The Analytical Language of John Wilkins

"The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" is a short essay by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, first printed in La Nación on 8 February 1942 and subsequently published in Otras Inquisiciones. It is a critique of the English natural philosopher and writer John Wilkins's proposal for a universal language and of the representational capacity of language generally. Borges begins by noting John Wilkins's absence from the 14th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica and makes the case for Wilkins's significance, highlighting in particular the universal language scheme detailed in his An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language. " Borges's point is the arbitrary nature of such taxonomies, regardless of whether they form a language or just a way of understanding and ordering the world. He challenges the idea of the universe as something we can understand at all‍-‌"We do not know what thing the universe is" ‍-‌much less describe using language. While considering Wilkins's effort naïve, Borges ultimately praises the ambition of a universal language and admits that Wilkins's word for salmon, zana, could hold more meaning than the corresponding words in conventional languages, which are arbitrary and carry no intrinsic meaning. Michel Foucault attributes the inspiration for his The Order of Things to Borges' "Celestial Emporium" passage and "The laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought ... breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things..." Foucault is disturbed less by the Emporium's arbitrariness than by the idea that such a classification might be intelligible to someone or some culture, then discusses the ways cultures make sense of the world by drawing relationships between things, expressed through language.