Read the passage and answer the question: Throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries there were frequent attempts made to develop a universal language. Such efforts, which were by no means limited to single country, had three major goals. There was a need for an auxiliary language, such as Latin had been, to expedite exchanges of various kinds: scientific, political, commercial. There was a need for a 'universal character', that would provide a simplified rigorous set of symbols capable of expressing all actual and possible knowledge and above all, it was felt, a truly universal language would itself be an instrument of discovery and verification. — A universal language has several ____.