In most philosophical languages, words are constructed from a limited set of morphemes that are treated as "elemental" or "fundamental".
Vocabularies of oligosynthetic languages are made of compound words, which are coined from a small (theoretically minimal) set of morphemes.
In 1855, English writer George Edmonds modified Wilkins' system, leaving its taxonomy intact, but changing the grammar, orthography and pronunciation of the language in an effort to make it easier to speak and to read.
[2] These projects aimed not only to reduce or model grammar, but also to arrange all human knowledge into "characters" or hierarchies.
Under the entry Charactère, D'Alembert critically reviewed the projects of philosophical languages of the preceding century.