by Eco, Umberto
22. In Sphaeram Ioannis de Sacro Bosco Commentarius (Rome: Apud Victorium Helianum, 1570.
23. The dates of composition are uncertain (ca. 1644–1648); the work was probably published at Leszno in 1648.
11
The Language of the Austral Land
The subject of a perfect language has appeared in the cultural history of every people. Throughout the first period of this search, which continued until the seventeenth century, this utopia consisted in the search for the primigenial Hebrew in which God spoke to Adam or that Adam invented when giving names to the animals and in which he had had his first dialogue With Eve. But already in Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia another possibility had been broached: that God had not given Adam primordial Hebrew but rather a general grammar, a transcendental form with which to construct all possible languages.
But this possibility was situated on the two horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, it was possible to conceive of a Chomskian God, who gave Adam some deep syntactical structures common to every language subsequently created by the human race, obeying a universal structure of the mind (without waiting for Chomsky, Rivarol, an eighteenth-century author, had defined French as the language of reason, because its direct order of discourse reproduces the logical order of reality). On the other hand, it could be supposed that God had given Adam some semantic universals (such as high/low, to stand up, to think, thing, action, and so on), a system of atomic notions by means of which every culture organizes its own view of the world.
Until the arrival of Humboldt, even if one accepted the so-called Epicurean hypothesis by which every people invents its own language to deal with its own experience, no one dared prefigure anything similar to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: that it is language that gives form to our experience of the world. Thinkers like Spinoza, Locke, Mersenne, and Leibniz admitted that our definitions (of man, gold, and so on) depend on our point of view about these things. Nobody, however, denied that it was possible to design a general system of ideas that somehow reflected the way the universe works.
Still, even before Dante, Ramon Llull had conceived the idea that there were universal notions, present in the language and in the thought of every people; he even believed that, by articulating and combining these concepts common to all men, it would be possible to convince the infidels—namely, the Muslims and the Jews—of the truth of the Christian religion.
This idea was revived at the dawn of the seventeenth century, after the discovery of Chinese ideograms, which were the same in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (though pronounced differently), for these different peoples referred to the same concepts. The same thing, it was said, happens with numbers, where different words refer to the same mathematical entity. But numbers possessed another attractive aspect: independently of the variety of languages, all peoples (or very many of them) indicated them with the same cipher or character.
The idea that began to circulate, especially in Anglo-Saxon circles, inspired by the Baconian reform of knowledge, was this: postulate a priori a system of semantic universals, assign to each semantic atom a visual character or a sound, and you will have a universal language. As for the grammar, it would be a question, according to the project, of reducing the declensions or the conjugations themselves in order to derive the various elements of speech from a same root, indicating them with diacritical signs or some other criterion of economy.
The first idea of a universal character appeared in Francis Bacon and was to produce in England an abundant series of attempts, of which we would mention only those of George Dalgarno, Francis Lodwick, and John Wilkins. These inventors of languages, which will be called philosophic and a priori, because they were constructed on the basis of a given philosophical view of the world, no longer aimed merely at converting the infidel or recovering that mystic communion with God that distinguished the perfect language of Adam but rather at fostering commercial exchange, colonial expansion, and the diffusion of science. It is no accident that most of these attempts were linked to the work of the Royal Society in London, and many of the results—apparent failures—of these utopists contributed to the birth of the new scientific taxonomies.
But this project, even if abundantly stripped of the mystic-religious connotations of earlier centuries, had another feature in common with the yearned-for perfect language of Adam. It was said of Adam that he had given “proper” names to things, the names that the things should have as they expressed their nature. In earlier centuries and still in the heyday of the occult and the kabbalistic speculations of the seventeenth century (consider, above all, Athanasius Kircher), this kinship between names and things was understood in terms of onomatopoeia, on the basis of far-fetched etymologies. To give an idea of the flavor of these ways of thinking, it suffices to quote Estienne Guichard (L’harmomie étymologique des langues, Paris: Le Noir 1606), where, for example, the author shows how from the Hebrew word batar was derived the Latin synonym dividere (147). Shuffling the letters, the word becomes tarab, and from tarab derives the Latin tribus, which then leads to distribuo and finally to dividere. Zacen means “old”; transposing the radicals one gets zanet, whence the Latin senex, and with a subsequent shift of letters comes zanec, whence in Oscan casnar, from which the Latin canus would be derived (247).
In subsequent attempts, the criterion of correspondence, or isomorphism between word and thing, is, by contrast, “compositional”: the semantic atoms are named arbitrarily, but their combination is motivated by the nature of the designated object. This criterion is similar to that followed by chemistry today: calling hydrogen H, oxygen O, and sulphur S is surely arbitrary, but calling water H2O or sulfuric acid H2SO4 is motivated by the chemical nature of these compounds. If either the order or the nature of the symbols were altered, another possible compound would be designated. Naturally this language is universal because, while each people indicates water with a different linguistic term, all are able to understand and write chemical symbols in the same way.
The search for a priori philosophic languages and the impassioned debates and rejections they inspired are evidenced by those pages in Gulliver’s Travels where Swift imagines an assembly of professors bent on improving the language of their country. The first project, you will recall, was to abbreviate speech, reducing all polysyllables to monosyllables and eliminating verbs and participles. The second tended to abolish all words completely, because it was quite possible to communicate by displaying things (a difficult project because the so-called speakers would be obliged to carry with them a sack containing all the objects they planned to mention).
But even earlier the subject of the philosophic language had rightfully entered the literary genre of seventeenth-century utopias. For that matter, already in the Basel edition (1518) of More’s Utopia, published by Pieter Gilles, there was an illustration with writing in the language of that ideal island; Godwin spoke of the possible language of the Selenites in his Man in the Moone (1638); and Cyrano de Bergerac mentioned other-planetary languages on several occasions, both in Les estats et les empires de la lune (1657) and Les estats et les empires du soleil (1662).
Still, if we want two models of language that echo the a priori philosophical language of the Utopians, we must turn to two novels narrating journeys in the Austral Land, La Terre australe connue (1676), by Gabriel de Foigny, and L’Histoire des Sevarambes (1677–1679), by Denis Vairasse. Here, I will delve only into the first, which to me seems particularly instructive, because, as often happens with good caricatures, the parodistic deformation reveals some essential features of the caricatured object.
La Terre australe connue is naturally a work of the imagination. In distant, unknown lands an ideal community is supposedly discovered. In this ideal community the language, too, is ideal, and it is interesting to remark that Foigny writes in 1676, after the three significant a priori philosophic language projects have appeared: Lodwick’s Common Writing (1647), Dalgarno’s Ars Signorum (1661), and Wilkins’s Essay towards a Real Charact
er (1668).
Foigny’s exposition, precisely because it is incomplete and a burlesque, takes up only a few pages of his ninth chapter, rather than the 500 (in folio!) of Wilkins’s, the most voluminous and complete of all the projects of that century. Yet is worth taking Foigny’s into consideration because, for all its terseness, it illustrates the advantages and limitations of a philosophic language. It reveals and magnifies—as only a parody can—the flaws of its models, but, as they are magnified, the better we are able to distinguish them.
In order to better understand Foigny it is useful to refer to Figure 11.1, where I try to extrapolate from his text a sort of Austral dictionary, along with some grammatical rules. Because the author is often reticent, I have inferred some rules from examples, while others remain unspecific (thus, for example, of thirty-six accidentals, I have been unable to reconstruct only eighteen).
Foigny’s Austral inhabitants,
to express their thoughts, employ three modes, all used in Europe: signs, voice, and writing. Signs are very familiar to them, and I have noticed that they spend many hours together without speaking in any other way, because they are ruled by this great principle: “that it is useless to employ several ways of action, when one can act with few.”
Figure 11.1
So they speak only when it is necessary to express a long series of propositions. All their words are monosyllabic, and their conjugations follow the same criterion. For example, af means “to love”; the present is la, pa, ma; I love, thou lovest, he loves; lla, ppa, mma; we love, you love, they love. They possess only one past tense, which we call the perfect: lga, pga, mga, I have loved, thou hast loved, etc.; llga, ppga, mmga, we have loved, etc. The future lda, pda, mda, I will love, etc., llda, ppda, mmda, we will love, etc. “To work,” in the Austral language, is uf: lu, pu, mu, I work, thou workest, etc.; lgu, pgu, ragu, I have worked, etc.
They have no declensions, no article, and very few words. They express simple things with a single vowel and compound things through vowels that indicate the chief simple bodies that make up those compounds. They know only five simple bodies, of which the first and most noble is fire, which they express with a; then there is air, indicated with e; the third is salt, indicated with o; the fourth, water, which they call i; and the fifth, earth, which they define as u.
As differentiating principle they employ the consonants, which are far more numerous than those of the Europeans. Each consonant denotes a quality peculiar to the things expressed by the vowels, thus b means clear; c, hot; d, unpleasant; f, dry, etc. Following these rules, they form words so well that, listening to them, you understand immediately the nature and the content of what they signify. They call the stars Aeb, a word that indicates their compound of fire and air, united to clarity. They call the sun Aab, birds are Oef, sign of their solidity and their aeriform and dry matter. Man is called Uel, which indicates his substance, partly aerial, partly terrestrial, accompanied by wetness. And so it is with other things. The advantage of this way of speaking is that you become philosophers, learning the prime elements, and in this country, nothing can be named without explaining at the same time its nature, which would seem miraculous to those unaware of the secret that they use to this end.
If their way of speech is so admirable, even more so is their writing … and though to us it seems very difficult to decipher them, custom makes the practice very simple.1
Instructions in the manner of writing follow; here vowels are indicated with dots marked in different positions, while the thirty-six consonants of the alphabet are little strokes that surround the dots and are recognized by their angles. Foigny mentions these graphic devices obviously making fun of similarly complicated systems, such as, for example, Joachim Becher’s Character pro notia linguarum universalis (1661), which proposes a form of notation capable of completely muddling the reader’s ideas. He then continues, citing composites that can be achieved:
For example: eb, clear air; ic, hot water; ix, cold water; ul, damp earth; af, dry fire; es, white air.… There are another eighteen or nineteen, but in Europe we have no consonants corresponding to them.
The more you consider this way of writing, the more you will discover secrets worthy of admiration: b means clear; c hot; x cold; l wet; f dry; n black; t green; d nasty; p sweet; q pleasant; r bitter; m desirable; g bad; z high; h low; j red; a joined with i, calm. The moment a word is spoken, they know the nature of what it denotes: to indicate a sweet and desirable apple, they write ipm; nasty and unpleasant fruit is ind. I cannot explain all the other secrets that they understand and reveal in their letters.
The verbs are even more mysterious than the nouns. For example, they write and pronounce af, to say “to love”; a means fire, f means the scorching caused by love. They say la to mean “I Love,” which means the secretion that love produces in us; pa, “thou lovest,” sign of the lover’s sweetness; lla, “we love,” the double ll indicating the number of persons; oz means “to speak,” the letter o standing for salt, which seasons out speech, while z indicates the inhaling and exhaling necessary to speech.
When a child is being taught, the meaning of all the elements is explained to him, and when he unites them, he learns both the essence and the nature of all things he is saying. This is a wonderful advantage both for the individual and for society, because, when they have learned to read, as they always do by the age of three, they understand at the same time all the characteristics of all beings.
In this language the single letters are chosen arbitrarily, and each refers to a simple notion or to a thing. When compound entities are denoted, however, the syntax of expression appears isomorphic with reference to the content. Assuming that stars are a compound of fire and clear-colored air, the syntagm aeb expresses “naturally” the nature of the thing. The expression is isomorphic to the content, to such a degree that changing one element of the expression denotes a different content. In fact, aab does not mean stars; it means sun because (in the astronomy of the Austral Land) the sun is obviously a double, clear fire. In this sense the language of real characters is distinguished from the natural languages where, if month means a length of time, the relationship between noun and notion (or thing) in both cases is entirely arbitrary. In other terms, if, by mistake, we write catt, this does not indicate, say, a cat with an extra leg, whereas, if in the Austral language you write, or say, icc instead of ic, probably you want to indicate water not hot but boiling hot.
As I said earlier, the system recalls the language of chemical formulas: if you write H2Au instead of H2O in theory you indicate a different chemical compound. But here the first drawback of the system crops up. In chemistry, the system remains, so to speak, open (accommodating neologisms) in case an absolutely new compound has to be named, but the acceptance of the neologism is conditioned by the system of the content. Because in nature the number of known or admitted compounds is limited, one may confidently read H2Au as a mistake, a misspelling, as it were. But in the Austral language, what happens if one rungs into the syntagm al? Must one admit the possibility that there exists a “wet fire”?
A problem of this sort emerged in connection with the semantic universals that Ramon Llull subjected to combinations and permutations, where the free combination of letters could theoretically produce an utterance repellent to the philosophical bases of the system into which it was introduced (or, in other words, a heretical utterance, such as “truth is false” or “God is lascivious”). But in these cases Llull considered null the theologically unacceptable combination. This also occurred because the letters denoted metaphysical entities that, in the realm of the theology of reference, were precisely defined. Bonitas est magna means that Goodness is great, but as Goodness was already defined in this way, it was impossible to conceive of its opposite, Bonitas est mala (Goodness is evil). Likewise, the Ars did not contemplate the possibility of metaphorical expression or even of periphrases. The primitive terms employed defined the entire universe of what was theologically sayable. Llu
ll, with his perfect theological language, was not interested in talking about stars or hot water.
On the contrary, the Austral language uses a very limited battery of primitives but must serve to express every possible experience, that is, to replace through compositions of primitives the entire vocabulary. Thus, as can be seen from the quotation above, it must employ periphrases that, in Foigny’s satirical version, are highly questionable metaphors: apple becomes sweet and desirable water, and the act of loving is expressed as af (dry fire), or burning derived from the fire of passion. If dry fire means love, then why should wet fire not be able to mean metaphorically some other thing? The problem that arises, analyzing this caricature of language, is a serious problem: if a few primitives must denominate many things, it is indispensable to recur to periphrasis, and this is precisely what happens with the “serious” projects of Wilkins and Dalgarno. And the confines between periphrasis and metaphorical expression can become very hazy. In fact, in Dalgarno’s serious project compounds were introduced on the order of “animal + full-hoofs + spirited” to signify horse and “animal + full-hoofs + huge” to signify elephant.
The equally serious project of Wilkins was based on the fact that all ambiguities of language had to be reduced so that every sign would refer to a single, rigorously defined concept. But some metaphorical operators were introduced to allow the language to express entities for which no terms existed in the philosophical dictionary, whose format had inevitably to be reduced. Wilkins asserts that it is not necessary to have a character for calf because the concept can be reached by combining cow and young; nor does one need a primitive lioness, since this animal can be denoted by combining the sign for female with that for lion. Thus Wilkins develops in his grammar (and then transforms into a system of special signs in the part devoted to the writing and pronunciation of the characters) a system of “Transcendental Particles” intended to amplify or alter the character to which they are applied. The list contemplates eight classes amounting to a total of forty-eight particles, but the criterion that assembles them is not at all systematic. Wilkins harks back to Latin grammar, which makes use of endings/suffixes (that allow the creation of terms like lucesco, aquosus, homunculus); of “segregates” such as tim and genus (allowing the creation, from a root, of gradatim or multigenus); and determination of place (hence vestiarium) and agent (cf. arator). Some of his particles are without doubt of a grammatical nature (for example, those that transform masculine into feminine or adult into young). But Wilkins himself recurs also to the criteria of rhetoric, citing metaphor, synecdoche, and metonymy, and, in fact, the particles in the metaphorical-like category are simply signs of rhetorical interpretation. Thus, adding one of these particles to root one gains original, while adding it to light yields evident. Finally, other particles seem to refer to the cause–effect relation, or container–thing contained, or function–activity, as in the following examples:
