“How Many Unemployed Are There?” — When fuzzy logic met linguistics and semantics

This paper illuminates the first 10 years of Fuzzy Sets and Systems (FSS) where nobody could know that this theory would be a big success in the applied sciences and technology. Starting with the content of an (perhaps) unpublished text of Lotfi A. Zadeh, we show that, the founder of FSS expected in the period of the years 1965-1972, before Fuzzy control appeared, that this new theory would play an important role in humanities and social sciences. Moreover he tried to link his theory to the fields of linguistics and semantics.