Another Short History of Linguistics (63)

Mathematics required a more abstract thinking style than literature. Or we may say that mathematics leaves us further than literature. Those who doesn’t like mathematics had tried to attract the people’s attention by claiming that the language had a special rule called grammar. Someone even called grammar as the logic of language. But after few hundred years’ development of this grammar, every language turned to be more complex. Until René Descartes who called back this development a little bit. Instead, he was trying to invent a new expressing system called universal language, “The great advantage of such a language would be that it would represent everything ‘distinctement.’ Yet, the great problem faced by someone who wanted to create such a language was the nature of the human imagination itself. ”

Such language is planed mathematically so among the meaning of words, there could be no overlap and no gap (grammar is making overlap as double expression). Anyway the idea is a simplest, clearest language. Stand in the viewpoint of mathematics, it is very easy to understand such a language, but in the viewpoint of literature, it could be a little bit hard to know. Although the idea was fruitless one, yet it gave an imagination of classify the space and that was the Cartesian coordinate which is used by modern people every day.

Here we may find that in ancient time that the Egyptian pictogram inspired Aristotle about semantics. One and half thousand years later, the pictogram of Chinee inspired Cartesian for universal language.