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‘Philosophical’ grammar in John Wilkins’s ‘Essay’*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

Vivian Salmon
Vivian Salmon*
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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Extract

Recent studies of John Wilkins, author of An essay towards a real character, and a philosophical language (1668) have examined aspects of his life and work which illustrate the modernity of his attitudes, both as a theologian, sympathetic to the ecumenical ideals of seventeenth-century reformers like John Amos Comenius (DeMott 1955, 1958), and as an amateur scientist enthusiastically engaged in forwarding the interests of natural philosophy in his involvement with the Royal Society. His linguistic work has, accordingly, been examined for its relevance to seventeenth-century thought and for evidence of its modernity; described by a twentieth-century scientist as “impressive” and as “a prodigious piece of work” (Andrade 1936:6, 7), the Essay has been highly praised for its classification of reality (Vickery 1953:326, 342) and for its insight into phonetics and semantics (Linsky 1966:60). It has also, incidentally, been examined for the evidence it offers on seventeenth-century pronunciation (Dobson 1968).

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , Fall 1975 , pp. 131 - 160
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1975

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Footnotes

*

I should like to thank Professor R. H. Robins and Professor G. Bursill-Hall for reading this paper, which I have revised in the light of their very helpful comments.

I should also like to thank the Reverend Professor T. F. Torrance for his generous assistance with information on the theological context in which Wilkins wrote the Essay.

The responsibility for any mistakes remains, of course, entirely with the author.

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