“The Best of All Possible Languages”: Marin Mersenne as a Source of Comenius’s Combinatorial Approach to Language Planning

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F67985955%3A_____%2F17%3A00503453" target="_blank" >RIV/67985955:_____/17:00503453 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

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DOI - Digital Object Identifier

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Result language

angličtina

Original language name

“The Best of All Possible Languages”: Marin Mersenne as a Source of Comenius’s Combinatorial Approach to Language Planning

Original language description

Apart from cabbalist and Lullist “philosophical combinatorics”, there is a tradition of mathematical combinatorics connected with transposing letters (phones) from Cardano on. While Girolamo Cardano (1539) uses the combinations of letters as a more or less random illustration of the method of combinatorial calculations, Christopher Clavius (1570) more appropriately applies permutation and Daniel Schwenter (1636) thinks about putting all the gained “words” down. Paul Guldin (1641), moreover, enumerates the media and space needed for such an enterprise. The problem is, step by step, taken more and more seriously. Marin Mersenne and Jan Amos Comenius take this problem as a serious issue too. This study shows the influence of Marin Mersenne’s Harmonie universelle (1636) on Jan Amos Comenius’s combinatorial approach to language planning. The influence could be either direct or indirect (perhaps via a hypothetical translation or abstract by Theodore Haak). However, there is no doubt that Comenius was acquainted with Mersenne’s project in detail. Comenius is the first thinker whose combinatorial calculations are a part of a treatise focused purely on general linguistic (Novissima linguarum methodus, 1648). Kircher’s Polygraphia nova et universalis appears in 1663, Leibniz’s Dissertatio de arte combinatoria in 1666, van Helmont’s Alphabeti vere naturalis Hebraici brevissima delineatio in 1667.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

J_SC - Article in a specialist periodical, which is included in the SCOPUS database

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

60301 - Philosophy, History and Philosophy of science and technology

Project

<a href="/en/project/GB14-37038G" target="_blank" >GB14-37038G: Between Renaissance and Baroque: Philosophy and Knowledge in the Czech Lands within the Wider European Context</a><br>

Continuities

P - Projekt vyzkumu a vyvoje financovany z verejnych zdroju (s odkazem do CEP)

Publication year

2017

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

Acta Comeniana

ISSN

0231-5955

e-ISSN

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Volume of the periodical

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Issue of the periodical within the volume

31/55

Country of publishing house

CZ - CZECH REPUBLIC

Number of pages

19

Pages from-to

23-41

UT code for WoS article

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EID of the result in the Scopus database

2-s2.0-85066815653