Pasigrafía y antipasigrafía a finales del siglo XVIII y a principios del siglo XIX

Abstract

In 1797 a rather short work appeared in Paris in two volumes, under the title Pasigraphie in both its French and German versions. The author, Joseph de Maimieux (1753–1820), is said to have coined the term pasigraphie. With the invention of pasigraphy, Maimieux pursued the goal of creating a conceptually based writing system that could be applied to all languages. In this way, a text written in this script could be read in all languages. The pasigraphic system is based on an a priori system of conceptual classification to which written characters are assigned. It is therefore initially an exclusively written language, on which Maimieux two years later also built a spoken language with the Pasilalie. The first arguments against the endeavour represented by the Pasigraphie were brought forward by Maimieux' immediate contemporaries, the ideologues. These objections were re-affirmed in particular by Johann Severin Vater. The decisive difference between Maimieux and his critics lies in the determination of the role of signs in the formation of concepts. While for Maimieux the signs only name the finished concepts, his critics argued that signs have a function in the constitution of the concepts. A universal language is therefore ultimately not possible, since there are no universal concepts and the individual languages lead to different conceptual structures.