ABSTRACT
Viewed from the perspective of the history of English linguistics, it is a fortunate coincidence that important early insights into the structure of the English language unfolded within a seventeenth-century scheme for an artificial language. Although John Wilkins' Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668) intends to deal with ideas and their universal relationship to one another within a large-scale universal philosophy, what it in fact considers are words, in particular English words. The Alphabetical Dictionary, printed as the final part of the Essay project and drawn up by William Lloyd, underlines this feature. Professor Gneuss, in his fundamental survey and bibliography of English language scholarship from its beginnings to the end of the nineteenth century, emphasizes the important fact that this "admirable complete dictionary of English" had been "strangely neglected by historians of English lexicography" for a long time.1 In addition, as Werner Hiillen points out, not all fields of linguistic importance that are couched in Wilkins' plan for a universal language have received sufficient attention up to now. After all, Wilkins furthered the exploration of acoustic phonetics, non-alphabetical writing systems, the theory of semantics and universal grammar and both alphabetical and onomasiologicallexicography.2 The following paper concen-
trates on Wilkins' use of the vocabulary of English within his scheme. It reviews the relationship between the different parts of the Essay on the level of lexis3, in particular in the philosophical tables which constitute Wilkins' universal language and the Alphabetical Dictionary. The nature and extent of the clash between the deductive and inductive approaches in the Essay project deserve particular attention.
