Great story. Wilkins and his language also feature in Stephenson’s “System of the World” books. The excellent book “In the land of invented languages” by Arika Okrent dedicates chapter 2 to Wilkins. I should point out, I didn’t go seeking information about Wilkins, but his language just seems to come up randomly for me.
Okrent’s book also has excellent introductions to Esperanto and Lojban. Lojban is a modern attempt to create a language without ambiguity. That turns out to be hard…speaking takes on some of the characteristics of writing a mathematical proof.
Minor nit: “System of the World” is the third novel in the Baroque Cycle, after Quicksilver and The Confusion.
I really enjoyed these books for the SF world-building perspective on the emergence in the 17th Century of modern science and finance, global trade, communications, etc. Many of the normal comments on Stephenson’s writing style apply, YMMV.
After reading _Quicksilver_ I began to wonder if a Universal Language, as conceived by Wilkins, could have an extremely powerful effect on the "thought patterns" one might instruct an LLM to use when responding to a specific prompt.
Borges's short stories are almost perfect nuggets for computer scientists, seemingly covering such topics as recursion (Garden of Forking Paths), the consequences of infinite memory (Funes), complexity theory (Library of Babel), virtualization (Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius), and so on.
Okrent’s book also has excellent introductions to Esperanto and Lojban. Lojban is a modern attempt to create a language without ambiguity. That turns out to be hard…speaking takes on some of the characteristics of writing a mathematical proof.
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