Cave Beck
Encyclopedia
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
schoolmaster and clergyman, the author of The Universal Character (published in London, 1657) in which he proposed a universal language
Universal language
Universal language may refer to a hypothetical or historical language spoken and understood by all or most of the world's population. In some circles, it is a language said to be understood by all living things, beings, and objects alike. It may be the ideal of an international auxiliary language...
based on a numerical system.
Life
Beck was born in LondonLondon
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
in 1623, the son of John Beck, a baker
Baker
A baker is someone who bakes and sells bread, Cakes and similar foods may also be produced, as the traditional boundaries between what is produced by a baker as opposed to a pastry chef have blurred in recent decades...
of the parish of St. John, Clerkenwell
Clerkenwell
Clerkenwell is an area of central London in the London Borough of Islington. From 1900 to 1965 it was part of the Metropolitan Borough of Finsbury. The well after which it was named was rediscovered in 1924. The watchmaking and watch repairing trades were once of great importance...
. He was educated in a private school in London run by a Mr. Brathwayte, and on 13th June 1638 was admitted as a pensioner of St. John's College, Cambridge. He took the degree of B.A.
Bachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
in 1641, and subsequently that of M.A.
Master of Arts (postgraduate)
A Master of Arts from the Latin Magister Artium, is a type of Master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The M.A. is usually contrasted with the M.S. or M.Sc. degrees...
, being incorporated in the latter at Oxford
Oxford
The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...
on 17th October 1643.
Beck was headmaster of Ipswich School
Ipswich School
Ipswich School is a co-educational public school for girls and boys aged 3 to 18. Situated in Suffolk, England in the town of Ipswich, it was founded in its current form as The King's School, Ipswich by Thomas Wolsey in 1528....
, Ipswich
Ipswich
Ipswich is a large town and a non-metropolitan district. It is the county town of Suffolk, England. Ipswich is located on the estuary of the River Orwell...
in Suffolk
Suffolk
Suffolk is a non-metropolitan county of historic origin in East Anglia, England. It has borders with Norfolk to the north, Cambridgeshire to the west and Essex to the south. The North Sea lies to the east...
from 1650 to 1657 - Beck Street in that same town is named after him. In 1657, he resigned and was replaced by former usher Robert Woodside; he was subsequently instituted to St. Helen's, Ipswich or Monksoham
Monk Soham
Monk Soham is a civil parish in the English county of Suffolk, four miles north east of Debenham and six miles north west of Framlingham.In 1868, the parish was recorded as "wholly agricultural"....
(in Suffolk) of which he was also rector. In 1662 he became curate
Curate
A curate is a person who is invested with the care or cure of souls of a parish. In this sense "curate" correctly means a parish priest but in English-speaking countries a curate is an assistant to the parish priest...
of St. Margaret, Ipswich, and in the same year, by lapse, rector
Rector
The word rector has a number of different meanings; it is widely used to refer to an academic, religious or political administrator...
of St. Helen's, Ipswich, with St. Clement's annexed.
Beck's date of death is uncertain - however he was certainly alive in 1697, and William Ray, who was
instituted to Monksoham in 1706, was probably his immediate successor.
Work
Beck is remembered for his book, "The Universal Character", published in London in 1657; it was also published the same year in French. The books's full title was "The Universal Character, by which all Nations in the World may understand one another's Conceptions, Reading out of one Common Writing their own Mother Tongues. An Invention of General Use, the Practise whereof may be Attained in two Hours' space, Observing the Grammatical Directions. Which Character is so contrived, that it may be Spoken as well as Written".In his book Beck sought to invent a universal language that could be understood and used by anyone in the world, no matter what their mother tongue. It was based on the ten Arabic numerals, 0-9, which he proposed the following pronunciations:
1. Aun, 2. Too, 3. Tray, 4. For orfo, 5. Fai, 6. Sic, 7. Sen, 8. At, 9. Nin, 0. o.
The combinations of these characters, intended to express all the main words in any language, were to be arranged in numerical order, from zero to 10,000, which he considered sufficient to cover all words in general use.
Every word was assigned a unique number and this number was the same whatever the native language of the user. Each language would have its own alphabetically ordered list of words for reference. Letters were also used in his system, either before or after the number, to indicate concepts like nouns, cases
Grammatical case
In grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun is an inflectional form that indicates its grammatical function in a phrase, clause, or sentence. For example, a pronoun may play the role of subject , of direct object , or of possessor...
, verbal tenses
Grammatical tense
A tense is a grammatical category that locates a situation in time, to indicate when the situation takes place.Bernard Comrie, Aspect, 1976:6:...
etc.
The system, though arousing interest, was not well received by those who studied it. The words were in most instances extended to an unmanageable length, and the difficulty of discovering the meaning of the numerical group which represented the desired "radical" was increased by the still greater difficulty of disconnecting the number from the modifying appendage, and of analysing the component parts of the latter.
On the frontispiece of Beck's "The Universal Character" is an engraving by William Faithorne
William Faithorne
William Faithorne , often "the Elder", , English painter and engraver, was born in London and was apprenticed to William Peake....
, and the figure of the European is supposed, with great probability, to be the portrait of the author.
See also
- PasigraphyPasigraphyA pasigraphy is a writing system where each written symbol represents a concept rather than a word or sound or series of sounds in a spoken language. The aim is to be intelligible to persons of all languages...
- George DalgarnoGeorge DalgarnoGeorge Dalgarno was a Scottish intellectual interested in linguistic problems. Originally from Aberdeen, he later worked as a schoolteacher in Oxford in collaboration with John Wilkins, although the two parted company intellectually in 1659.-Works:...
(1635-1682) and John WilkinsJohn WilkinsJohn Wilkins FRS was an English clergyman, natural philosopher and author, as well as a founder of the Invisible College and one of the founders of the Royal Society, and Bishop of Chester from 1668 until his death....
(1614-72) collaborated together in an attempt to devise a universal character. - Joachim Becher proposed a numerically based universal language scheme in his book "Character pro notitia linguarum universali" in 1661.
- Athanasius KircherAthanasius KircherAthanasius Kircher was a 17th century German Jesuit scholar who published around 40 works, most notably in the fields of oriental studies, geology, and medicine...
(1601/2 – 1680) proposed a universal language in "Polygraphia nova et universalis" in 1663.