Person of the Week
He invented a language
Barbara Millar on Thomas Urquhart
The language he had invented could, he claimed, be learned by a boy of 10, within just three months. This claim, however, was never put to the test because Sir Thomas Urquhart never actually created ‘Logopandecteision’, the language he outlined in his 1653 book of the same name.
In the book, he promised that the language would have 66 ‘qualities and advantages’ over other languages, with 12 parts of speech, each declinable in 11 cases, plus 11 tenses and 11 genders – including god, goddess and animal – and the language would translate any idiom in any other language, without any alteration of the literal sense.
But little of this language was actually formulated. No grammar or lexicon appeared (although the word quodomodocunquizingclusterfists was coined to describe bankers who left Scotland to seek their fortune south of the border). Instead most of the book is a rant against Urquhart’s creditors, of whom there were many, the Church of Scotland and others, who, he railed, were preventing him from publishing this perfected language.
In fact, there was never going to be any such language – it was one of Urquhart’s rather elaborate jokes.
Thomas Urquhart was born in 1611 in Cromarty on the north-east tip of the Black Isle, the eldest of the eight children of Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty. His family was Catholic turned Episcopalian and, in the disputes between church and crown, which were rife during the 17th century, Urquhart had nailed his colours firmly to the Royalist mast.
At the age of 11 he went to Aberdeen University to study classics and mathematics, following which he travelled around Europe – largely to France, Spain and Italy, where he was involved in military campaigns. He returned to Scotland when civil war was threatening – his father’s refusal to sign the national covenant made him a good number of enemies. Thomas Urquhart senior also had substantial debts and, for a time, his sons locked him up inside Cromarty Castle to prevent him from spending money.
In 1639, Urquhart, along with 2,000 other Royalists, heeded the call of the Marquis of Huntly and attacked a meeting of Covenanters – the first serious bloodshed in the Civil War. After the ‘trot of Turiff’, as it was known, the Royalists also took Aberdeen, losing it a few days later. Urquhart then went by ship to London, where he was knighted for his support by Charles I in April 1641.
In the same year he published his first book – ‘Epigrams, Divine and Moral’. Collections of epigrams were fashionable in the mid-17th century. But most critics have panned Urquhart’s contribution to the genre as fairly conventional and boring.
‘Either he is mad, or he’s doing it on purpose as a joke. A joke with a very limited audience.’
He returned to Scotland in 1642, on the death of his father, to discover that the large family estate was deeply in debt. As the eldest son, he was harassed by creditors and took refuge by returning to the continent for long periods, claiming this was preventing him from producing countless inventions for the benefit of mankind.
His second book ‘Trissotetras’ – on trigonometry – was published in 1645. Although apparently mathematically sound, a reasonably straightforward geometrical theorem is elaborated to the point of absurdity. One critic has suggested: ‘It reads like Jabberwocky. Either he is mad, or he’s doing it on purpose as a joke. A joke with a very limited audience.’
Charles I was executed in January 1649 and, a month later, Urquhart took part in a short-lived Royalist rising, which expelled the Covenanter garrison from Inverness and dismantled its fortifications. For this he was declared a rebel by the Scottish parliament, although he was later pardoned.
Two years later, Urquhart marched south with Charles II and fought at the Battle of Worcester on 3 September 1651. Some 3,000 Scots were killed that day, the final crushing defeat for the royalist cause at the hands of Oliver Cromwell and the parliamentarians. A further 10,000 were taken prisoner, among them Thomas Urquhart.
He was initially imprisoned in the Tower of London although later moved to Windsor Castle, where he was given considerable freedom by his captors. He had taken all his papers and manuscripts with him to Worcester and wrote how he had ‘above 10,000 crowns worth of papers, embezzled without recovery’.
Urquhart was released on parole, although his estate was declared forfeit unless he could show that he possessed ‘merits and services’ which demonstrated that he deserved to keep his land. So, in a bid to prove he was an important writer and intellectual, he set about producing further books.
In his work of genealogy, ‘Pantochrononchanon’, published in 1652, he constructs a family tree that asserts an impeccable lineage by starting with Adam and Eve and ending with himself. His next book – ‘Ekskybalauron’ (usually known as ‘The Jewel’), published in the same year – provides an introduction to his universal language but is mostly, as its title page suggests, ‘a vindication of the honour of Scotland’, and includes anecdotes about Scottish soldiers and scholars including Urquhart’s fictionalised life of Scottish hero ‘the Admirable’ James Crichton.
The book also includes the first explicit prose sex scene in Scottish literature, which manages to combine Urquhart’s passionate interests in sex, astronomy, the construction of sundials, Greek and Latin vocabulary and syntax. One critic comments: ‘It amazes me, actually, that he’s giving this stuff – these sex scenes – to the arch-puritan Cromwell. It strikes me as crazy’.
This work is followed by ‘Logopandecteision’ and then, also in 1653, by his most celebrated work, his translation of three of the comic narratives about the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel by French monk-turned-writer, satirist, doctor and humanist, Francois Rabelais.
Urquhart’s translation has been in print almost continuously since it was published and has been described as one of the great Scots translations. It has also been suggested, however, that it is ‘a somewhat free translation, although it never departs from the spirit of Rabelais’.
Certainly the book secured his release from prison, although, probably as a condition of his freedom, he moved permanently to the continent, spending the rest of his life in Holland where, it is rumoured, he died in 1660 in a fit of laughter after hearing the news that Charles II had been restored to the English throne.
This spring, to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Urquhart’s birth, Cromarty Arts Trust is to host a conference on his life and times with an international list of eminent speakers. Among them is local historian David Alston who says: ‘He is a man worth celebrating but often neglected, because he does not fit into any neat category. He was no doubt infuriating to deal with, but he stands out as a truly international Scot’.