The Search for the Perfect Language

by Umberto Eco, James Fentress (Translator)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780631205104
Publisher:	Wiley
Publication date:	04/08/1997
Series:	Making of Europe
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	707,935
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

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).

Hometown:

Bologna, Italy

Date of Birth:

January 5, 1932

Date of Death:

February 19, 2016

Place of Birth:

Alessandria, Italy

Education:

Ph.D., University of Turin, 1954

Table of Contents

Series Editor's Preface.

Introduction.

1. From Adam to Confusio Linguarum. .

Genesis 2, 10, 11.

Before and After Europe.

Side-effects.

A Semiotic Model for Natural Language.

2. The Kabbalistic Pansemioticism. .

The Reading of the Torah.

Cosmic Permutability and the Kabbala of Names.

The Mother Tongue.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. Magic Language.

Hypotheses.

Dee's Magic Language.

Perfection and Secrecy.

9. Polygraphies.

Kircher's Polygraphy.

Beck and Becher.

First Attempts at a Content Organizations.

10. A Priori Philosophical Languages. .

Bacon.

Comenius.

Descarted and Mersenne.

The English Debate on Character and Traits.

Primitives and Organization Content.

11. George Dalgarno.

12. 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.

13. Francis Lodwick. .

14. From Liebniz to the Encyclopédie.

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 Encyclopédie.

15. 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.

16. 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.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"This is as much a history of the study of language and its origins as it is a tour de force pursuit using scholarly detection and cultural interpretation, thus providing a series of original perspectives on two thousand years of European history." The Medieval Review

Editorial Reviews

"This is as much a history of the study of language and its origins as it is a tour de force pursuit using scholarly detection and cultural interpretation, thus providing a series of original perspectives on two thousand years of European history." The Medieval Review

From the Publisher

Before the bewildering Babel of tongues described in Genesis, humanity had just one perfect language, originating in the Garden of Eden, or so theologians and philosophers believed from the early Dark Ages to the Renaissance. In this erudite study, which will be heavy going for most readers, famed Italian novelist and linguist Eco mines a wealth of esoteric lore as he investigates a neglected chapter in the history of ideas. He begins with Dante's proposal for a universal vernacular in place of Latin, and Catalan friar Raymond Lull's combinatorial system of letters and symbols designed to explore metaphysical connections. He goes on to examine the Kabbalistic search for hidden messages in sacred Hebrew texts, the Rosicrucian society's symbolic writing in 17th-century Germany and French Enlightenment thinkers' invention of philosophical languages organized around fundamental categories of knowledge. He also surveys the search for a primordial language assumed by Augustine to be Hebrew and by later mother tongue-seekers to be Aramaic or various other languages. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The myth of primordial language in which the word corresponds to being, or the dream of a universal language, has long fascinated thinkers. In this provocative history of ideas, noted Italian linguist and semiologist Eco (The Island of the Day Before, LJ 7/95) traces the quest for a perfect language. For Eco, this quest informs the myth of Adam, Cabalism, Enlightenment theories of classification and the encyclopedias, the search for Indo-European universal grammars, as well as the development of International Auxiliary Languages. He also includes illuminating chapters on Dante, Raymond Lull, Francis Lodwick, and others. Eco's complex yet lucid account of the nature of language is the most stimulating since George Steiner's After Babel (Oxford Univ. Pr., 1975). For academic libraries.-T.L. Cooksey, Armstrong State Coll., Savannah, Ga.

Library Journal