Re: [lojban] Re: The Analytical Language of John Wilkins

[Jorge "Llambías" <jjllambias2000@yahoo.com.ar>]

--- Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
> Can you explain the source a bit please?  It sounds like a table of
> contents I once heard for a Chinese book of animal pictures.

Here's a longer exerpt from Borges' "The Analytical Language 
of John Wilkins":

[...] Descartes, in a letter dated November 1619, [...] proposed the 
creation of a similar, general language that would organize and 
contain all human thought. Around 1664, John Wilkins undertook that 
task.
[...]
He divided the universe into forty categories or classes, which 
were then subdivided into differences, and subdivided in turn into 
species. To each class he assigned a monosyllable of two letters; 
to each difference, a consonant; to each species, a vowel. For 
example, de means element; deb, the first of the elements, fire; 
deba, a portion of the element of fire, a flame.
[...]
Having defined Wilkins' procedure, we must examine a problem that 
is impossible or difficult to postpone: the merit of the forty-part 
table on which the language is based. Let us consider the eighth 
category: stones. Wilkins divides them into common (flint, gravel, 
slate); moderate (marble, amber, coral); precious (pearl, opal); 
transparent (amethyst, sapphire); and insoluble (coal, fuller's 
earth, and arsenic). The ninth category is almost as alarming as 
the eighth. [...] These ambiguities, redundances, and deficiencies 
recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese 
encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. 
On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into 
(a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those 
that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous 
ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this 
classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, 
(j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's 
hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower 
vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.[...]

mu'o mi'e xorxes



	
		
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