Borges begins by noting John Wilkins's absence from the 14th edition of the
Encyclopædia Britannica and makes the case for Wilkins's significance, highlighting in particular the universal language scheme detailed in his
An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668). Wilkins's system decomposes the entire universe of "things and notions" into successively smaller divisions and subdivisions, assigning at each step of this decomposition a syllable, consonant, or vowel. Wilkins intended for these conceptual building blocks to be recombined to represent anything on earth or in heaven. The basic example Borges gives is "
de, which means an element;
deb, the first of the elements, fire;
deba, a part of the element of fire, a flame." Examining this and other second-hand examples from Wilkins's schemehe did not have access to Wilkins's actual work, but based his comments on others' comments on itBorges believes he finds "ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies", concluding "it is clear that there is no classification of the Universe not being arbitrary and full of conjectures." He fancifully likens Wilkins's classification scheme to a "certain Chinese encyclopedia," one of his own fabrication but attributed to translator
Franz Kuhn, called the
Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, said to divide animals into "(a)those that belong to the Emperor, (b)embalmed ones, (c)those that are trained, (d)suckling pigs, (e)mermaids, (f)fabulous ones, (g)stray dogs, (h)those that are included in the present classification, (i)those that tremble as if they are mad, (j)innumerable ones, (k)those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l)others, (m)those that have just broken a flower vase, (n)those that look like flies from a long way off." Borges's point is the arbitrary nature of such taxonomies, regardless of whether they form a language or just a way of understanding and ordering the world. He challenges the idea of the universe as something we can understand at all"we do not know what thing the universe is"much less describe using language. While considering Wilkins's effort naïve, Borges ultimately praises the ambition of a universal language and admits that Wilkins's word for salmon,
zana, could (for someone well-versed in Wilkins's language) hold more meaning than the corresponding words in conventional languages, which are arbitrary and carry no intrinsic meaning. He says that, "Theoretically, it is not impossible to think of a language where the name of each thing says all the details of its destiny, past and future." ==Commentary and uses by others==