Review of “Cave Beck: The Universal Character”, prepared with foreword by Andrew Drummond, pub 2020
book cover
Is Cave Beck perchance a stream in Yorkshire, sez you? No, sez I, he was an Ipswich schoolmaster who in 1657 published a scheme for a universal language. As those who have read Mr Drummond’s novel A Hand-Book of Volapük will be aware, he is hugely interested in universal languages. That novel was set in the late 19th century, when several were being invented at once; Beck lived in the 17th-century Enlightenment era when there had also been interest in the search for such a language, which its adherents fondly imagined would enable “all the Nations in the World to understand one another’s Conceptions”.
This book begins with an introduction by Drummond in which, with his usual dry humour, he enumerates several reasons why Beck’s idea did not take off. A profusion of typos in Beck’s work, plus a hopeless system of cross-referencing and indexing and an eccentric choice of vocabulary, rank high, though personally I would add another which Drummond doesn’t see as a problem in itself. Beck’s system was partly mathematical: he substitutes numbers for certain words (the “primitives” or radicals from which others can be formed) and uses letters to represent cases, persons and tenses. Thus, for instance, the verb “to see” is 480 - pronounced “forato”, for this was to be a spoken as well as a written language and Beck gives a pronunciation guide. Agent nouns are prefixed by “p” and feminines by “f”, so a woman who sees would be “pf480”, unless she’s in the accusative case, when she is “pif480”. “We will see” would be “ag480s (agforatos)” And so on…
The idea was, firstly, that words from any language could be transferred into this code (in fact it would only really work for European languages, and a French version of the book did come out in the same year) and secondly, that it would be easy to learn. Beck points out that Latin, though it was at the time something of a universal language for highly educated Europeans, took years to learn. He reckons a child of ten can learn his universal language in four months. I can only say that this child, and Beck himself, clearly don’t share my own numerophobia: as soon as I saw the system involved numbers as well as letters, I knew I could never learn it.
Nevertheless, his grammar does actually make sense in principle; what does not is his choice of root words, which goes by the alphabet; whichever comes first in the dictionary becomes the radical. This leads to nonsense like “made” being the radical and “make” having to refer back to it. The dictionary which takes up much of the book is however fascinating for what it shows about his priorities and those of his day. In contrast to the Junior Oxford dictionary, which culled numerous plant names a few years back, Beck names every herb and tree he can recall, including “cat’s-tail, a long round thing growing on nut-trees”. There are also a remarkable number of worms, including the hand-worme, the palmer worme (he doesn’t say if it sports a little cockleshell badge) and “a worme eating vines”.
This dictionary is in fact a wonderful time-wasting device; who wouldn’t want to know more about the lentish tree, the material Fillip & Cheyney, or the disease known as purples? To be a fan of the book as a whole you probably need a basic interest in linguistics, especially in the whole idea of invented languages. But for those of us who do, this is an essential little gem.