ABSTRACT
The Enlightenment philosopher Destutt de Tracy wrote of the problem of a universal language that:
Even were everybody on earth to agree to speak the same language from today onwards, they would rapidly discover that, under the influence of their own use, the single language had begun to change, to modify itself in thousands of different ways in each different country, until it produced in each a different dialect which gradually grew away from the others.
(Eléments d'idéologie, II, 6, 569, cited in Eco, 1997, p. 332)