George Dalgarno.

In the words of the pathetically brief Wikipedia article, “George Dalgarno (c. 1616 – 1687) was a Scottish intellectual interested in linguistic problems.” You can get more information at the charmingly defensive Dictionary of National Biography entry by George Goodwin (1888):

Among other eminent men he knew Ward, bishop of Sarum, Wilkins, bishop of Chester, and Wallis, Savilian professor. Yet not the slightest notice of him is taken in the works either of Wilkins or of Wallis, both of whom must have derived some very important aids from his speculations. To Dalgarno has been erroneously ascribed the merit of having anticipated some of the most refined conclusions of the present age respecting the education of the deaf and dumb. […] Dalgarno may also claim the distinction of having first exhibited, and that in its most perfect form, a finger alphabet. He makes no pretensions, however, to the original conception of such a medium of communication. […] Nearly twenty years before the appearance of his ‘Didascalocophus’ Dalgarno had published another curious treatise entitled ‘Ars Signorum, vulgo Character Universalis et Lingua Philosophica,’ &c., 8vo, London, 1661, from which it appears that he was the precursor of Bishop Wilkins in his speculations concerning ‘A Real Character and a Philosophical Language’ (1668). Dalgarno’s treatise exhibits a methodical classification of all possible ideas, and a selection of characters adapted to this arrangement, so as to represent each idea by a specific character, without reference to the words of any language. He admits only seventeen classes of ideas, and uses the letters of the Latin alphabet, with two Greek characters, to denote them.

But really, the place to read about him is Arika Okrent’s magnificent In the Land of Invented Languages, which I reviewed back in 2009; she discusses him on pp. 45-50:

After attending a demonstration of a new type of shorthand that could express phrases in “a more compendious way than any I had seen,” he was inspired to “advance it a step further.” In the process of working out how to stuff the most meaning into the fewest possible symbols, he realized that such a system could be used not just as a shorthand for English but as a universal writing that could be read off into any language. He was “struck with such a complicated passion of admiration, fear, hope and joy” at this idea that he “had not one houres natural rest for the 3 following nights together.” […]

Dalgarno was a nobody in Oxford, but it so happened that the only person he knew there, an old school friend, was in good with the vice-chancellor of the university. Dalgarno’s work was read and passed around, and soon he found himself in the company of the most eminent scholars in town, a stroke of luck at which he was “overjoyed.” One of these scholars was Wilkins, who had not yet begun to work on his own universal character.

Dalgarno’s system provided a list of 935 “radicals”—the primitive concepts he judged necessary for effective communication— and a method for writing them. They were not, however, organized into a hierarchical tree. They were not grouped by shared properties, or by any logical or philosophical system. Instead, they were placed into a verse composed of stanzas of seven lines each, so that they could be easily memorized. For example, if you memorize the first stanza, you know the placement of forty-two of his radical words (italicized) […]

He developed a written character where the placement and direction of little lines and hooks referred to a specific place in a line of a stanza […]. To write “light,” for example, you draw the character representing the first stanza modified by a small mark indicating first line, fifth word. The pattern is repeated for the fourth through sixth lines, but with little hooks added to the marks, and for the seventh line the mark is drawn through the character […]. Additionally, the opposite of a word was represented by reversing the orientation of the stanza symbol. […] He also provided for a way for the system to be spoken by assigning consonants and vowels to the numbered stanzas, lines, and words. So if B = stanza 1, A = line 1, and G = word 5, then the word for “light” would be BAG.

Wilkins admired Dalgarno’s system, but he thought it needed to include more concepts, and took it upon himself to draw up an ordered table of plants, animals, and minerals. Dalgarno respectfully declined to use those tables, arguing that the longer the list of concepts got, the harder they would be to memorize. He thought that specific species, like elephant, didn’t need their own, separate radical words, but that they could be referred to by writing out compound phrases, such as “largest whole-footed beast.”

Okrent has illustrations of how all this works; again I am bowled over by the effort she put in to not only understanding the ideas of all these inventors but presenting them in an intelligible way.

Incidentally, I was reminded of Dalgarno by a mention in Irina Polyanskaya’s wonderfully allusive 2002 novel Горизонт событий [Event horizon], which I will be enthusiastically reviewing at some point (I’m currently reading her earlier novel Прохождение тени [The passing of the shadow]). She has a whole section about Agnès Varda’s movie Cléo de 5 à 7. Varda is one of my favorite directors, but I never expected to see her show up in a Russian novel!