Introduction
The early modern period saw the rise of a remarkable interest in language and possible ways of reforming it. This interest found its most ambitious manifestation in various projects for creating an artificial language, which flourished in England and on the Continent in the seventeenth century, culminating in the 1660s with the publication of George Dalgarno’s Ars signorum (1661) and John Wilkins’s Essay towards a real character and a philosophical language (1668). A number of causes lay behind this pursuit of artificial languages: (i) the decline of Latin as a lingua franca and the rise of vernaculars, (ii) increased contact with extra-European civilizations, which brought with it both a need for interlinguistic communication (for purposes of diplomacy, commerce and proselytism) and a mass of new information about other languages and notation systems, (iii) religious concerns...
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Dumitru, C. (2020). Artificial Languages. In: Jalobeanu, D., Wolfe, C.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20791-9_217-1
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