ABSTRACT
The seventeenth century voiced its increasing frustration with the barriers that languages created and the impostures and deceptions that words made possible. John Wilkins's long critique of language made plain why new experiments with alternatives to natural language were imperative: Present languages brimmed with words that misled and deceived, they changed and decayed, their alphabets were either redundant or deficient and in either case were ordered in a confused manner, single words had several meanings, vulgar idioms couldn't be made sense of, figurative language created ambiguity so that a single word like draw m pass had thirty or forty senses, synonyms created superfluity, grammars abounded in anomaly, and languages generally reflected a lack of careful design and art, having been developed in a haphazard fashion before written grammars could regulate and refine them.2 By contrast with Francis Bacon, who wanted to sift through languages and combine the best of them, the group discussed in this chapter had largely given up on natural languages. John Webster pointed out, to the chagrin of those who still dreamed of language as a route to nature, that one could name a certain tree or bird in twenty languages yet still know only one tree or bird: acquaintance with languages yielded no
gain in understanding.3 Isaac Newton captured the point in his 1661 manuscript "Of an Universall Language," in which he observed that because dialects of languages were so diverse and arbitrary, a "general Language cannot bee so fitly deduced from them as from the natures of things which is the same in all Nations & by which all language was at the first composed."4 The key, of course, was to know "the natures of things."
