Theory Meets Empiricism: English Lexis in John Wilkins’ Philosophical Language and the Role of William Lloyd

• Gabriele Knappe

Viewed from the perspective of the history of English linguistics, it is a fortunate coincidence that important early insights into the structure of the English language unfolded within a seventeenth-century scheme for an artificial language. Although John Wilkins’ Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668) intends to deal with ideas and their universal relationship to one another within a large-scale universal philosophy, what it in fact considers are words, in particular English words. The Alphabetical Dictionary, printed as the final part of the Essay project and drawn up by William Lloyd, underlines this feature. Professor Gneuss, in his fundamental survey and bibliography of English language scholarship from its beginnings to the end of the nineteenth century, emphasizes the important fact that this “admirable complete dictionary of English” had been “strangely neglected by historians of English lexicography” for a long time.

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