Borges on Metadata

In devising a general system for the classification of archival entities, we should be mindful of the intellectual tradition of this work, which extends at least to the seventeenth century. Some of the most ambitious efforts were also among the earliest; not all have been entirely successful. An important essay by Jorge Luis Borges asks why this might be so, and may be taken to suggest moderation in the multiplication of classes, differences and species.

[N.B. An English translation is below the Spanish original.]

El Idioma Analítico de John Wilkins

(Un ensayo de Jorge Luis Borges, publicado primera vez en la colección Otras Inquisiciones)

He comprobado que la décimocuarta edición de la Encyclopaedia Britannica suprime el articulo sobre John Wilkins. Esa omisión es justa, si recordamos la trivialidad del artículo (veinte renglones de meras circunstancias biográficas: Wilkins nació en 1614, Wilkins murió en 1672, Wilkins fue capellán de Carlos Luis, príncipe palatino; Wilkins fue nombrado rector de uno de los colegios de Oxford, Wilkins fue el primer secretario de la Real Sociedad de Londres, etc.); es culpable, si consideramos la obra especulativa de Wilkins. Éste abundó en felices curiosidades: le interesaron la teología, la criptografía, la música, la fabricación de colmenas transparentes, el curso de un planeta invisible, la posibilidad de un viaje a la luna, la posibilidad y los principios de un lenguaje mundial. A este último problema dedicó el libro An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (600 páginas en cuarto mayor, 1668). No hay ejemplares de ese libro en nuestra Biblioteca Nacional; he interrogado, para redactar esta nota, The Life and Times of John Wilkins (1910), de P.A. Wright Henderson; el Woerterbuch der Philosophie (1924), de Fritz Mauthner; Delphos (1935) de E. Sylvia Pankhurst; Dangerous Thoughts (1939), de Lancelot Hogben.

Todos, alguna vez, hemos padecido esos debates inapelables en que una dama, con acopio de interjecciones y de anacolutos, jura que la palabra luna es más (o menos) expresiva que la palabra moon. Fuera de la evidente observación de que el monosílabo moon es tal vez más apto para representar un objeto muy simple que la palabra bisilábica luna, nada es posible contribuir a tales debates; descontadas las palabras compuestas y las derivaciones, todos los idiomas del mundo (sin excluir el volapük de Johann Martin Schleyer y la romántica interlingua de Peano) son igualmente inexpresivos. No hay edición de la Gramática de la Real Academia que no pondere "el envidiado tesoro de voces pintorescas, felices y expresivas de la riquísima lengua española", pero se trata de una mera jactancia, sin corroboración. Por lo pronto, esa misma Real Academia elabora cada tantos años un diccionario, que define las voces del español... En el idioma universal que ideó Wilkins al promediar el siglo XVII, cada palabra se define a sí misma. Descartes, en una epístola fechada en noviembre de 1629, ya había anotado que mediante el sistema decimal de numeración, podemos aprender en un solo día a nombrar todas las cantidades hasta el infinito y a escribirlas en un idioma nuevo que es el de los guarismos [1]; también había propuesto la formación de un idioma análogo, general, que organizara y abarcara todos los pensamientos humanos. John Wilkins, hacia 1664, acometió esa empresa.

Dividió el universo en cuarenta categorías o géneros, subdivisibles luego en diferencias, subdivisibles a su vez en especies. Asignó a cada género un monosílabo de dos letras; a cada diferencia, una consonante; a cada especie, una vocal. Por ejemplo: de, quiere decir elemento; deb, el primero de los elementos, el fuego; deba, una porción del elemento del fuego, una llama. En el idioma análogo de Letellier (1850), a, quiere decir animal; ab, mamífero; abo, carnívoro; aboj, felino; aboje, gato; abi, herbivoro; abiv, equino; etc. En el de Bonifacio Sotos Ochando (1845), imaba, quiere decir edificio; imaca, serrallo; imafe, hospital; imafo, lazareto; imarri, casa; imaru, quinta; imedo, poste; imede, pilar; imego, suelo; imela, techo; imogo, ventana; bire, encuadernor; birer, encuadernar. (Debo este último censo a un libro impreso en Buenos Aires en 1886: el Curso de lengua universal, del doctor Pedro Mata.)

Las palabras del idioma analítico de John Wilkins no son torpes símbolos arbitrarios; cada una de las letras que las integran es significativa, como lo fueron las de la Sagrada Escritura para los cabalistas. Mauthner observa que los niños podrían aprender ese idioma sin saber que es artificioso; después en el colegio, descubrirían que es también una clave universal y una enciclopedia secreta.

Ya definido el procedimiento de Wilkins, falta examinar un problema de imposible o difícil postergación: el valor de la tabla cuadragesimal que es base del idioma. Consideremos la octava categoría, la de las piedras. Wilkins las divide en comunes (pedernal, cascajo, pizarra), módicas (mármol, ámbar, coral), preciosas (perla, ópalo), transparentes (amatista, zafiro) e insolubles (hulla, greda y arsénico). Casi tan alarmante como la octava, es la novena categoría. Ésta nos revela que los metales pueden ser imperfectos (bermellón, azogue), artificiales (bronce, latón), recrementicios (limaduras, herrumbre) y naturales (oro, estaño, cobre). La ballena figura en la categoría décimosexta; es un pez vivíparo, oblongo. Esas ambigüedades, redundancias y deficiencias recuerdan las que el doctor Franz Kuhn atribuye a cierta enciclopedia china que se titula Emporio celestial de conocimientos benévolos. En sus remotas páginas está escrito que los animales se dividen en (a) pertenecientes al Emperador, (b) embalsamados, (c) amaestrados, (d) lechones, (e) sirenas, (f) fabulosos, (g) perros sueltos, (h) incluidos en esta clasificación, (i) que se agitan como locos, (j) innumerables, (k) dibujados con un pincel finísimo de pelo de camello, (l) etcétera, (m) que acaban de romper el jarrón, (n) que de lejos parecen moscas. El instituto Bibliográfico de Bruselas también ejerce el caos: ha parcelado el universo en 1000 subdivisiones, de las cuales la 262 corresponde al Papa; la 282, a la Iglesia Católica Romana; la 263, al Día del Señor; la 268, a las escuales dominicales; la 298, al mormonismo, y la 294, al brahmanismo, budismo, shintoísmo y taoísmo. No rehusa las subdivisiones heterogéneas, verbigracia, la 179: "Crueldad con los animales. Protección de los animales. El duelo y el suicidio desde el punto de vista de la moral. Vicios y defectos varios. Virtudes y cualidades varias."

He registrado las arbitradiedades de Wilkins, del desconocido (o apócrifo) enciclopedista chino y del Instituto Bibliográfico de Bruselas; notoriamente no hay clasificación del universo que no sea arbitraria y conjetural. La razón es muy simple: no sabemos qué cosa es el universo. "El mundo - escribe David Hume - es tal vez el bosquejo rudimentario de algún dios infantil, que lo abandonó a medio hacer, avergonzado de su ejecución deficiente; es obra de un dios subalterno, de quien los dioses superiores se burlan; es la confusa producción de una divinidad decrépita y jubilada, que ya se ha muerto" (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, V. 1779). Cabe ir más lejos; cabe sospechar que no hay universo en el sentido orgánico, unificador, que tiene esa ambiciosa palabra. Si lo hay, falta conjeturar su propósito; falta conjeturar las palabras, las definiciones, las etimologías, las sinonimias, del secreto diccionario de Dios.

La imposibilidad de penetrar el esquema divino del universo no puede, sin embargo, disuadirnos de planear esquemas humanos, aunque nos conste que éstos son provisorios. El idioma analítico de Wilkins no es el menoos admirable de esos esquemas. Los géneros y especies que lo componen son contradictorios y vagos; el artificio de que las letras de las palabras indiquen subdivisiones y divisiones es, sin duda, ingenioso. La palabra salmón no nos dice nada; zana, la voz correspondiente, define (para el hombre versado en las cuarenta categorías y en los géneros de esas categorías) un pez escamoso, fluvial, de carne rojiza. (Teóricamente, no es inconcebible un idioma donde el nombre de cada ser indicara todos los pormenores de su destino, pasado y venidero.)

Esperanzas y utopías aparte, acaso lo más lúcido que sobre el lenguaje se ha escrito son estas palabras de Chesterton: "El hombre sabe que hay en el alma tintes más desconcertantes, más innumerables y más anónimos que los colores de una selva otoñal... cree, sin embargo, que esos tintes, en todas sus fusiones y conversiones, son representables con precisión por un mecanismo arbitrario de gruñidos y de chillidos. Cree que del interior de un bolsista salen realmente ruidos que significan todos los misterios de la memoria y todas las agonias del anhelo" (G. F. Watts, pág. 88, 1904).

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[1] Teóricamente, el número de sistemas de numeración es ilimitado. El más complejo (para uso de las divinidades y de los ángeles) registraría un número infinito de símbolos, uno para cada número entero; el más simple sólo requiere dos. Cero se escribe 0, uno 1, dos 10, tres 11, cuatro 100, cinco 101, seis 110, siete 111, ocho 1000... Es invención de Leibniz, a quien estimularon (parece) los hexagramas enigmáticos del I King.

(English Translation)

I have noticed that the 14th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica does not include the article on John Wilkins. This omission can be considered justified if we remember how trivial this article was (20 lines of purely biographical data: Wilkins was born in 1614, Wilkins died in 1672, Wilkins was chaplain of Charles Louis, Elector Palatine; Wilkins was principal of one of Oxford's colleges, Wilkins was the first secretary of the Royal Society of London, etc.); it is an error if we consider the speculative works of Wilkins. He was interested in several different topics: theology, cryptography, music, the building of transparent beehives, the orbit of an invisible planet, the possibility of a trip to the moon, the possibility and principles of an universal language. To this latter problem he dedicated the book 'An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language' (600 pages in large quarto, 1668). There are no copies of this book in our National Library, I have consulted, to write the present article, 'The Life and Times of John Wilkins' (1910), by P. A. Wright Henderson; the 'Wörterbuch der Philosophie' (1935), by Fritz Mauthner; 'Delphos' (1935), by E. Sylvia Pankhurst; 'Dangerous Thoughts' (1939), by Lancelot Hogben.

All of us have once experienced those neverending discussions in which a lady, using lots of interjections and incoherences, swears to you that the word 'luna' is more (or less) expressive than the word 'moon'. Apart from the evident observation that the monosyllable 'moon' perhaps is a more suitable representation of such a very simple object than the bisyllable 'luna', there is nothing to add to such a discussion; apart from the composed words and the derivations, all the languages in the world (including the 'Volapük' of Johann Martin Schleyer and the romantic 'Interlingua' of Peano) are equally inexpressive. There is not one issue of the Grammar of the Royal Spanish Academy that does not ponder "the enormous treasure of pitoresque, bright and expressive words of the extremely rich Spanish language", but it is mere bragging, without corroboration. In fact, this same Royal Academy edits every few years a dictionary, defining Spanish words... In the universal language which Wilkins invented in the seventeenth century, each word is defined by itself. Descartes, in a letter dated November 1629, had already noticed that, using the decimal number system, it may take only one day to learn how to name all the numbers up to infinity and how to write them in a new language, namely that of ciphers (1); he did also suggest the creation of a language similar to this former system, a general language, organizing and covering all human ideas. John Wilkins, around 1664, started to work on this task.

He divided the universe in forty categories or classes, these being further subdivided into differences, which was then subdivided into species. He assigned to each class a monosyllable of two letters; to each difference, a consonant; to each species, a vowel. For example: de, which means an element; deb, the first of the elements, fire; deba, a part of the element fire, a flame. In a similar language invented by Letellier (1850) a means animal; ab, mammal; abo, carnivore; aboj, feline; aboje, cat; abi, herbivore; abiv, horse; etc. In the language of Bonifacio Sotos Ochando (1845) imaba means building; imaca, harem; imafe, hospital; imafo, pesthouse; imari, house; imaru, country house; imedo, coloumn; imede, pillar; imego, floor; imela, ceiling; imogo, window; bire, bookbinder; birer, bookbinding. (This last list belongs to a book printed in Buenos Aires in 1886, the 'Curso de Lengua Universal', by Dr. Pedro Mata.)

The words of the analytical language created by John Wilkins are not mere arbitrary symbols; each letter in them has a meaning, like those from the Holy Writ had for the Cabbalists. Mauthner points out that children would be able to learn this language without knowing it be artificial; afterwards, at school, they would discover it being an universal code and a secret encyclopaedia.

Once we have defined Wilkins' procedure, it is time to examine a problem which could be impossible or at least difficult to postpone: the value of this four-level table which is the base of the language. Let us consider the eighth category, the category of stones. Wilkins divides them into common (silica, gravel, schist), modics (marble, amber, coral), precious (pearl, opal), transparent (amethyst, sapphire) and insolubles (chalk, arsenic). Almost as surprising as the eighth, is the ninth category. This one reveals to us that metals can be imperfect (cinnabar, mercury), artificial (bronze, brass), recremental (filings, rust) and natural (gold, tin, copper). The whale belongs to the sixteenth category; it is an oblong viviparous fish.

These ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies remind us of those which doctor Franz Kuhn attributes to a certain Chinese encyclopaedia entitled 'Celestial Empire of benevolent Knowledge'. In its remote pages it is written that the animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.

The Bibliographic Institute of Brussels exerts chaos too: it has divided the universe into 1000 subdivisions, from which number 262 is the pope; number 282, the Roman Catholic Church; 263, the Day of the Lord; 268 Sunday schools; 298, mormonism; and number 294, brahmanism, buddhism, shintoism and taoism. It doesn't reject heterogene subdivisions as, for example, 179: "Cruelty towards animals. Animals protection. Duel and suicide seen through moral values. Various vices and disadvantages. Advantages and various qualities."

I have registered the arbitrarities of Wilkins, of the unknown (or false) Chinese encyclopaedia writer and of the Bibliographic Institute of Brussels; it is clear that there is no classification of the Universe not being arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what thing the universe is. "The world - David Hume writes - is perhaps the rudimentary sketch of a childish god, who left it half done, ashamed by his deficient work; it is created by a subordinate god, at whom the superior gods laugh; it is the confused production of a decrepit and retiring divinity, who has already died" ('Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion', V. 1779). We are allowed to go further; we can suspect that there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense, that this ambitious term has. If there is a universe, it's aim is not conjectured yet; we have not yet conjectured the words, the definitions, the etymologies, the synonyms, from the secret dictionary of God.

The impossibility of penetrating the divine pattern of the universe cannot stop us from planning human patterns, even though we are concious they are not definitive. The analytic language of Wilkins is not the least admirable of such patterns. The classes and species that compose it are contradictory and vague; the nimbleness of letters in the words meaning subdivisions and divisions is, no doubt, gifted. The word salmon does not tell us anything; zana, the corresponding word, defines (for the man knowing the forty categories and the species of these categories) a scaled river fish, with ruddy meat. (Theoretically, it is not impossible to think of a language where the name of each thing says all the details of its destiny, past and future).

Leaving hopes and utopias apart, probably the most lucid ever written about language are the following words by Chesterton: "He knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless than the colours of an autumn forest... Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them, in all their tones and semitones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire" (G. F. Watts, page 88, 1904).

(1) Theoretically, the number of numbering systems is unlimited. The most complete (used by the divinities and the angels) has an infinite number of symbols, one for each individual number; the simplest needs only two. Zero is written as 0, one 1, two 10, three 11, four 100, five 101, six 110, seven 111, eight 1000... This is an invention by Leibniz, who was stimulated (it seems) by the enigmatic hexagrammes of I Ching.

Biographical Material on John Wilkins

(From http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/wilkins/wilkins.html)

Bishop John Wilkins

John Wilkins chaired the founding meeting of the Royal Society and was its first secretary. He was the only person to have been head of a college in both Cambridge and Oxford. He was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge but was deposed at the Restoration in 1660: he had married Oliver Cromwell's sister, and this did not endear him to returning royalty. He had previously been Warden of Wadham College, Oxford.

He is of interest to cryptographers because he wrote a book called `Mercury, or the Secret and Swift Messenger', which is described in David Kahn's history `The Codebreakers' as `the first book in English on cryptography'. It is much more than that: it is a treatise on the state of the art in seventeenth century telegraphy.

Wilkins describes a number of optical and acoustic techniques. He explains how the letters of the alphabet can be represented as five bits each and then transmitted using any available means - such as two different bells, or a musket shot for `0' and a cannon shot for `1'. He goes on to what may be the first systematic treatment of coding in different number bases (binary and ternary). This technology evolved into the chains of semaphore stations used by both Britain and France in the Napoleonic wars, and they in turn stimulated the development of the electric telegraph in the mid-nineteenth century. He also speculates on whether a universal language could be constructed; this inspired Roget's thesaurus, and (much later) Esparanto.

In passing, Wilkins explains how to protect telegraph messages against being understood by hostile observers. As well as showing how to break simple substitution ciphers, and introducing various geometrical enciphering schemes, he proposes the use of nulls to make cryptanalysis harder. He not only launches the subject of cryptology into the English literature, but introduces the words `cryptographia' and `cryptologia' to the English language. The book ends with two pages on cryptography policy that are still pertinent today. His conclusion is that `If all those useful Inventions that are liable to abuse, should therefore be concealed, there is not any Art or Science which might be lawfully profest'.

John Wilkins was born on the 1st January 1614, the son of an Oxford watchmaker. He became an undergraduate at Magdalen Hall when he was only 13 and graduated MA in 1634. He sided with the republican faction becoming chaplain to a series of anti-Stuart noblemen, and wrote `Mercury' in 1641 at the age of 27. The Civil War broke out the following year, and when it ended in 1648 he was made Warden of Wadham College, a former royalist stronghold in Oxford. Although this was a political appointment - he was awarded his doctorate only the following year - he proved to be an able and vigorous academic, writing on a huge range of practical topics ranging from the design of submarines to the possibility of travel to the moon. His mission in life was to demolish the Aristotlean view of the world and usher in an age of experimental reason. The meetings of experimental scientists he held in Wadham during the 1650s made the college one of the scientific foci of Europe and later developed into the Royal Society. This was the honeymoon period of Western science. As the shackles of classical scholarship fell away, everything seemed possible for a while - until Newton spoiled the fun by discovering inertia in 1667.

Although Wilkins married Cromwell's sister Robina in 1656, his appointment at Trinity in 1659 was at the demand of the fellowship there, and his subsequent sacking by Charles the Second was strongly protested by them. He then became Secretary of the Royal Society and, in 1668, having made his peace with the King, finally became Bishop of Chester. He died on the 19th November 1672.