We've been trying to solve the language problem for millennia. The Tower of Babel story captures something we've never quite shaken—the intuition that if only everyone spoke the same language, we'd finally understand each other. Wars would end. Trade would flourish. Peace would reign.

It's a beautiful dream. It's also probably wrong. From medieval scholars designing logical alphabets to Victorian idealists inventing Esperanto to Silicon Valley engineers building neural translation networks, humanity keeps reaching for the same goal and keeps falling short. Not because we're not clever enough, but because language might not work the way we think it does.

In the 1600s, some of Europe's greatest minds convinced themselves they could fix language. The problem, they reasoned, wasn't just that people spoke different tongues—it was that all existing languages were fundamentally broken. Words were arbitrary, ambiguous, full of historical accidents. What if you could build a language from scratch, one where every word perfectly corresponded to the thing it described?

John Wilkins, an English bishop and founding member of the Royal Society, spent decades creating exactly this. His 1668 work An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language attempted to classify all human knowledge into categories, then assign each concept a unique symbol based on its position in the classification. A sufficiently educated person could read any word and know what it meant just from its structure. It was like trying to build a periodic table of ideas.

The project collapsed under its own weight. Reality, it turns out, doesn't sort neatly into categories. Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? Where do platypuses go? Wilkins's system required agreement on how to carve up the universe before anyone could speak it—and that agreement was precisely what language was supposed to create.

Takeaway

The dream of a perfectly logical language assumes we can agree on how to categorize reality before we have language to negotiate those categories—putting the cart before the horse.

L.L. Zamenhof was a Jewish eye doctor from Białystok, a city where Poles, Russians, Germans, and Yiddish speakers lived in mutual suspicion. He grew up watching people who lived on the same street treat each other as foreigners. His solution? Esperanto, launched in 1887—a language designed to be everyone's second language, belonging to no nation, carrying no colonial baggage.

Esperanto actually worked, linguistically speaking. Its grammar was ruthlessly regular, its vocabulary drawn from European roots. You could learn it in a fraction of the time needed for natural languages. Millions did. Communities formed. Conferences happened. People fell in love in Esperanto, raised children in it, wrote poetry in it.

But Esperanto never became universal. Wars continued. Nations remained suspicious of each other. It turned out that linguistic barriers weren't actually causing conflict—they were symptoms of deeper divisions. People who wanted to understand each other found ways to do so. People who didn't want to understand each other wouldn't let a shared vocabulary stop them. The Esperantists had diagnosed a symptom and built a treatment for it, leaving the disease untouched.

Takeaway

Shared vocabulary doesn't create shared understanding—people who want to understand each other will find ways, while those who don't will find reasons.

Google Translate and its descendants have achieved something remarkable. You can photograph a menu in Tokyo and read it in English. You can email a colleague in São Paulo without either of you learning each other's language. The dream of universal communication has, in some sense, arrived.

Except it hasn't. What these systems do brilliantly is translate words. What they can't do is translate meaning. They can tell you that the Japanese phrase literally means "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down," but they can't give you the childhood of being hushed by parents, the office culture of studied conformity, the centuries of social pressure packed into those syllables. They translate the message but lose the world that makes the message mean something.

This is the deeper problem that every universal language project runs into. Language isn't just a code for transmitting information—it's a record of a community's history, values, jokes, traumas, and triumphs. You can't extract the meaning and throw away the language any more than you can extract the music from a song and throw away the melody.

Takeaway

Translation can move words between languages, but meaning lives in the shared experiences and cultural context that no algorithm can fully transfer.

Maybe the universal language project fails because it misunderstands what language is for. We don't speak to exchange information like computers exchanging data. We speak to build relationships, signal belonging, create shared worlds. The "inefficiency" of having thousands of languages isn't a bug—it's how human meaning works.

The dream of Babel reversed keeps recurring because it promises something beautiful: understanding without effort, connection without the hard work of learning another's world. But perhaps that hard work is the understanding. Perhaps the journey is the destination, and there are no shortcuts.