Another Short History of Linguistics (71)

Yet for a long period, the world’s discourse power was holding in the hand of English speakers and they didn’t like Leibniz perhaps because he was a German. I know a story about the inventor of calculus, the English scholar insisted that it was Newton but German scholar insisted it was Leibniz.

Until today, we may find this prejudices, at: http://ial.wikia.com/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes

 “Many great philosophers have taken stances on the topic of universal languages. Derrida, Descartes, Leibniz, Rousseau, Saussure have all commented upon it. Descartes did so in a letter to a friend about his concerns of the Leibnizian project. Leibniz, fascinated with the Chinese script, proposed to create a universal language with the Asian characteristics as a model. From the letter Descartes writes it does not sound like he was aware of the full scope of the project. He mentions learning primitive words of all languages and having a large dictionary of all words of all languages to decipher the text. Leibniz, however, did not want to create a language of text, but rather a language of graphics that could be learned in a matter of a few weeks instead of a lifetime like the Chinese script. Descartes passes the project off as a cumbersome burden suitable only for revelations and mysteries that “no-one who had anything better to do would take the trouble.” He concludes the matter before adding the disclaimer that he might be wrong with, “I do not see that all this has much use.” It might be important to note that Descartes and Leibniz were rivals.”

Leibniz (1646-1716), Descartes (1596-1650) that means to say when Descartes was staying on his dead bed, he made some important criticise of a four year old boy.

It show some clue of the English bias that until 1997, Margaret Thatcher have the famous speech: “In my lifetime all our problems have come from mainland Europe and all the solutions have come from the English-speaking nations across the world.”