretty upright, and even a dog can walk upright if properly motivated. And as for the featherless-biped idea, Diogenes the Cynic responded to it by brandishing a plucked chicken and proclaiming, “Behold, Plato’s man!” A description of man that lets you pick out man as opposed to something else is dependent not so much on the characteristics man has as on the characteristic that everything else does not have.
And that characteristic, it was commonly supposed, was the capacity to reason. Naturally, the people who were concerned with big questions like the essential nature of man—the philosophers—held this characteristic in high regard. After all, it was the tool of their trade. So they may have failed to focus on other human characteristics that are arguably just as distinguishing. Why is man not the vengeful animal or, in the words of G. K. Chesterton, “the animal who makes dogmas” or, in the words of Ambrose Bierce, the “animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be”?
Depends on what’s important in your philosophy. Descartes thought the philosophical language idea was doomed because it required you to first figure out the true philosophy. Wilkins thought the philosophical language idea was possible because all you needed was a pretty good philosophy. Though he aimed to make his system “exactly suited to the nature of things,” he acknowledged that it fell short. He didn’t know the Truth, but he had some not completely unreasonable opinions about it. They were, however, still opinions, and therefore informed by his own idiosyncratic viewpoint and the particular preoccupations of the times he lived in. Had he been younger or older when he crafted his tables (he was in his early fifties when he finished), he may not have categorized the age “betwixt the 50th and 60th year” as the “most perfect for the Mind … the Age of Wisdom.” Had he not lived in the seventeenth century, he may not have categorized “witchcraft” under judicial relations > capital crimes. Had he not lived in England, he may not have included a whole category of terms for ship rigging. The parrel, jeers, and buntline all get their rightful places in the universe of Wilkins.
So, to sum up the progression from “let’s make a math for language” to “let’s make a hierarchy of the universe”:
1. To make a math for language, you need to know what the basic units of meaning are, and how we compute more complicated concepts out of them.
2. To figure both of these things out, you need an idea of how concepts break down into smaller concepts.
3. To break down the concepts, you need a satisfactory definition for those concepts; you have to know what things are.
4. In order to know what something is, you have to distinguish it from everything it is not.
5. Because you have to distinguish it from everything, you have to include everything in your system. So there you are, crafting your six-hundred-page table of the universe.
Do you get the sense that each step in this progression doesn’t necessarily follow from the last one? So did George Dalgarno. He was a Scottish schoolmaster of humble means who moved to Oxford in 1657 in order to start a school. After attending a demonstration of a new type of shorthand that could express phrases in “a more compendious way than any I had seen,” he was inspired to “advance it a step further.” In the process of working out how to stuff the most meaning into the fewest possible symbols, he realized that such a system could be used not just as a shorthand for English but as a universal writing that could be read off into any language. He was “struck with such a complicated passion of admiration, fear, hope and joy” at this idea that he “had not one houres natural rest for the 3 following nights together.”
His idea wasn’t as original as he thought. Quite a few scholars of the time had become preoccupied with developing a “real character.” This was the term used by the philosopher Francis Bacon to describe Chinese writing—it was “real” in that the symbols represented not sounds, or words, but ideas. Traveling missionaries of the previous century had noted that people who spoke mutually incomprehensible languages—Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Vietnamese—could understand each other in writing. They got the impression that Chinese characters by-passed language entirely, and went right to the heart of the matter. This impression was mistaken (we will discuss how Chinese characters do work in chapter 15), but it encouraged a general optimistic excitement about the possibility of a universal real character.
Dalgarno was a nobody in Oxford, but it so happened that the only person he knew there, an old school friend, was in good with the vice-chancellor of the university. Dalgarno’s work was read and passed around, and soon he found himself in the company of the most eminent scholars in town, a stroke of luck at which he was “overjoyed.” One of these scholars was Wilkins, who had not yet begun to work on his own universal character.
Dalgarno’s system provided a list of 935 “radicals”—the primitive concepts he judged necessary for effective communication— and a method for writing them. They were not, however, organized into a hierarchical tree. They were not grouped by shared properties, or by any logical or philosophical system. Instead, they were placed into a verse composed of stanzas of seven lines each, so that they could be easily memorized. For example, if you memorize the first stanza, you know the placement of forty-two of his radical words (italicized):
When I sit-down upon a hie place, I’m sick with light and heat
For the many thick moistures, doe open wide my Emptie pores
But when sit upon a strong borrowed Horse, I ride and run most swiftly
Therefore if I can purchase this courtesie with civilitie, I care not thehirers barbaritie
Because I’m perswaded they are wild villains, scornfully deceiving modest men
Neverthelesse I allowe their frequent wrongs and will encourage them with obliging exhortations
Moreover I’l assist them to fight against robbers, when I have my long crooked sword.
He developed a written character where the placement and direction of little lines and hooks referred to a specific place in a line of a stanza (as shown in figure 5.4).
To write “light,” for example, you draw the character representing the first stanza modified by a small mark indicating first line, fifth word. The pattern is repeated for the fourth through sixth lines, but with little hooks added to the marks, and for the seventh line the mark is drawn through the character (as shown in figure 5.5).
Figure 5.4: Dalgarno’s system
Additionally, the opposite of a word was represented by reversing the orientation of the stanza symbol.
He also provided for a way for the system to be spoken by assigning consonants and vowels to the numbered stanzas, lines, and words. So if B = stanza 1, A = line 1, and G = word 5, then the word for “light” would be BAG.
Figure 5.5: Dalgarno’s system, lines 4–7
Wilkins admired Dalgarno’s system, but he thought it needed to include more concepts, and took it upon himself to draw up an ordered table of plants, animals, and minerals. Dalgarno respectfully declined to use those tables, arguing that the longer the list of concepts got, the harder they would be to memorize. He thought that specific species, like elephant, didn’t need their own, separate radical words, but that they could be referred to by writing out compound phrases, such as “largest whole-footed beast.”
Dalgarno’s method was another way to get a mathematics of language. No need to determine a universe of categories and distinguishing features—you simply decide what the primitives are (no need to systematically break everything down; just ask yourself what makes sense) and assume everything else can be described by adding those primitives together to make a compound. For Dalgarno, “coal” is “mineral black fire,” “diamond” is “precious stone hard,” and “ash tree” is “very fruitless tree long kernel.”
Wilkins thought this method lacked rigor. Dalgarno hadn’t chose
n his basic concepts in a principled way, and, worse, the words in his language told you nothing about their meanings, just their arbitrary placement in a nonsense verse. Wilkins was convinced that the ordered tables were necessary. He wanted words to reflect the nature of things—only in this way could the language serve as an instrument for the spread of knowledge and reason. Dalgarno thought the tables were unnecessary. He wanted words to be easy to memorize—only in this way could the language be a useful communication tool. After about a year of arguing, they parted ways, and Wilkins began to work on his own project.
The Word for “Shit”
The problem with natural languages, as Wilkins saw it, was that words tell you nothing about the things they refer to. You must simply learn that a dog is a “dog” in English or a chien in French or a perro in Spanish or a Hund in German. The sounds in those words are just sounds to be arbitrarily memorized. They tell you what to call a dog, but they do not tell you what a dog is.
In Wilkins’s system, the word for “dog” does tell you what a dog is. Like Dalgarno, Wilkins worked out a way to refer to a specific position in his tables with a character or a word. Since the concept dog is located in category XVIII (Beasts), subcategory V (oblong-headed), sub-subcategory 1 (bigger kind) (refer to figure 5.3), the character for “dog” would be formed with the symbol for category XVIII, along with modifications indicating subcategory V, and sub-subcategory 1.
The character for “wolf,” being paired with “dog” on the basis of a minimal opposition (docile versus not docile), requires an additional marking for opposite.
Wilkins’s scheme for forming pronounceable words follows the same plan. “Dog” is zitα:
and “wolf” is zitαs.
The words of both Dalgarno’s and Wilkins’s systems direct you to a position in a table, but only in Wilkins’s case does that position mean something. Dalgarno’s word for “light,” BAG, shows you where in his verses the word “light” may be found (stanza 1, line 1, word 5), but it does not tell you what light is. Zitα, on the other hand, gives you a definition of a dog: a clawed, rapacious, oblong-headed, land-dwelling beast of docile disposition.
A word in Wilkins’s language doesn’t stand for a concept; it defines the concept. So, to return to the important business at hand, what is the definition of “shit”? Where might I find it in Wilkins’s tree of the universe? Wilkins does provide an index to his tables, where you can look up specific English words and find out where they fall in the hierarchy. If you look up, say, “rabble,” you will find written next to it RC.I.7 (relations, civil > political relations of rank > of the lower sort, in the aggregate). Sometimes the word directs you to another word; if you look up “parsimony,” it will tell you to see “frugality” (which then directs you to Man. III.3—manners > virtues relating to our estates and dignities > in regards to keeping as opposed to getting). But “shit” doesn’t appear in the index, nor does “feces.” So I set out to find it by figuring out its true definition. To begin, I turned to what seemed to be the most promising category for my quest, number XXX, “Corporeal Action.” But I did not find what I was looking for. The concepts included in this category ranged from quite general (living, dying) to quite specific (itching, stuttering). I noted that some of them, contrary to the indications of their category title, didn’t seem very corporeal (editing, printing) or very action-like (dreaming, entertaining). But this category did include the concept politely known as coition, listed along with a colorful collection of synonyms: “coupling,” “gendering,” “lie with,” “know carnally,” “copulation,” “rutting,” “tread,” “venery.” The word for all this, by the way, is cadod (a corporeal action > belonging to sensate beings > of the kind concerning appetites and the satisfying of them > relating to the preservation of the individual > as regards the desire of the propagation of the species).
Figure 6.1: Category XXXI (Motion), subcategory IV (Purgation)
Sexual matters being a bit above my level of dictionary maturity, I continued my search in the next category, number XXXI, “Motion.” After skimming past the first three subcategories (animal progression, modes of going, and motions of the parts), which rather haphazardly encompassed everything from “swimming” to “ambling” to “yawning,” I came to subcategory IV, purgation, where I found: “Those kinds of Actions whereby several animals do cast off such excremetitious parts as are offensive to nature.” This was a seven-year-old boy’s dream catalog of bodily function, and it bears reproducing in its entirety (see figure 6.1).
What a window on the past! How interesting to note that people once talked of “breaking wind upwards,” or that you could just as well “neeze” as sneeze. How much less distant three hundred years ago seems when one realizes that then, too, people said “snot” and “puke.” And there it was, not just “shiting,” but a fascinating array of alternatives, which, being the scholar that I am (immaturity notwithstanding), sent me to the Oxford English Dictionary to look for origins and explanations.
“Muting,” for example, is a special word for “bird poop.” And “sir-reverence” used to mean “with all due respect” (from the Latin salva reverentia—“save [your] reverence”). People usually pull out “with all due respect” when they are about to drop some bad news, so I suppose the change of meaning came about after enough people, upon hearing the phrase, thought to themselves, “Oh, great. Here comes another pile of sir-reverence.”
Once I had located my target concept in the tables, I could finally piece together the word for it:
Cepuhws. A serous and watery purgative motion from the consistent and gross parts (from the guts downward). That’s how you say “shit” in Wilkins’s language. By the time I figured it out, I was too tired to giggle.
Knowing What You Mean to Say
Even though Wilkins’s universe was supposed to be a more organized, rational place than the one I was living in, I sometimes found it disorienting. Animals could be categorized according to the shapes of their heads, their eating preferences, or their general dispositions. I didn’t really understand why emotions were classified as simple (hope) or mixed (shame), or why tactile sensations could be active (coldness) or passive (clamminess). Entertaining was a bodily action, but shitting was a motion—so was playing dice. While things as different as irony and semicolon were grouped together (under discourse > elements), things as similar as milk and butter were placed miles apart (milk with the other bodily fluids in “Parts, General,” and butter with other foodstuffs in “Provisions”).
There is an absurdity to Wilkins’s categorization of the universe that was best highlighted in an article by Borges titled “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”:
These ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies remind us of those which doctor Franz Kuhn attributes to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled “Celestial Empire of benevolent Knowledge.” In its remote pages it is written that the animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.
Borges’s point is not to ridicule Wilkins’s attempt to impose a pattern on the universe (he later concedes that Wilkins’s is “not the least admirable of such patterns”), but to call attention to the hopelessness of all such attempts.
“It is clear,” he says, “that there is no classification of the universe not being arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what thing the universe is.”
I thought it would be appropriate, in a slyly ironic way, to attempt a translation of these lines into Wilkins’s language.
This translation was no simple matter. The sentiment expressed in these lines is quite correct. In Wilkins’s tables I found arbitrariness and conjecture all around. He did not know (as we do not) w
hat thing the universe is. But he took a heroic stab at it. Over the four days I worked on my translation, sly irony gave way to surprised admiration. As a language of its own, Wilkins’s work was unusable, but as a study of meaning in English it was brilliant.
I started by looking up the word for “clear.” Where, in the universe of ideas, might this one fall? What does “clear” mean, in the grand scheme of things? Well, lots of things. In the index I found over twenty-five options listed. Do you mean “not mingled with another”? Then see “simple.” Do you mean “visible”? Then see “bright,” “transparent,” or “unspotted.” Do you mean “as refers to men”? Then see “candid.” Do you mean “not hindered from being passed through”? See “accessible” or “empty.” Do you mean in the sense of “clear weather”? That would be El.VI.1 (elements > condition of the air > being transparent). “Not guilty”? That’s RJ.II.6 (relations, judicial > concerning proceedings > decision regarding party’s lack of transgression).