Mattie Cardinale

John Wilkins’ A Real Character: A Language with A Great Deal of Character

Introduction:

The curse of Babel is something that humanity has struggled with for a very, very long

time. There are many languages, and many contradictions within them: how do we communicate

with each other despite these flaws? The first solution many minds come to is a perfect universal

language - a means of communication with no inconsistencies or irregularities that can be

understood by everyone. The methods through which a universal language has been attempted

are numerous, and in this essay we will focus on the efforts of one noble man: John Wilkins, a

scholar from the Enlightenment. A rather generic but well-spirited noblemen, John Wilkins

sought to do what many before him had, but in a rather unique way: he felt that since language

was an attempt to transmit concepts from one mind to another, a universal language should be at

its core about these concepts.

To achieve this dream, Wilkins spent a great deal of his life creating a massive amalgam

of ideas: An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language. The largest chunk

of this essay is a massive table sorting every single concept in the universe, from the abstraction

of clarity to domesticated dogs, into a large categorical tree. He admits it is a task with no end

and makes no claims that his sorting system is the only correct one. He is just the only person so

far to attempt it, so his system will have to do!

He spent most of his adult life working on honing his “darling”, and even when the Great

Fire of London burned his several hundred-page manuscript to ash, completely obliterating 10

years of progress, he simply went back and wrote the whole thing again. Wilkins did a lot of

things – he worked as a vicar, supported other academics such as Robert Boyle, built a glass
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beehive – but his language was always his top priority (Okrent 22). It was literally his life’s

work, and although it never gained any notable traction, he kept going at it until the approach of

death made him physically incapable of continuing. Why? What could have driven a man to take

on a task he himself regarded as impossible, and dedicate himself to it without hesitation or

qualm?

I believe it was a thirst for knowledge. Wilkins was a man of the Enlightenment, through

and through – The Age of Reason was centered around human intellect and discovery, and

Wilkins believed completely that there was more to learn and more to discover. The

enlightenment had just begun, and he hoped to utilize his skills to further it along: do something

that would make this era of academic flourishing glow even brighter. His language, like all of his

endeavors, was a means to this end: an experiment to further the world, a scientific discovery.

Looking at A Real Character, it is clearly more of a notation system than a proper means

of communication – a new method by which ideas could be conveyed and categorized, with a

few linguistic elements thrown in for practicality. All of existence was to be examined, and all

the elements of this massive category, nearly infinite, to be sorted without flaw or inconsistency.

This was obviously a monstrous task, one that Wilkins knew looked hopeless to all, but there is

one clear source of inspiration: mathematic notation.

It had just been implemented, and in many ways it was the root cause of the

Enlightenment: it lifted math to new heights and let it be discussed on a much more global scale,

which prompted science to follow suit. Numbers, an objectively infinite category with infinite

means of interaction with one another, had been condensed into a universal orthography, and this

allowed science the world over to increase at an unprecedented rate. Wilkins hoped to apply this

principle to the rest of the universe. Looking at his language, we can see this desire to mimic the
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newly christened mathematical notation in its morphology, and we can see it fall apart under its

own weight.

Morphology is the linguistic study of morphemes, and morphemes are typically defined

as the smallest meaningful unit of language. In most languages, this can be simplified to the

discussion of words and how they are built: affixes, roots, and conjugation. Wilkins, however,

manages to create a morphology unlike any in natural language. The first morpheme in a word

has what we typically think of when we think of “meaning” – it refers to the highest echelon of

categorization in his tree, what Wilkins calls a “genus”. A “genus” is a basic category of any

concept in the universe: examples include beasts and spiritual actions. From then on, however,

the morphemes become very different from what we typically see: the meaning they carry is

where in his enormous chart the word goes next. The next individual sound indicates what

“difference” (the next level of categorization) the word is, and after that the sound indicates

where the word falls in the specie (the final category). The exact morphemes connected to this

system are attached in the appendix.

For example, the word zita – meaning “fox” – can be broken up into three morphemes.

/Zi/, meaning the genus beasts, /t/, meaning the fifth difference beneath that genus, and /a/,

meaning the second specie underneath that genus. Tracing this down, we find fox, and if any of

these morphemes were changed we would follow a different route down the path. Ziti would be

the same down to the specie, where instead of the 2nd variant we would go the fourth: jackal.

Zipa would still be underneath the category of beasts, but the difference would be the fourth

instead of the fifth (cat-like beasts instead of dog-like ones), and then the specie would be the

first beneath that difference – lion. These three “morphemes” bound together create what is

equivalent in most languages to a root.

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This bizarre structure is unlike any traditional morphology, but it can be compared with

the numerical notation system without much effort. Let’s observe the number 8,413. The 8 is in

the “thousands place”, the 4 is in the “hundreds place”, the 1 is in the “tens place”, and the 3 is in

the “ones place”. Knowing what the individual symbols mean (8 is two less than ten, 3 is two

less than five, etc.) and knowing what the locations are (the thousands place is the fourth number

going right to left, the ones place is the first, etc.) and what they mean (the number in the

thousands place is present one thousand times in the number, the ones place is present once, etc.)

we can decipher the symbols and decode the number: Eight thousands, four hundreds, one tens,

three ones – Eight thousand, four hundred and thirteen. Wilkins language can be approached

similarly. The first two letters, going from left to right, are the “genus place” – the third is the

“difference place” and the fourth is the “specie place”.

Here is where his attempt to follow the mathematical system falls apart. Wilkins believes

that for a language to be good “the words of it should be brief”, so he attempts to give each

place’s meaning away in a single sound. Due to the nature of spoken language, a lot of identical

spoken sounds cannot be repeated next to one another, and so he gives each place its own set of

sounds to build from (as can be seen in the appendix). Imagine if in our current numerical

system, the “ones” place was designated with the Arabic numerals we are used to while the

“tens” place used a completely different orthography – the complexity increases astronomically,

and it becomes less and less intelligible to those sussing it out.

Then we move on to the next aspect of the morphology: affixes. In the comparison

between languages and mathematical notation, affixes would be equivalent to radicals,

exponents, and the like. They are functions that are applied to the “root” to change the outcome.

Affixes are present in the same way they are in many languages, but to his credit, Wilkins has
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made sure that the irregularities present in natural languages are completely absent from his

work. He writes at length about “transcendental” affixes, a category whose exact meaning is

confusing to even the most skilled reader, and a number of affixes do not all rely simply on

adding sounds, either – some are reliant on reduplication. As they are transcendentals, what exact

meaning they carry is vague, but the 2nd morpheme in the root, the one in the “difference place”

(/t/ in the example zita) would be copied to indicate some sort of elemental shift. The examples

given of this change are planet to comet (dade to daded) and ice to snow (dego to degog).

The lack of examples makes a lot about affixation in A Real Character unclear, including

how many affixes can be used simultaneously as well as what most of the affixes are (a list of all

affixes is absent from An Essay Towards a Real Character, so locating them and their

applications is near impossible). What is clear, however, is just how many of them there are –

and how their exact result is frustratingly difficult to decipher. Given the knowledge that 4^2 is

16, 3^2 is 9, and 3^3 is 27, someone sufficiently intelligent could learn that the function/affix “^”

is multiplying something by itself the amount of times specified, but I still have no clue what the

reduplication affix mentioned above is intending to do to its root. Another example of this

impossibility of understanding is the suffix /s/ - zipa is lion and adding the suffix /s/ gives us

bear, zipas. What is the function that results in this shift, you ask? Simple negation – in Wilkins

system, in his massive chart, lion and bear are opposites.

And this leads us to the biggest problem with the system, the most glaring issue: the

categorization. Wilkins himself knew it was impossible, and he did do his best, but it is simply

not a good sorting system. Every review of his work finds a new discrepancy – whether it be

Jorge Luis Borges noting that a whale is listed as fish or Arika Okrent questioning the decision to

put butter and milk so far from one another. The reason for this is an obvious one, but one
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someone as obsessed with truth as Wilkins simply refused to care about: the universe is too

complicated!

Numbers, while infinite and interesting, are nothing compared to the universe that

contains them. They have objective interactions with each other – objective results, and objective

processes that can be applied to obtain. What is the “objective” opposite of a lion? Of anything?

The universe is not an objective system, no matter how badly we want it to be. Wilkins, having

seen one aspect of it recognized and sorted, was filled with hope and took an enormous step: sort

every aspect.

And he failed. Wilkins was a mathematician at heart, and although his optimistic vision

of a perfect, unbiased sorting system of everything conceivable was beautiful and inspired, a

lifetime of dedication could not turn it into something feasible. This is the objective truth.

But, as we were just discussing, is there any such thing? Wilkins did not do what he set

out to, nor did he come close. Yet is there not some beauty in his trying to do so? He created a

list of every concept he could image – he tried to enumerate the universe and everything within

it. It was an act of hubris, but a noble one regardless: he just wanted to make the world better. He

saw what a mathematical system did for society, and wanted to progress even further – wanted to

push humanity into the future once again. He just saw a shift like that happen; why not one more

time? He knew it was impossible, and he knew he would fail, but he spent his life doing it

regardless, because he wanted to try. He wanted to know, and he wanted the world to know

alongside him.
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Works Cited

Wilkins, John. An Essay towards a Real Character ; and a Philosophical Language. Clearwater
Pub. Co., 1978.
Okrent, Arika. In the Land of Invented Languages. Spiegel and Grau, 2010.
  Borges, Jorge Luis. "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins". Translated by Lilia Graciela
Vázquez. 

Appendix

The morphemes used to create the “root” of a word in A Real Character

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