Cave Beck

Frontispiece from Beck's Universal Character

Cave Beck (born 1623 ; died 1706 ) was an English school teacher in Ipswich . He became known as the author of The Universal Character , a paper published in London in 1657, in which he proposed a universal language based on a numerical system .

Life

The language Beck described was not very structured. It was based on a list of 3996 English words determined by an index number. The meaning of these "roots" could be modified in many ways by adding letters. Beck also proposed a system for pronouncing these digit words. He hoped that the use of his language would facilitate the trade and Christian mission of indigenous peoples .

His approach was criticized by George Dalgarno , who also endeavored to develop a universal language, as nothing else, but an enigmatical way of writing the English language (“just a tricky way of writing English ”).

literature

• Cave Beck: The universal character, by which all the nations in the world may understand one anothers conceptions, reading out of one common writing in their own mother tongues; an invention of general use, the practice whereof may be attained in two hours space, observing the grammatical directions, which character is so contrived, that it may be spoken as well as written. London: William Weekley, 1657 (Reprint: University Microfilms, 1981)
• Vivian Salmon: The Study of Language in 17th-Century England . 2nd Edition. Amsterdam 1988, pp. 176-190
• MM Slaughter: Universal Languages ​​and Scientific Taxonomy in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge 1982. pp. 120-121

Web links

• Cave Beck in a catalog of the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford

Individual evidence

1. ^ Letter to Samuel Hartlib , April 20, 1657, British Library, Ms. Add. 4377, fol. 148r.