Word as definition. A key principle of the Comenian project for universal language: its sources and contexts

Abstract

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to re-examine the intellectual history of a principle central to seventeenth-century universal language projects. We call this principle ‘word as definition’. It is the requirement that every word in the dictionary of a new language should already be, by its shape, a definition of what it denotes: the root of the word would express the proximate genus and the affixes the specific difference. In Comenius, we find it first formulated in the Via lucis and later elaborated in the Panglottia manuscript. Besides the medieval and early modern mystical traditions, Johann Heinrich Bisterfeld and Marin Mersenne are key figures in the process of its emergence. In this respect, Comenius plays a role in the link between the ‘continental’ and the British approach to the problem of language reform.