Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

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I’ve always been a fan of constructed languages, but one of my favorites is set forth in John Wilkins’ An Essay Towards a Real Character and Philosophical Language (1668). The real thing would set you back a cool couple of grand (or more), and there is a reprint available for around three or four hundred dollars, but now it’s available online both in scanned and text versions. One of the problems with the real character that I noticed right away was that the meaning of words is coded with the least amount of redundacy possible, and the margin for error is quite large. (See also, Jorge Luis Borges’ essay on the Real Character.) A large part of the book is taken up with an outline of knowledge, or ontology, which is fun to browse. Wilkins, who was one of the founders of the Royal Society, got fellow scientists to help him with his categories. One of the illustrations for the book appears often enough in phonology textbooks as one of the earliest illustrations of the vocal tract.