Pedro Bermudo, the Spaniard who invented the language of God in 1653

The so-called “last universal genius,” the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, mentioned in a 1666 document a mysterious “certain Spaniard” who had been a pioneer among his contemporaries in attempting to create a common language for all humanity. This enigmatic Spaniard, Leibniz recounted, had presented an “ingenious” method in Rome in 1653, based on converting the essential concepts of life into a kind of mathematical language, with a combination of Roman and Arabic numerals.

For centuries, this revolutionary Spanish figure remained anonymous, but the historian Ramón Ceñal unmasked his identity in 1946: he was Pedro Bermudo, born in 1610 in La Puebla de Montalbán (Toledo) and who died in Madrid at the age of 74. A play in his town now rescues the astonishing story of this completely forgotten member of the Society of Jesus Catholic congregration, better known as the Jesuits.

Bermudo’s proposal took up a single page. In it, he suggested grouping concepts into 44 fundamental classes, written with Roman numerals. Fish belonged to class XVI. Within each class, he included a few dozen common, specific terms, which in turn were labeled with an Arabic numeral. Hake, for example, would be XVI.12. His 44 classes reflected his personal concerns: class I was made up of the elements, such as fire, wind, and hell; class II, celestial entities, such as stars and lightning; and class III, intellectual entities, such as Jesus Christ and the soul. God was III.1; Lucifer, II.5; love, VIII.1; The unicorn, XIV.5; and beer, XX.2.

When he was 43 years old, Bermudo presented his proposal in Rome with the lengthy title in Latin Arithmeticus nomenclator [Arithmetic nomenclature], mundi omnes nationes ad linguarum et sermonis unitatem invitans [inviting all the nations of the world to unity of language and discourse]. Authore linguae (quod mirere) Hispano quodam, vere, ut dicitur, muto [the author of the language being, (as you might expect), a certain Spaniard who is truly, as they say, mute]. This document has disappeared, but its existence is known thanks to another contemporary Jesuit, the German Gaspar Schott, who published an analysis of the idea, although he claimed not to remember the name of its Spanish author.

Bermudo vanished from the collective memory, even in his own town. Another fellow resident of the Toledo region, Jesús Pulido, a retired professor of Spanish at the University of Warsaw (Poland), recalls that 15 years ago he was astonished to read an article in Spain’s ABC newspaper in which a certain Pedro Bermudo of La Puebla de Montalbán, author of “the first attempt in Spain to develop an artificial universal language,” was mentioned in passing. The Jesuit’s name did not appear in any history book about Toledo. Pulido began to investigate obsessively and in 2011 he published everything he discovered in an article in the local magazine, Crónicas, in which he denounced the “unforgivable” centuries-long neglect in his hometown. Bermudo went on to become Attorney General of the Indies at the Court of Madrid, a kind of representative of the Americas before the Spanish monarchy, yet for all that, his name had been erased from history.

Playwright Luis María García, from the La Recua theater company, recalls reading that article and being inspired to create a play entitled Pedro Bermudo, or the Language of God. Dressed in a floor-length black cassock, during a dress rehearsal, the actor who plays the Jesuit recalls the biblical passage of the Tower of Babel, in which a supreme being disperses humans and confuses their languages so they cannot build a structure that reaches heaven. “When, due to our pride at Babel, God punished us by making us unable to understand each other by speaking a thousand languages, I have always wondered: What language was spoken before that punishment? Without a doubt, a universal language, the language of God,” proclaims actor David López to artistic director María Elena Diardes.

“We were punished, we must repent and make amends, reject all differences, and return to speaking a single language, the language of God,” proposes the theatrical version of Pedro Bermudo. The play was performed until August 31 in the courtyard of the Franciscan convent in La Puebla de Montalbán, as part of the Celestina Festival, a series of events in which the entire town becomes a stage and which reached its peak on Saturday night, when the townspeople performed the famous play La Celestina, the 1499 tragicomedy attributed to another townsman, Fernando de Rojas.

Bermudo’s universal language was saved thanks to Gaspar Schott, who detailed it in his 1664 book Technica curiosa. This German Jesuit recounted that he had met a man in Rome who had published, on a single unfolded sheet, “a new artifice, by which the languages of all the nations and peoples of the world — and all the methods of writing, however diverse — can be reduced to one.” Schott detailed the system and its vocabulary: the plebs were IV.13; a concubine, III.16; an elephant, XIV.2; the brain, XVII.2. However, he omitted an essential piece of information. “The author of the artifice [...] is a learned and ingenious man of our Society [of Jesus], a Spaniard by nation, whose name I have forgotten,” he stated. The mathematician Leibniz, obsessed with a universal language, learned about the Spaniard’s proposal through Schott, without ever knowing who was behind it.

The key was hidden in the title of the 1653 page itself: Authore linguae (quod mirere) Hispano quodam, vere, ut dicitur, muto. “A truly mute author” — authore vere muto — or “Bermudo.” The solution to the enigma was published in 1946 by the Jesuit historian Ramón Ceñal, in an article in the magazine Pensamiento, entitled “An anonymous Spaniard cited by Leibniz.” But was Bermudo truly mute, or was it just a play on words?

The expert Gerhard Strasser is convinced that Bermudo was truly “deaf and mute,” and that this characteristic shaped his universal language. Strasser, a professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University (USA), recalls the historical context. Latin was beginning to lose its dominance as a global language, especially in regions where the Protestant Reformation movement identified it with the language of corrupt popes. “Several Catholic scholars focused on creating a substitute for what was beginning to be considered a suspect means of communication,” notes Strasser, who studied Bermudo’s case for the book The History of Information Security (2007).

“At the same time, communication in the newly evangelized areas, particularly in South America, clearly demonstrated the limits of Latin as a lingua franca with the native inhabitants of those territories,” the professor emphasizes. Several Jesuits, such as the German Atanasio Kircher in 1663 and the Frenchman Philippe Labbe that same year, began proposing new universal languages. Bermudo had done so a decade earlier. “The unique feature of his system was the division of the known world into 44 classes, which were probably influenced by manuals for the instruction of the deaf in 17th-century Spain,” Strasser speculates. There was one class for birds (XV), another for trees (XXX), another for metals (XXVI), and another for places (XXXVII). Hispania was XXXVII.2.

The world’s first manual on the art of “teaching the mute to speak” was published in Madrid in 1620, authored by Juan de Pablo Bonet, an official of the Spanish Crown. “Incest at court resulted in a large number of deaf-mutes, who, due to their noble status, had to be cared for with the help of these combinatorial languages, whose individual words could be combined to create the Bermudo language,” Strasser hypothesizes. “Pedro Bermudo, the deaf-mute, was at the forefront of the development of new mathematical-combinatorial languages that significantly influenced philosophical thought in the second half of the 17th century,” highlights the Pennsylvania State University expert.

Professor Jesús Pulido, however, believes that the “truly mute author” was simply a joke. In the play, Pedro Bermudo is not mute. In the courtyard of the Franciscan convent in La Puebla de Montalbán, the cassock-clad López, under the shade of a medlar tree, solemnly repeats a phrase: “We were punished, we must repent and make amends, reject all differences, and return to speaking a single language, the language of God.” Or III.1.

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