An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language

[2] A scheme for a lingua franca based on numerical values had been published by John Pell (1630); and in his 1640 work Mercury or the Secret Messenger (1640) Wilkins had mentioned the possibility of developing a trade language.

[3] Seth Ward was author with Wilkins of Vindiciae academiarum (1654), a defence of the Commonwealth period of the Oxbridge university system against outsider reformers.

[4] Ward's ideas derived from a number of sources, such as Cyprian Kinner who was a follower of Comenius, Ramon Lull, and Georg Ritschel.

It was intended as a pasigraphy, in other words, to provide elementary building blocks from which could be constructed the universe's every possible thing and notion.

One criticism (among many) is that "words expressing closely related ideas have almost the same form, differing perhaps by their last letter only...[I]t would be exceedingly difficult to remember all these minute distinctions, and confusion would arise, in rapid reading and particularly in conversation.

"[14] (Umberto Eco notes[15] that Wilkins himself made such a mistake in the Essay, using Gαde (barley) where apparently Gαpe (tulip) was meant.)

George Edmonds sought to improve Wilkins's Philosophical Language by reorganizing its grammar and orthography while keeping its taxonomy.

In Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, character Daniel Waterhouse spends considerable time supporting the development of Wilkins's classification system.