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41
Francis Lodwick
A Common Writing
[London], 1647
4º: A–E4
154×98mm
Vet. A3 e. 350
  

Eight verses from the first chapter of St John’s Gospel, written in Francis Lodwick’s ‘common writing’, displayed next to the numerical key which he composed for it. Lodwick was the first person to outline a design for a universal character. Catalogue no.41, pp.28
full size (78 K)


During the 1640s and 1650s, several authors based in England attempted to produce universal, real or philosophical characters and universal languages. A number of stimuli may have provoked them to this activity. Francis Bacon had already suggested the need for a philosophical writing in which there was a direct correspondence between words and things, and the idea of a universal character, as a means of communication, had been taken up by John Wilkins in his Mercury of 1641. Comenius and others had argued for the usefulness of a universal language, based on a reformed philosophy and on the natural ordering of things. Others were concerned about improving the speed or security of communications and overcoming the expensive barriers posed by differences between vernaculars, or wished to make it easier for children to learn how to communicate.

Advances in shorthand writing from the late sixteenth century, and in cryptography, especially during the Civil Wars, as well as the discovery of new kinds of human language and writing, such as Chinese, helped to encourage people to believe that breakthroughs could be made in these areas. Behind much linguistic work lay the conviction that human beings had once all spoken the same language, and that, before the Fall, Adam had named things using a language which corresponded exactly to nature. What had once come naturally to human beings might now be restored through diligence and effort, not least because a universal language would prove to be a providential tool for spreading the Gospel to newly-discovered lands, such as America. As Robert Boyle wrote to Samuel Hartlib, ‘If the design of the Real Character take effect, it will in good part make amends to mankind for what their pride lost them at the tower of Babel’ (Letter dated 19th March 1647, in Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, vol. 1, p.xxxvii).

Francis Lodwick (1619–94), a merchant from the refugee community which worshipped at the Dutch church of Austin Friars in London, was the first person to publish a design for a universal character (the Common Writing) and for a universal language (The Ground-Work or Foundation Laid for the Framing of a New Perfect Language, in 1652). His Common Writing was based on a grammatical analysis of language, which led to the development of a series of symbols or augmentations, each of which would modify a root word or character in the same way. These symbols (mostly additional strokes or points) conveyed whether the root was to be understood as a noun, verb, adjective, or adverb; they specified cases, voices, moods, and tenses, and so on. Thus, a relatively small number of agreed roots could quickly be transformed into a character in which an entire language could be written: ‘whereby two, although not understanding one the others language, yet by the helpe thereof, may communicate their minds one to another’ (title-page). As a sample of his common writing, Lodwick provided a transcript of the opening eight verses of the first chapter of St John’s Gospel (illustrated opposite). The symbols of the common writing were reminiscent of musical notation, and Lodwick eventually intended them to be accompanied by numbers which would identify their roots in a lexicon which he promised to compose.

Lodwick’s Common Writing was published by Hartlib, and attracted favourable notice from Boyle and from Sir Cheney Culpeper. They appear, however, to have been more intrigued by the concept of a universal character than they were convinced by Lodwick’s execution of it. There were numerous drawbacks with schemes such as Lodwick’s, for example: how were things to be analysed so that an agreed lexicon of accurately-chosen roots might be made; how was such a lexicon to be disseminated so that the ideal of universal communication could be achieved? Nevertheless, Lodwick’s work was valued by others who attempted to compose universal languages, especially Wilkins, who asked Lodwick to help him with the orthography of his real character (see catalogue no. 43 ).


Vivian Salmon, The Works of Francis Lodwick (London, 1972); M.M. Slaughter, Universal Languages and Scientific Taxonomy in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1982), pp.116–20; Thomas Birch (ed.), The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle (new edition, 6vols, London, 1772), vol.1, pp. xxxvii–viii; M. J. Braddick and Mark Greengrass (eds.), ‘The Letters of Sir Cheney Culpeper, 1641–1657’, pp.105–402 in Camden Miscellany XXXIII (Camden Society, Fifth Series, vol. 7, 1996), pp.288–9 & 292–4.



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