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A Remarkable 1668 Writing System by John Wilkins

The character matrix that can be viewed from this page, is from An Essay Towards a Real Character and Philosophical Language, London, 1668.
• The real character, named in the title, was a kind of phonemic shorthand for English.
• The philosophical language was an attempt to develop symbols which would directly express things. This was Wilkin's prototype for a universal language.

 
Bishop Wilkins (1614 - 1672), one of the founders of the Royal Society, was held in high esteem by his contemporaries but not necessarily for his work in linguistics. Most of his contemporaries considered his venture into linguistics a monumental waste of time. Today he is recognized for making major contributions to the quest for a universal language and to the development of symbolic logic. Even today, few have indicated an appreciation for his work in phonology and orthography. .

I find Wilkins' shorthand to be remarkably advanced for 1668. The system is more advanced than any system devised for the next 100 years. Had it been promoted or discovered by those concerned with rapid writing, his reputation might have been quite different than it is today. It appears that those concerned with pragmatics were unaware of Wilkins' work. Ellis and Pitman, who devised the most popular system of shorthand in the 1840's appear to among the few to have been aware of the relevance of Wilkins' work to what they were trying to do. Perhaps because they independently arrived at the same point, they fail to acknowledge any dependence on Wilkins.

Wilkins seems to have identified 31 consonant categories and had enough shape options for 12 vowels. He chose to retain long-short vowel ambiguity in his syllabary but he had an alternate notation that could, with a 2-character digraphs, indicate a greater number sound categories.

The system that Wilkins used, however, included only 6 vowels plus combinations with Y and W. Wilkins' writing system has the same ambiguity as TO (traditional orthography) The following chart comparing different notational systems shows how Wilkin's used a slanted line representing Y to create the sounds for /ei/ (eh+y) mid loop + slant and /ai/ (ah+y) low loop + slant. Attaching the same mid loop /eh/ phonogram to the R phonogram [ ( ] created the sound sign for /air/.

The vowels were indicated by either a loop or a flattened C shape at three different heights above the base line. Two markers x 2 horizontal positions x 3 vertical positions results in 12 possible sound signs.





As shown in this chart, Wilkins identified all the significant sounds of English but then reverted to a six vowel system. A given sign in Wilkins' character set could refer to either the long or short form of the vowel. For example, the loop can refer to either the vowel sound in hoop or hook. By contrast, the fancy y shape refers only to the vowel sound in up. Wilkins failed to identify a short (unstressed) sound found in the first syllable of *acute. This could be placed in the open position.

rod  mat met  fit  o-vote  u-fool  y-but  yi-bite  yu-owl  (the script y is a kind of schwa) from Subbiondo 92

dhat  dzhin  thin  tshat  leizhure  shut  ingk

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A Similar Analysis with New Follick notation
MenuSpell notation in red   NuFolik in blue  TO in green
 

amb	short	extended	+ uh	+ ee	+ r*	y +
a	a /ae/ ah-eh at, ax	a:  o  /a:/ ah  ah alms, ox	a' uh ago a'go'	ai  y ah-ee buy by	ar ah-r are ar	ya   ia' ee-ah Asia
e	e eh edge ej	e:   ei eh-ee date / de:t deh-eet	e' eh-yuh hair her he'(r)	ei ay ace eis	er eh-er air er	ye yeh yay
i	i ih itch	i: ee each i:ch	i' ee-uh Asia azi'	ai ah-ee eye y	ir eer ear ir ire yr	yi   yi: yee yeast ee'uh-ee yet   iet
o	o ah	o:  q awe  o: talk to:k	o' /ou/ aw-u'h owe, oh	oi aw-ee oil boi	or ore oar	yo' ee-oh yoke io'k
u	u uh cup kup	u: ooze u:z rule ru:l thru	u' hook hu'k put pJt book bu'k	ui  u:i: oo-ee chewy chui	ur u:r tour tu'r urn 'rn	yu   i:u: ee-oo you  iu ute  iut

The lack of a true consonant y (yod grapheme) is a problem for NuFolik where y = /ai/.
In the more pragmatic version of NF, positional spelling allows the use of the consonant y in the initial position where NF would normally use `I.

No system with digraphs will be without alternate ways to represent the same sound.

Ah yehm gohing awn uh deh:eet. Menu Spel.   "I am going on a date" TO   `I em go'ing o:n a' de:t. NF

All digraphic systems will have duplicate ways of representing the same sound. All digraphic systems
will deviate from the ideal of one and only one symbol per sound.

Wilkins recommendations:

The letters, the most simple elements of speech, ought to be expressed by the most simple names which would signify their several powers.

Regarding Shape:

• They should be the most simple and facil and yet elegant and comely
• They must be sufficiently distinguished from one another
• There should be some kind of correspondence between the figure and the nature and kind of the letters which they express.

Comment

While the recommendations are consistent with pictographic monofon, Wilkins was not talking about using pictographic letter names or using any kind of mnemonic.

Wilkin's letter names were the same as we use today with the addition of 16 new signs. The shapes of Wilkins' letters have no relation to the Roman character set. He felt that the relationship between shape and sound should not be arbitrary, yet his choices do not seem to be constrained by anything more than internal consistency, simplicity, and using similar shapes for similar sounds.

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Half of the 12 positions, mentioned earlier, were used used to indicate whether the vowel came before or after the consonant stem to which it was usually attached. If so, then Wilkins is content to use the same shape to indicate either a long or short vowel. Just why Wilkins wanted to retain this ambiguity is difficult to understand.

While the 43 sound categories he identified may not be identical to the 40 or so categories linguists use today, they are remarkably close.

If his work is an independent invention, identifying the sound categories alone would be a major achievement.

Wilkins' acknowledges his indebtedness to others. Today, most of the references are very obscure. Most books dating from the 16th and 17th century are not readily available.

Wilkins displays considerable acquaintance with the Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Illyrian, Georgian, Gothic, Ethiopic, and Coptic alphabets. He dismissed them all as inadequate and argued that the letters seemed to be in a confused order and were unsystematic in their correspondence between form and sound.

Since writing systems were arbitrary, all people should agree on the same expression as they agree on the same concept.

Many other people had worked on phonetic shorthands before and after Wilkins. He may have been the first to match similar sound categories with similar character forms. The next person to use reflexive forms for the related letter pairs p-b, d-t, k-g, etc. does not appear until around 1740. (Unless Wm. Upham overlooked a few of the inventors in his book on the history of shorthand). While Upham recognizes 48 people who had proposed systems to advance phonography from 1600 to 1840, he does not list Wilkins. This suggests that perhaps Wilkins may not have had any direct influence on others who were working on visible speech ideas.

Since Alexander Ellis, who collaborated with Pitman, was familiar with Wilkin's work, I am interested in finding out if Isaac Pitman owes any debt to Wilkins. The way that Pitman's 1830-1850 shorthands use vertical position to denote different vowel sounds seems very close to the convention that Wilkin's used.

Two shapes: a loop and a c-shape are used to reference 6 vowel sounds:

The idea of referencing vowel sounds through spatial positioning seems to predate the strategy used by Pitman in 1849. Ellis, who collaborated with Pitman, has indicated his indebtedness to Wilkins. I don't recall reading anywhere that Pitman suggested that his work had been influenced by Wilkins. Is there any connection or is Pitman's shorthand a reinvention of this strategy?

The Cree syllabary is another writing system that uses the same symbol in different orientations to multiply the number of signs.

Similar sounds are grouped
Reflexive forms are used to represent a similar sounds (e.g., PB, FV, CG )

It was not until 1760 that someone else (Henry Taplin) begins to use reflexive character shapes to indicate similar consonal sounds.

Reflexive forms are used extensively in Kingsley Read's Shavian script and in Pictographic Monofon. Some Roman forms such as [p] and [b] are already reflexive but possibly due to the fact that the characters are not contiguous in alphabetical order, this is rarely pointed out. While the relationship appears to be accidental, one could claim that the shapes are similar to show the affinity between the two labial consonants.

Historically, some shapes were similar because the sounds were confused. The Egyptians rarely distinguished beween the R and the L and therefore use the same or similar shape to represent both of them. Some R words began as L words and vv. The roots for the word lion, "leo" and "ru" may have been pronounced quite similar in the past. Both roots are found in Egyptian. There was a similar confusion between the /t/ and /d/ sounds. While these were distinct pictographic phonograms representing a loaf of bread and a hand, they were often hard to distinguish when written.

To view the matrix, click on the underlined text

Wilkins Shorthand Syllabary - 572 sound signs.
File size: 50kb: This is an oversized graphic.
Use the slider at the bottom and right side of the browser window to view the entire page.

A non-roman character set consisting of a 12x31 syllabary with 572 cells listing Consonant -Vowel Combinations.

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30 Kb John Wilkin's Visible Speech
from An Essay Towards a Real Character and Philosophical Language, London, 1668

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last revised:  May, 1999

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