Artificial Languages Between Innate Faculties

The history of pre-modern science is not in accordance with the fashionable multiculturalism of yesteryear that placed Arabs, Chinese, Euro-Americans, Indians and others in separate and impermeable cognitive worlds that are isolated from each other. On the contrary, pre-modern, that is, ancient and medieval science can only be adequately understood if the Eurasian continent is treated as an undivided unit. That conclusion was reached, though not without qualification, by most of the participants in a workshop on ‘‘Asian contributions to the formation of modern science’’ that took place in Leiden in 2002. The Proceedings were published in this journal (Granoff et al. 2006). My own contribution arrived at several more conclusions. One was that artificial or formal languages exist across sciences and civilizations. The argument is based upon a single case with good credentials: the artificial metalanguage of the Sanskrit grammar composed by the Indian linguist Pān: ini (see, e.g., Staal 2003). Pān: ini’s grammar is the first embodiment of a science of language that is different from the mathematical sciences that are associated with artificial languages in the

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