Thomas Urquhart and the Question of Non-Sense

In 1652, Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty (1611–1669), best known for his translation of Rabelais,1 published ΕΚΣΚΥΒΑΛΑΥΡΟΝ: or, The Discovery of A most exquisite Jewel, more precious then Diamonds inchased in Gold….2 The ‘jewel’ is his artificial language, a marvellous instrument: eleven genders, eleven tenses, four numbers, and seven moods (74), and yet capable of expressing in a word of one syllable ‘the yeer of God, the moneth of that yeer, week of the moneth, day of that week, partition of the day, hour of that partition, quarter and half quarter of the hour (76).’ It may, moreover, be mastered by a boy of 10 in three months (79–80). The first of dozens of advantages in this language is that ‘there is not a word utterable by the mouth of man which, in this language, hath not a peculiar signification by it self, so that the allegation of Bliteri by the Summulists will be of small validity’ (72). Jack and Lyall gloss ‘Bliteri’ in a footnote as ‘foolish or outrageous speech’ and offer the following explanation in an appended Commentary: ‘The Summulists were logicians, commentators on the Summulae logicales of Peter of Spain, notorious for their pedantry. “Bliteri” (cf. “blitery”, p. 89) is apparently derived from the MSc. verb “bluiter” (also used as a noun), meaning “to talk foolishly or outspokenly”; cf. Alexander Montgomerie, Sonnet xxiv.’ (220). This supposed etymology is repeated in the most recent scholarly work on the text, a French study in which ‘bliteri’ is translated as ‘ineptie’ and glossed ‘Bliteri est un gaélisme dérivé de « bluiter », « parler de manière insensée voire outrageuse »’.3 ‘Bliteri’, in fact, comes from the technical language of the Summulists and may be traced back at least to Boethius. Medieval Aristotelian language theorists, commenting on the Peri hermeneias, began their treatises by making a few necessary distinctions concerning the subject matter of their discipline and provided stock examples to fix these distinctions in their pupils’ minds. Logic is based on speech, and speech is sound, so sounds which are vocal must first be distinguished from non-vocal sound; the usual example of the latter is footsteps. Vocal sounds which signify by convention (e.g. ‘homo’) must be distinguished from sounds which signify naturally; the latter usually appear in the treatises as ‘the groans of the sick or the barking of dogs’. Vocal sounds, too, can be subdivided. Urquhart’s ‘bliteri’ is his spelling of Boethius’ ‘blityri’, which is the example of a vocal sound which is non-significant: ‘sunt quedam voces litteris syllabisque conpositae, quae nullam habeant significationem, ut est blityri.’[There are also some spoken sounds made up of letters and syllables which have no signification, e.g. blityri]4 ‘Blityri’ does not signify ‘nonsense’; it does not signify ‘nothing’; it does not signify a non-existent signified, as does ‘chimaera’. The Summulists5 present ‘blityri’ as a word which simply does not signify. They do not ‘use’ ‘blityri’, they adduce it; Urquhart is not defaming their work as meaningless bluster; rather, he is criticizing one of its arguments. Urquhart is saying that though the Summulists may ‘allege’ that there is a word with no signification, no word in his language is meaningless. As if to prove his point, some pages later he writes ‘I have known some, even of the most rigid zealots, who, rather then to forgo their present emoluments … would wish presbytery were of as empty a sound as its homaeoteleft, blitery’ (89). In this passage, ‘blitery’ makes sense. It has not, it is true, been given a signification, but its spelling has been anglicized, it has been made part of a meaningful paragraph, and it has emerged from the italics of citation into full use, still patiently waiting to join its companion ‘homoeoteleft’6 in some future revision of the Oxford English Dictionary. If Urquhart can do this for the limit case, the word which generations of linguists have declared to be meaningless, is there any doubt that he could do the same for any word ‘utterable by the mouth of man’?

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