1302: Philosophical Languages Jul 4, 2018

People may regard philosophy today as full of niche jargon, and rather exclusive therefore, but there was a time in history when people invented whole languages for it. These philosophical languages were developed, primarily in the 17th century and into the 18th as a way to create something which would be universal, though at the time European intelligentsia would all use Latin anyway, so a language which no one spoke natively was already used for academic use. Further irony was added by the fact that people constructed many different "universal" languages, including Leibniz, Bacon, Wilkins, Kircher, Comenius, and Dalgarno. Nevertheless, these philosophical languages were not supposed to make cross-cultural dialogue easier ultimately, but instead it was usually supposed to use symbols and other graphs in order to represent ideas more concisely. These, obviously, did not catch on for long, but there are hundreds of thousands of pages with examples of this.

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