Definovat a kombinovat - Komenského projekt posledního jazyka – Pavlas Petr (2019)

Jan Amos Komenský occupies a special position in the literature on the history of the search for a perfect language: everyone mentions him, yet almost no one attributes to him a more significant role or originality. Nevertheless, Komenský's project of a perfect language was original, due to its combination of a strictly rationalist approach with a deeply eschatological, even millenarian expectation. This book therefore examines Komenský's endeavor as logical-theological, and through this prism, places it in the context of the intellectual space of the early modern republic of scholars. The most important direct inspiration for Komenský turns out to be the French minorite Marin Mersenne, particularly with his 'harmonic', that is, combinatorial approach to the search for the best of possible languages. The thesis of the book is that Komenský is historically the very first author to incorporate calculations of combinatorial mathematics into a treatise on general linguistics. We are, of course, still far from the language of ones and zeros, yet even in the 16th and 17th centuries, a kind of prehistory of reflections culminating in binary computer code, this contemporary 'perfect language' sui generis, emerges. In the final part, the interpretation of the book culminates where it reaches its furthest theological horizon and Komenský's idea...