1984 and ‘1984’
Randolph Quirk, 16 February 1984
“... The vision of regaining a pre-Babel state of universal linguistic grace was given a fillip in the West with the ‘discovery’ of Chinese, and the idea not only therefore of a charactery, but of a system of oral signs also, that might be firmly anchored in ‘matter’ (cf. the reference to Bacon above) and hence be universal: a linguistic base for ... ”