“The Best of All Possible Languages”: Marin Mersenne as a Source of Comenius’s Combinatorial Approach to Language Planning

0503453 - FLÚ 2019 RIV CZ eng J - Journal Article
Pavlas, Petr
“The Best of All Possible Languages”: Marin Mersenne as a Source of Comenius’s Combinatorial Approach to Language Planning.
Acta Comeniana. -, 31/55 (2017), s. 23-41. ISSN 0231-5955
R&D Projects: GA ČR GB14-37038G
Institutional support: RVO:67985955
Keywords : Combinatorics * Combinatorial mathematics * Raymond Lull * Girolamo Cardano * Christopher Clavius * Paul Guldin * Daniel Schwenter * Marin Mersenne * Jan Amos Comenius
OECD category: Philosophy, History and Philosophy of science and technology
Method of publishing: Metadata only

Apart from cabbalist and Lullist “philosophical combinatorics”, there is a tradition of mathematical combinatorics connected with transposing letters (phones) from Cardano on. While Girolamo Cardano (1539) uses the combinations of letters as a more or less random illustration of the method of combinatorial calculations, Christopher Clavius (1570) more appropriately applies permutation and Daniel Schwenter (1636) thinks about putting all the gained “words” down. Paul Guldin (1641), moreover, enumerates the media and space needed for such an enterprise. The problem is, step by step, taken more and more seriously. Marin Mersenne and Jan Amos Comenius take this problem as a serious issue too. This study shows the influence of Marin Mersenne’s Harmonie universelle (1636) on Jan Amos Comenius’s combinatorial approach to language planning. The influence could be either direct or indirect (perhaps via a hypothetical translation or abstract by Theodore Haak). However, there is no doubt that Comenius was acquainted with Mersenne’s project in detail. Comenius is the first thinker whose combinatorial calculations are a part of a treatise focused purely on general linguistic (Novissima linguarum methodus, 1648). Kircher’s Polygraphia nova et universalis appears in 1663, Leibniz’s Dissertatio de arte combinatoria in 1666, van Helmont’s Alphabeti vere naturalis Hebraici brevissima delineatio in 1667.
Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0295298