While today it is common for philosophers and linguists to conceive of language as a system of rationally-understood syntactical relationships between larger units of meaning, such as words or whole sentences (see Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought), the Cartesian revolution in linguistics did not occur until the latter half of the seventeenth century. During the first half, the letter still dominated linguistic theory as the primary unit of sound and sense. As Hudson writes,

Language was envisioned as an aggregate of discrete signs, each denoting a mental image, with in turn mirrored a natural world of separate physical objects. As the syntactical relations between signs could not be easily visualized, they tended to be neglected. (Hudson 43)

Like many other baroque thinkers, Harsdörffer identified the material form of letters in objects of the world -- or, rather, found the world in the materiality of letters. In these images from the Delitiae mathematicae et physicae - Der mathematischen und philosophischen Erquickstunden, Dritter Theil (1653, 44-5), Harsdörffer plays with signifying nature of Buchstaben, lending his writing (as Juliet Fleming puts it, describing early modern graffiti) "meaning in excess both of its signified content, and of its easily recognized aesthetic dimensions -- a meaning that has to do with the fact of its appearance in matter" (Fleming 115).

If words represent reality to our understanding, then, like existing things, they must consist of assembled elements. Reducing language to physical properties visually organized on the page justifies operating on words as objects. If the written and spoken language can be touched, tabulated, and visualized, then it can be secured, improved, perfected and rationally taught. (Cohen 8)