Global Perspectives
Have you ever noticed how many languages surround us every day? Sometimes all it takes is a ride on the subway. Each carriage holds dozens of voices, and every language carries within it a whole world of meanings and differences.
But have you ever wondered if there is one language that is, scientifically speaking, better than the others?
From the experiment of Esperanto to today’s coding languages in AI, humans’ search for a perfect language has never stopped. With Imminent, we are beginning a journey: listening to local voices, looking through a global lens to explore what really lies behind the quest for a perfect language.
What Makes a Language “Perfect”?
In 1619, the French philosopher René Descartes wrote to a friend about an intoxicating idea: a language so clear, so perfectly structured, that even peasants would be able to grasp philosophical truths better than scholars. It was the dream of perfect clarity: a vision that has obsessed Western thinkers for centuries. From Plato to Leibniz, the logic was seductive: clearer language equals clearer thought. Perfect your words, perfect your mind.
But if you step into that subway, the illusion starts to tremble. More than 7,000 languages surround us, each structuring reality in its own way, each carrying its own logic, its own rhythm of thought. The philosophical dream of a single, ‘better’ language assumes universal rationality, yet language refuses to be confined by any single logic.
So when we speak of a “perfect” language, maybe we should ask instead: perfect for what? To express the inexpressible? Wield power? Cross borders? Each answer reveals a different cultural vision and a different set of priorities.
In the seventeenth century, the educational theorist Samuel Hartlib made a distinction that still matters. He saw that ‘ideal’ actually masks two separate desires:
- the universal language that bridges differences, to unite us;
- the perfect language that mirrors the deep structure of reality, to outthink us.
One is philosophical. The other, political. Both have been tried. Both have failed the subway test: the noisy, multilingual proof that no single tongue can contain us all. And yet the dream persists. Because long before Descartes or Hartlib, long before philosophy claimed language as its own domain, another authority promised perfection through speech: the divine Word itself.
And Light There Was
In Genesis, God doesn’t build the world with His hands; He speaks it into being. “Let there be light,” and there was light. Later, Adam names every creature in Eden, and through naming, brings order to chaos. Language isn’t description—it’s creation itself.
This pattern echoes across traditions. In Islam, the Qur’an takes the idea to its purest form: not a book about God, but God’s literal word, revealed in Arabic so pristine that translation becomes mere interpretation. The language itself is the miracle (i’jāz), and from Morocco to Indonesia, Arabic unites over a billion faithful through a single sacred text. Perfect in origin, universal in function.
Sanskrit pushes the structural logic even further. Its name literally means “perfectly formed”: not human invention but cosmic revelation. The Vedas weren’t written, they were received and the language’s structure proves it. In fact, Pāṇini’s grammar is so mathematically airtight that linguists compare it to programming code.
That mathematical vision of language finds a parallel in Jewish mysticism. In the Kabbalistic tradition, language becomes fully algorithmic. Through gematria—where each letter holds numerical value—and temurah, sacred anagrams, the Torah transforms into an infinite hypertext. Reading becomes calculation. Every letter is data; every word, an equation drawing you closer to God’s mind.
Whether through sound, form, structure, or algorithm, these traditions share one conviction: certain languages hold privileged access to reality itself. And crucially, none of this is human-made. Perfection is always mediated, always authorized from above. Without divine mediation, language loses its creative power. And humanity faces divine punishment.
After Babel
Our story begins when language is no longer one, but many.
Viewed in this light, the Tower of Babel isn’t just a story of loss. Once divine unity breaks, humanity starts experimenting, and without God as mediator, ‘perfect’ ceases to be something revealed and becomes a reflection of human need.
Consider Turkish. In the 1920s, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk rewrote the language entirely. Out went Ottoman and Persian influences; in came a purified, modernized Turkish. It was linguistic engineering as nation-building, a deliberate act of cultural rebirth. Perfection here meant power: the ability to imagine a country into existence through words alone.
But if Turkish achieved power through reinvention, English claimed it through sheer sprawl. Today, 400 million speak it natively and over a billion as a second language. It spread by empire, trade, and culture until it became infrastructure, the default code of globalization. But, in trying to stay “pure,” English broke apart: Nigerian Pidgin, Singaporean Singlish, Indian English… Varieties now so distinct they’re barely mutually intelligible.
Meanwhile, while English resisted blending, Urdu thrived on it. Born from the collision of Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and Indian dialects, it absorbed everything in its path and made it its own. Today, it’s among the world’s ten most spoken languages, uniting vast geographies across ethnic conflicts and colonial borders.
And yet, if many languages gesture toward a universal kind of perfection, there’s another vision that turns the lens inward. Spoken by around two million people in Peru, Bolivia, and Chile, Aymara embodies mathematical perfection. Its elegant structure has long fascinated linguists and even inspired ideas for computational translation. But here’s the catch: Aymara can take in any thought and render it perfectly, yet once translated, it cannot be turned back. It’s a linguistic black hole. Perfection, it turns out, has a price.
An Ongoing Journey
Every attempt to perfect language reveals the same paradox: the closer we get to an ideal, the more it multiplies, shifts, and reinvents itself. Perfection slips through our fingers, yet the search never stops.
This enduring human pursuit has taken many forms over the years—Esperanto, Toki Pona, even programming languages—each a daring experiment to impose order on words and strive for clarity, universality, or expressive power. Even today, LLMs continue this quest, generating, transforming, and preserving language on an unprecedented scale.
Are they bringing us closer to a universal medium—or amplifying the tensions and diversity already embedded in our words?
This opening note marks the beginning of Imminent’s year-long exploration. Over the next three issues, we will follow the threads of this quest across continents and centuries, speaking with linguists and local voices to understand how language shapes our identity and what, in the absence of a single perfect tongue, continues to connect us across borders.