The Search for the Perfect Language

by Eco, Umberto

• ISBN13: 9780631174653
• ISBN10: 0631174656
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1995-10-30
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

The idea that there once existed a language which perfectly and unambiguously expressed the essence of all possible things and concepts has occupied the minds of philosophers, theologians, mystics and others for at least two millennia. This is an investigation into the history of that idea and of its profound influence on European thought, culture and history.From the early Dark Ages to the Renaissance it was widely believed that the language spoken in the Garden of Eden was just such a language, and that all current languages were its decadent descendants from the catastrophe of the Fall and at Babel. The recovery of that language would, for theologians, express the nature of divinity, for cabbalists allow access to hidden knowledge and power, and for philosophers reveal the nature of truth. Versions of these ideas remained current in the Enlightenment, and have recently received fresh impetus in attempts to create a natural language for artificial intelligence.The story that Umberto Eco tells ranges widely from the writings of Augustine, Dante, Descartes and Rousseau, arcane treatises on cabbalism and magic, to the history of the study of language and its origins. He demonstrates the initimate relation between language and identity and describes, for example, how and why the Irish, English, Germans and Swedes - one of whom presented God talking in Swedish to Adam, who replied in Danish, while the serpent tempted Eve in French - have variously claimed their language as closest to the original. He also shows how the late eighteenth-century discovery of a proto-language (Indo-European) for the Aryan peoples was perverted to support notions of racial superiority.To this subtle exposition of a history of extraordinary complexity, Umberto Eco links the associated history of the manner in which the sounds of language and concepts have been written and symbolized. Lucidly and wittily written, the book is, in sum, a tour de force of scholarly detection and cultural interpretation, providing a series of original perspectives on two thousand years of European History.The paperback edition of this book is not available through Blackwell outside of North America.

Author Biography

Umberto Eco was born in Alessandria in 1932 and has been Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna since 1975 and the President of the International Center for Semiotic and Cognitive Studies at the Universityu of San Marino since 1988. His books include The Name of the Rose (1980), Foucault's Pendulum (1988) and the more recent works include Semiotics and Philosophy of Lanaguage (1984) and The Limits of Interpretation (1990).

Table of Contents

Series Editor's Preface

Introduction

From Adam to Confusio Linguarum. .Genesis 2, 10, 11

Before and After Europe

Side-effects

A Semiotic Model for Natural Language

The Kabbalistic Pansemioticism

The Reading of the Torah

Cosmic Permutability and the Kabbala of Names

The Mother Tongue

The Perfect Language of Dante

Latin and the Vernacular

Language and Lingusitic Behavior

The First Gift to Adam

Dante and Universal Grammar

The Illustrious Vernacular

Dante and Abulafia

The Ars Magna of Raymond Lull

The Elements of the Ars Combinatoria

The Alphabet and the Four Figures

The Arbor Scientarium

The Concordia Universalis of Nicholas of Cusa

The Monogenetic Hypothesis and the Mother Tongues

The Return to Hebrew

Postel's Universalistic Utopia

The Etymological Furor

Conventionalism, Epicureanism and Polygenesis

The Pre-Hebraic Language

The Nationalistic Hypotheses

Philosophers against Monogeneticism

A Dream that refused to Die

New Prospects for the Monogenetic Hypothesis

Kabbalism and Lullism in Modern Culture

Magic Names and Kabbalistic Hebrew

Kabbalism and Lullism in the Steganographies

Lullian Kabbalism

Bruno: Ars Combinatoria and Infinite Worlds

Infinite Songs and Locutions

The Perfect Language of Images

Horapollo's Hieroglyphica

The Egyptian Alphabet

Kircher's Egyptology

Kircher's Chinese

The Kircherian Ideology

Later Critics

The Egyptian vs. the Chinese Way

Images for Aliens

Magic Language

Hypotheses

Dee's Magic Language

Perfection and Secrecy

Polygraphies

Kircher's Polygraphy

Beck and Becher

First Attempts at a Content Organizations

A Priori Philosophical Languages

Bacon

Comenius

Descarted and Mersenne

The English Debate on Character and Traits

Primitives and Organization Content

George Dalgarno

John Wilkins

The Tables and the Grammar

The Real Characters

The Dictionary: Synonyms, Periphrases, Metaphors

An Open Classification?

The Limits of Classification

The Hypertext of Wilkins

Francis Lodwick

From Liebniz to the Encyclopedie

Characteristica and Calculus

The Problem of the Primitives

The Encyclopedia and the Aphabet of Thought

Blind Thought

The I Ching and the Binary Calculus

Side-effects

The 'Library' of Liebnitz and the Encyclopedie

Philosophic Language from the Enlightenment to Today

Eighteenth-century Projects

The Last Flowering of Philosophic Languages

Space Languages

Artificial Intelligence

Some Ghosts of the Perfect Language

The Internatonal Auxiliary Languages

The Mixed Systems

The Babel of A Posteriori Languages

Esperanto

An Optimized Grammar

Theoretical Objections and Counter-objections

The 'Political' Possibilitites of an IAL

Limits and Effability of an IAL

Conclusion

Translation

The Gift to Adam

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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