Universal language?
From the 1870's, a little book proposing a means of UNIVERSAL COMMUNICATION...
Basically (see pic's of pages for examples), the most common words are assigned a number. Say, the word "ROCK" is assigned a number, said number staying constant for English, French, Hindi, etc.
Now, if you all have the same wee guide book, you can chat rudimentarily by writing down these numbers
The author adds a bunch of simple other symbols and modifications for conjugation, etc.
But that's not all... if you have these numbers, what if you were to assign sounds to each number? And then, you can reverse-engineer a SPOKEN universal language (!) (if I understand this right...)
Odd indeed
Not much on the internet about this one — see the New York times notice here: https://www.nytimes.com/1874/11/26/archives/new-publications-international-correspondence-by-means-of-numbers.html
... and the World Cat entry:
https://www.worldcat.org/title/international-correspondence-by-means-of-numbers-an-easy-method-whereby-people-of-different-nations-may-readily-communicate-with-each-other-by-charles-stewart/oclc/559603351
Yours for NZ$25.00
