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BECHER, Johann Joachim. Character, pro Notitia Linguarum Universali. Inventum steganographicum hactenus inauditum quo quilibet suam Legendo vernaculam diversas imò omnes Linguas, unius etiam diei informatione, explicare ac intelligere potest. Frankfurt, Johann Georg Spörlin for Johann Wilhelm Ammon and Wilhelm Serlin, 1661.
 Small 8vo, ff. [104]; with an engraved title-page and 3 pp. of ideograms; B5 a folded sheet of grammatical tables, equal to four leaves in width; some mild spotting, a few leaves browned, but still a good copy in contemporary marbled boards, lightly rubbed, spine lettered in ink; from the Donaueschingen library, with its stamp to the printed title.Author was 26 years old at time of publishing.
The language does not have an official name.
OCLC locates only four copies (Library of Congress, Washington, Princeton, and Cornell).
First editions available from antiquarians for around $6,000. (The information on this page is derived from a past listing in Bibliopoly.)
Umberto Eco, in The Search for the Perfect Language, p. 2013, writes:
In 1661, two years before Kircher's Polygraphia
, Joachim Becher published his Character, pro notitia linguarum universali (sometimes known under its engraved title of Clavis convenientiae linguarum). Becher's project was not unlike Kircher's; the major difference was that Becher constructed a Latin dictionary that was almost ten times more vast (10,000 items). Yet he did not include synonyms from other languages, expecting the accommodating reader to make them up for him. As in Kircher, nouns, verbs and adjectives composed the main list, with a supplementary list of proper names of people and places making up an appendix.
For each item in Becher's dictionary there is an Arabic number: the city of Zürich, for example, is designated by the number 10283. A second Arabic number refers the user to grammatical tables which supply verbal endings, the endings for the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives, or adverbial endings. A third number refers to case endings. The dedication "Inventum Eminentissimo Principi" is written 4442. 2770:169:3. 6753:3, that is, "(My) Invention (to the) Eminent + superlative + dative singular, Prince + dative singular".
Unfortunately Becher was afraid that his system might prove difficult for peoples who did not know the Arabic numbers; he therefore thought up a system of his own for the direct visual representation of numbers. The system is atrociously complicated and almost totally illegible
[However, together with Gaspar Schott's Technica curiosa (1664), Becher's system has been seen] as tentative models for future practices of computer translation. In fact, it is sufficient to think of Becher's pseudo-ideograms as instructions for electronic circuits, prescribing to a machine which path to follow through the memory in order to retrieve a given linguistic term, and we have a procedure for a word-for-word translation (with all the obvious inconveniences of such a merely mechanical program).
For an analysis of Becher's system, see W. G. Waffenschmidt's modern edition and German translation of the work ('Zur mechanischen Sprachübersetzung: ein Programmierungsversuch aus dem Jahre 1661', Veröffentlichungen der Wirtschaftshochschule Mannheim, Reihe 1, Band 10 (Stuttgart, 1962)) and Luigi Heilman's article 'J. J. Becher: un precursore della traduzione meccanica', De homine 78 (1963), 1314.
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