This offbeat essay argues that the roots of NLP go way back. In the 17th century, Gottfried Leibniz imagined a “great instrument of reason” that wouldn’t just generate text, it would generate entire ideas.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/robotics/artificial-intelligence/in-the-17th-century-leibniz-dreamed-of-a-machine-that-could-calculate-ideas

“Leibniz … embarked on a project to create his own method of idea generation through symbolic combination. He wanted to use his machine not for theological debate, but for philosophical reasoning. He proposed that such a system would require three things: an ‘alphabet of human thoughts’; a list of logical rules for their valid combination and re-combination; and a mechanism that could carry out the logical operations on the symbols quickly and accurately…”