Another Short History of Linguistics (68)

Leibniz developed the idea of Rene Descartes form:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristica_universalis

“Many Leibniz scholars writing in English seem to agree that he intended his characteristica universalis or “universal character” to be a form of pasigraphy, or ideographic language. This was to be based on a rationalised version of the ‘principles’ of Chinese characters, as Europeans understood these characters in the seventeenth century. From this perspective it is common to find the characteristica universalis associated with contemporary universal language projects like Esperanto, auxiliary languages like Interlingua, and formal logic projects like Frege’s Begriffsschrift. The global expansion of European commerce in Leibniz's time provided mercantilist motivations for a universal language of trade so that traders could communicate with any natural language.”

In the time of Leibniz, with only around 30,000 words in each developed language, he didn’t think about the issue of vocabulary soaring up to one million. Or we may say that the Leibniz knew the vocabulary explosion issue unconsciously. But today, this issue turned to be the most important issue in linguistic area and it seemed no one dared touch this topic.