ABSTRACT
To the extent that many or most of the earth’s inhabitants use language, one might say that language itself is a universal means to access the past experience of human civilization. e widespread use of specifi c languages in the past, such as the Roman Empire’s and later the Catholic Church’s use of Latin, the extensive use of French in European diplomacy up to the 19th century, the Chinese Empire’s use of Mandarin, or the global use of English in commerce today serve as examples. Over the centuries, many diff erent theorists and practitioners have attempted to augment natural languages (those emerging from the idiosyncratic fl ow of technological, economic, social, military, and other factors) by attempting to design more rational artifi cial, universal spoken and written languages. Such universal written languages are called technically pasigraphies and are described, among other places, at the LangMaker web site (2007). e most famous pasigraphy is perhaps Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’ Characteristica Universalis (Cohen, 1954; Leibniz web site, 2007) begun in about 1677. Others are George Dalgarno’s Universal Language begun in 1661 (Dalgarno web site, 2007) and John Wilkins’ Analytical Language begun in 1668 (Wilkins web site, 2007).
