Borges on John Wilkins

I have a new-found soft spot for a gent called John Wilkins, who Luis Borges refers to with typical fascination for Wilkins' Quixotic pursuit of a Universal language.

" The words of the analytical language created by John Wilkins are not mere arbitrary symbols; each letter in them has a meaning, like those from the Holy Writ had for the Cabbalists. Mauthner points out that children would be able to learn this language without knowing it be artificial; afterwards, at school, they would discover it being an universal code and a secret encyclopaedia.
Once we have defined Wilkins' procedure, it is time to examine a problem which could be impossible or at least difficult to postpone: the value of this four-level table which is the base of the language. Let us consider the eighth category, the category of stones. Wilkins divides them into common (silica, gravel, schist), modics (marble, amber, coral), precious (pearl, opal), transparent (amethyst, sapphire) and insolubles (chalk, arsenic). Almost as surprising as the eighth, is the ninth category. This one reveals to us that metals can be imperfect (cinnabar, mercury), artificial (bronze, brass), recremental (filings, rust) and natural (gold, tin, copper). Beauty belongs to the sixteenth category; it is a living brood fish, an oblong one."

" In the universal language which Wilkins invented in the seventeenth century, each word is defined by itself. Descartes, in a letter dated November 1629, had already noticed that, using the decimal number system, it may take only one day to learn how to name all the numbers up to infinity and how to write them in a new language, namely that of ciphers; he did also suggest the creation of a language similar to this former system, a general language, organizing and covering all human ideas. John Wilkins, around 1664, started to work on this task."

http://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/language/johnWilkins.html

Following up on Wilkins, who Borges rightly laments is no longer referenced in the Brittanica,
I found Wikipedia helpful as always: he was Warden of Wadham Oxford, my old college, for ten years, though he is usually given more credit for being Dean of Trinity Cambridge for one.
He was one of the originators of the Royal Society, and a supporter of that great British democrat, Oliver Cromwell. A proud engraving of him now resides on my office wall.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wilkins