Logic was Leibniz's earliest philosophic interest going back to his teens. René Descartes had suggested that the lexicon of a universal language should consist of primitive elements.[3] The systematic combination of these elements, according to syntactical rules, would generate the infinite combinations of computational structures required to represent human language. In this way Descartes and Leibniz were precursors to computational linguistics as defined by Noam Chomsky.[4]