What do Plato, Dante Alighieri, Guillaume Postel, Raymond Lull, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Nicholas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, Giulio Camillo, Athanasius Kircher, John Wilkins, Francis Lodwick , Leibniz, Giacomo Leopardi, Ludwik Zamenhof, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Noam Chomsky have all in common? They were all interested (or obsessed) in finding a perfect language.

While many thinkers have argued about the possible existence of a perfect language, few have tried to find it. Some philosophers discovered it using symbols, logic, geometry or mathematics. Some linguists (and ophthalmologists) recalled old languages or shaped new ones, such as Esperanto.

After examining different models and explanations, I came to the conclusion that a perfect language cannot be made out of words but universal elements that can be recognized by any civilization from anywhere and anytime.

There are two authors that became crucial in my research, Jonathan Swift and Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussere, who initiated Structuralism, affirmed that a sign is formed by the associative link between the signifier (the sound pattern of a word, either in mental projection — as when we silently recite lines from a poem to ourselves — or in actual, physical realization as part of a speech act)  and a signified (the concept or meaning of the word). Signs exist in opposition to other signs. That is, signs are created by their value relationships with other signs. The contrasts that form between signs of the same nature in a network of relationships is how signs derive their meaning. 

Swift, best known for his masterpiece, Gulliver’s Travels, tells on Book III, Chapter 5 “..since words are only names for things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express the particular business they are to discourse on…many of the most learned and wise adhere to the new scheme of expressing themselves by things, which has only this inconvenience attending it, that if a man's business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be obliged in proportion to carry a greater bundle of things upon his back, unless he can afford one or two strong servants to attend him…Another great advantage proposed by this invention, was that is would serve as an universal language to be understood in all civilized nations, whose goods and utensils are generally of the same kind, or nearly resembling, so that their uses might easily be comprehended. And thus ambassadors would be qualified to treat with foreign princes or ministers of state, to whose tongues they were utter strangers.”

Both authors helped me to synthesize a novel approach to build a perfect language by employing the objects certain words denote.  Thus, a perfect language functions as a metalanguage instead of a natural or formal language.

In this case, I used 1.100 classic candies to depict the word “candy/confectionary” in Japanese (菓子). This work appeared in the movie “Elipsis”, produced by 20^th Century Fox in 2006.