Abstract

As language rapidly changes due to on-going developments in Speech Synthesis/Speech Recognition Systems, and advanced Natural Language Processing, this paper pays attention to the various attempts to synthesize, and mechanize language over time. These include key historical proposals to render logical logical, rational, and mechanical, including John Wilkinson’s dream of a crystalline, error-free language, alongside Leibniz’s ‘Mathesis’. This history engages the kinds of philosophical questions raised with respect to language as a 'human' phenomenon, but also as a technology in its own right – one which is itself increasingly being mediated by technologies such as Artificial Intelligence. The question - what is language when it is made by a machine? - invokes ethical concerns, including the notion of linguistic agency, and the shifting relationship between language, thought and the status of human beings as linguistic entities, proposing that philosophy of language needs to acknowledge these non-human, computational linguistic phenomena.