Mezzanine wilkins biography of albert

Book by John Wilkins

An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (London, 1668) is the best-remembered of the numerous works of John Wilkins, in which he expounds a new universal language, meant primarily to facilitate international communication among scholars, but envisioned for use by diplomats, travelers, and merchants as well.

Unlike many universal language schemes of the period, it was meant merely as an auxiliary to—not a replacement of—existing natural languages.^{[citation needed]}

Background

One of the aims of the Essay was to provide a replacement for the Latin language, which had been the international language of scholars in Western Europe by then for 1000 years.^[1]Comenius and others interested in international languages had criticisms of the arbitrary features of Latin that made it harder to learn, and Wilkins also made such points.^[2] A sch