TFA says the author has been "trying to transcribe on and off for the past few months." It's a two-page letter in English. To save anyone else the bother (including TFA's author), I just sat down and wrote it all out:

https://www.club.cc.cmu.edu/~ajo/disseminate/leibniz.html

The letter is basically Hooke saying: "Well, I can't convince anyone but you, Leibniz, that Wilkins' Universal Character is a cool idea. I think we'll have problems figuring out the medium (i.e. what the characters look like and so on), but that should all shake out during testing. What kind of testing? Well, we need a bunch of smart people to come up with a lot of true facts in different fields, all of which we can try writing down in this language. Do you know any smart people I could brainstorm some true facts with? If you were to send me some such people, that might get the ball rolling over here."

Now, "get a bunch of smart people together with Robert Hooke to come up with true facts in a wide variety of fields" sounds suspiciously like the founding idea of the Royal Society... but in fact the Royal Society seems to have been started already about 20 years earlier ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham_College_and_the_format... ), so I guess I don't know how this letter fits into the big picture there.

FWIW, John Wilkins (the Bishop of Chester mentioned in the letter) had been dead for nine years by the time this letter was written (1681).

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quuxplusone 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Oh, the other weird thing about this is that even though the "external" catalog information on makingscience.royalsociety.org and the "internal" catalog information penned on page 2 of the letter both describe it as a letter written to Leibniz, and sent to Leibniz, the text of the letter itself refers to Leibniz only in third person, and refers to some other individual in the second person. But it does make (oblique) requests of Leibniz, e.g.

> I question not but Mr Leibnitz may have many of those specimens by him and therefore I doe heartily wish you could prevail wh him to Communicate some of those which would be a means to persuade severall yet incredulous of the possibility of such a Science.

I suppose it could have been written to Leibniz's personal secretary, or some such. If it weren't for all the catalog data I'd assume it was written to some close colleague of Leibniz instead. Anybody want to track down a plausible explanation/mechanism here?

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cxr 2 days ago | parent [-]

I was going to bring up the same claim—of it being a "Letter, from Robert Hooke to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz". It's clearly not written with that intent.

While reading, I first took it to be a journal entry. The penmanship also supports this. But the second person "you" at the end is a confounding detail. A journal entry in the form of a letter to himself is possible, but doesn't seem plausible.

The word you've labelled "[deviate?]" in your copy is definitely not "deviate" in the manuscript. I'm certain that the first letter is "R", and the second to last letter probably a "d" followed by "e" (compare to "undenyable" and "persuade"). The letter following "R" could be "i", but really could be anything. It's unfortunate that it's not as straightforward as just crafting a regex and grepping at /usr/share/dict/words, because whatever Hooke meant, it's likely to be an archaic spelling. "Recede" spelled as "Ricede" works grammatically, but I don't think that's it, either.

	▲	quuxplusone 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		FYI I agree with you on that word: letter by letter it looks to me like "Roeade", but I can't figure out what English word that would be, either.

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kmote00 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> come up with a lot of true facts in different fields, all of which we can try writing down in this language.

Reminds me of Cyc.[1][2]

[1] www.cyc.com [2] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cyc

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Gormisdomai 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Thank you for doing this!