Filologija, No. 17, 1989.
Original scientific paper
A FORGOTTEN 17th CENTURY ENGLISH PIONEER OF LANGUAGES IN CONTACT
Monica Partridge
; Nottingham
Abstract
This paper has been written as a contribution to be added to those of all the authors who have already shown their wish to celebrate the seventieth birthday ot Rudolf Filipović and to wish him many more years of fruitful work.
This paper calls attention to a forgotten English scientist, John Wilkins, who as early as 1668 printed his 'Essay Towards a Real Character and Philosophical Language'. The work was undertaken at the request of the Royal Society. He was to invent a universal language and orthography which would enable men of all nationalities to communicate more adequately since Latin, then used by them, was inadequate for the communication of the new scientific ideas and discoveries, especially in physics and mathematics. Wilkins's Essay of some 700 pages presents a vast accumulation of material, collected by many experts, in many languages and branches of knowledge. His conclusions regarding grammatical categories, the nature and classification of speech sounds anticipate by three centuries the work of modern phoneticians and linguists, from the Table of Eight Cardinal Vowels formulated by D. Jones to the modern study of language by contrastive analysis.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
165408
URI
Publication date:
18.6.1990.
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