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Introduction 3 Having established the boundaries of my discourse, I must pay my debts. I am indebted to the studies of Paolo Rossi for first awakening my interest in the subjects of classical mnemonics, pansophia and world theatres; to Alessandro Bausani's witty and learned overview on invented languages; to Lia Formigari's book on the linguistic problems of English empiricism; and to many other authors whom, if I do not cite every time that I have drawn on them, I hope, at least, to have cited on crucial points, as well as to have included in the bibliography.

My only regret is that George Steiner had already copyrighted the most appropriate title for this book - After Babel - nearly twenty years ago. Hats off. I would also like to thank the BBC interviewer who, on 4 October , asked me what semiotics meant. I replied 6 Introduction that he ought to know the answer himself, since semiotics was defined by Locke in , in Great Britain, and since in the same country was published in the Essay towards a Real Character by Bishop Wilkins, the first semiotic approach to an artificial language.

Later, as I left the studio, I noticed an antiquarian bookstore, and, out of curiosity, I walked into it. Lying there I saw a copy of Wilkins' Essay. It seemed a sign from heaven; so I bought it. That was the beginning of my passion for collecting old books on imaginary, artificial, mad and occult languages, out of which has grown my personal 'Bibliotheca Semiologica Curiosa, Lunatica, Magica et Pneumatica ', which has been a mainstay to me in the present endeavour.

In , I was also encouraged to undertake the study of perfect languages by an early work of Roberto Pellerey, and I shall often be referring to his recent volume on perfect languages in the eighteenth century.

I have also given two courses of lectures on this topic in the University of Bologna and one at the College de France. Many of my students have made contributions about particular themes or authors. Their contributions appeared, as the rules of academic fairness require, before the publication of this book, in the special issue of VS , , 'Le lingue perfette'.

A final word of thanks to the antiquarian booksellers on at least two continents who have brought to my attention rare or unknown texts. Unfortunately - considering the size prescribed for this book - as rich as the most exciting of these trouvailles are, they could receive only passing mention, or none at all. I console myself that I have the material for. Besides, the first draft of this research totalled twice the number of pages I am now sending to the printer.

I hope that my readers will be grateful for the sacrifice that I have celebrated for their comfort, and that the experts will forgive me the elliptic and pancrramic bent of my story. God spoke before all things, and said, 'Let there be light.

Thus Creation itself arose through an act of speech; it is only by giving things their names that he created them and gave them an ontological status: 'And God called the light Day and the darkness He called Night And God called the firmament Heaven' , 8. In Genesis , the Lord speaks to man for the first time, putting at his disposal all the goods in the earthly paradise, commanding him, however, not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

We are not told in what language God spoke to Adam. Tradition has pictured it as a sort of language of interior illumination, in which God, as in other episodes of the Bible, expresses himself by thunderclaps and lightning.

If we are to understand it this way, we must think of a language which, although not translatable into any known idiom, is still, through a special grace or dispensation, comprehensible to its hearer. It is at this point, and only at this point ff , that 'out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, From Adam to Confusio Linguarum and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them'.

The interpretation of this passage is an extremely delicate matter. Clearly we are here in the presence of a motif, common to other religions and mythologies - that of the nomothete, the name-giver, the creator of language. Yet it is not at all clear on what basis Adam actually chose the names he gave to the animals. The version in the Vulgate, the source for European culture's understanding of the passage, does little to resolve this mystery.

The Vulgate has Adam calling the various animals 'no minibus suis', which we can only translate, 'by their own names'. The King James version does not help us any more: 'Whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. Either he gave them the names that, by some extra-linguistic right, were already due to them, or he gave them those names we still use on the basis of a convention initiated by Adam.

In other words, the names that Adam gave the animals are either the names that each animal intrinsically ought to have been given, or simply the names that the nomothete arbitrarily and ad placitum decided to give to them. From this difficulty, we pass to Genesis Here Adam sees Eve for the first time; and here, for the first time, the reader hears Adam's actual words.

In the King James version, Adam is quoted as saying: 'This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman.. The linguistic theme is taken up once more, this time in a very explicit fashion, in Genesis 1.

We are told that after the Flood, 'the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. To punish their pride and to put a stop to the construction of their tower, the Lord thought: 'Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.

Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth' Genesis , 9.

In the opinion of various Arab authors cf. Borst I, II, 9 , the confusion was due to the trauma induced by the sight, terrifying no doubt, of the collapse of the tower. This really changes nothing: the biblical story, as well as the partially divergent accounts of other mythologies, simply serves to establish the fact that different languages exist in the world. Told in this way, however, the story is still incomplete. We have left out Genesis Here, speaking of the diffusion of the sons of Noah after the Flood, the text states of the sons of Japheth that, 'By these [sons] were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations' This idea is repeated in similar words for the sons of Ham and of Shem How are we meant to interpret this evident plurality of languages prior to Babel?

The account presented in Genesis 11 is dramatic, able to inspire visual representations, as is shown by the further iconographic tradition. The account in Genesis 10 is, by contrast, less theatrical. It is obvious that tradition focused on the story in which the existence of a plurality of tongues was understood as the tragic consequence of the confusion after Babel and the result of a divine malediction.

Where it was not neglected entirely, Genesis 10 was reduced to a sort of footnote, a provincial episode recounting the diffusion of tribal dialects, not the multiplication of tongues. Thus Genesis 11 seems to possess a clear and unequivocal meaning: first there was one language, and then there were depending on which tradition we follow - seventy or seventy-two. It is this story that served as the point of From Adam to Confusio Linguarum departure for any number of dreams to 'restore' the language of Adam.

Genesis 10, however, has continued to lurk in the background with all its explosive potential still intact. If the languages were already differentiated after Noah, why not before? It is a chink in the armour of the myth of Babel. If languages were differentiated not as a punishment but simply as a result of a natural process, why must the confusion of tongues constitute a curse at all?

Every so often in the course of our story, someone will oppose Genesis 10 to Genesis Depending on the period and the theologico-philosophical context, the results will be more or less devastating. None the less, it is one thing to know why many languages exist; it is quite another to decide that this multiplicity is a wound that must be healed by the quest for a perfect language. Before one decides to seek a perfect language, one needs, at the very least, to be persuaded that one's own is not so.

Keeping, as we decided, strictly to Europe - the classical Greeks knew of peoples speaking languages other than theirs: they called these peoples barbaroi, beings who mumble in an incomprehensible speech. The Stoics, with their more articulated notion of semiotics, knew perfectly well that the ideas to which certain sounds in Greek corresponded were also present in the minds of barbarians.

However, not knowing Greek, barbarians had no notion of the connection between the Greek sound and the particular idea. Linguistically and culturally speaking, they were unworthy of any attention.

For the Greek philosophers, Greek was the language of reason. Aristotle's list of categories is squarely based on the categories of Greek grammar. This did not explicitly entail From Adam to Confusio Linguarum 11 a claim that the Greek language was primary: it was simply a case of the identification of thought with its natural vehicle.

Logos was thought, and Logos was speech. About the speech of barbarians little was known; hence, little was known about what it would be like to think in the language of barbarians. Although the Greeks were willing to admit that the Egyptians, for example, possessed a rich and venerable store of wisdom, they only knew this because someone had explained it to them in Greek. As Greek civilization expanded, the status of Greek as a language evolved as well.

At first, there existed almost as many varieties of Greek as there were Greek texts Meillet 4. In the period following the conquests of Alexander the Great, however, there arose and spread a common Greek - the koine. This was the language of Polybius, Strabo, Plutarch and Aristotle; it was the language taught in the schools of grammar.

Gradually it became the official language of the entire area of the Mediterranean bounded by Alexander's conquests. Spoken by patricians and intellectuals, Greek still survived here under Roman domination as well, as the language of commerce and trade, of diplomacy, and of scientific and philosophical debate. It was finally the language in which the first Christian texts were transmitted the Gospels and the Septuagint translation of the Bible in the third century BC , and the language of the ear]y church Fathers.

A civilization with an international language does not need to worry about the multiplicity of tongues. Nevertheless such a civilization can worry about the 'rightness' of its own. In the Cratylus, Plato asks the same question that a reader of the Genesis story might: did the nomothete chose the sounds with which to name objects according to the objects' nature physis?

This is the thesis of Cratylus, while Ermogene maintains that they were assigned by law or human convention nomos. Socrates moves among these theses with apparent ambiguity. Finally, having subjected both to ironical comment, inventing etymologies that neither he nor Plato is eager to accept, Socrates brings 12 From Adam to Confusio Linguarum forward his own hypothesis: knowledge is founded not on our relation to the names of things, but on our relation to the things themselves - or, better, to the ideas of those things.

Later, even by these cultures that ignored Cratylus, every discussion on the nature of a perfect language has revolved around the three possibilities first set out in this dialogue.

None the less, the Cratylus was not itself a project for a perfect language: Plato discusses the preconditions for semantic adequacy within a given language without posing the problem of a perfect one.

While the Greek koine continued to dominate the Mediterranean basin, Latin was becoming the language of the empire, and thus the universal language for all parts of Europe reached by the Roman legions.

Later it became the language of the Roman church. Once again, a civilization with a common language was not troubled by the plurality of tongues. Learned men might still discourse in Greek, but, for the rest of the world, speaking with barbarians was, once again, the job of a few translators, and this only until these same barbarians began to speak their Latin.

Despite this, by the second century AD, there had begun to grow the suspicion that Latin and Greek might not be the only languages which expressed harmoniously the totality of experience.

Slowly spreading across the GrecoRoman world, obscure revelations appeared; some were attributed to Persian magi, others to an Egyptian divinity called Thoth-Hermes, to Chaldean oracles, and even to the very Pythagorean and Orphic traditions which, though born on Greek soil, had long been smothered under the weight of the great rationalist philosophy.

By now, the classical rationalism, elaborated and reelaborated over centuries, had begun to show signs of age. With this, traditional religion entered a period of crisis as well.

The imperial pagan religion had become a purely formal affair, no more than.. Each people had been allowed to keep its own gods. These were accommodated to the Latin pantheon, no one bothering over contradictions, synonyms or homonyms.

The term From Adam to Confusio Linguarum l3 characterizing this levelling toleration for any type of religion and for any type of philosophy or knowledge as well is syncretism. An unintended result of this syncretism, however, was that a diffused sort of religiosity began to grow in the souls of the most sensitive.

It was manifested by a belief in the universal World Soul; a soul which subsisted in stars and in earthly objects alike.

Our own, individual, souls were but small particles of the great World Soul. Since the reason of philosophers proved unable to supply truths about important matters such as these, men and women sought revelations beyond reason, through visions, and through communications with the godhead itself. It was in this climate that Pythagoreanism was reborn.

From its beginnings, Pythagoreans had regarded themselves as the keepers of a mystic form of knowledge, and practised initiatory rites. Their understanding of the laws of music and mathematics was presented as the fruit of revelation obtained from the Egyptians. By the time of Pythagoreanism's second appearance, however, Egyptian civilization had been eradicated by the Greek and Latin conquerors. Egypt itself had now become an enigma, no more than an incomprehensible hieroglyph.

Yet there is nothing more fascinating than secret wisdom: one is sure that it exists, but one does not know what it is. In the imagination, therefore, it shines as something unutterably profound. That such a wisdom could exist while still remaining unknown, however, could only be accounted for by the fact that the language in which this wisdom was expressed had remained unknown as well.

This was the reasoning of Diogenes Laertius, who wrote in his Lives of the Philosophers in the third century AD: 'There are those who assert that philosophy started among the Barbarians: there were, they claim, Magi among the Persians, the Chaldeans, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Gymnosophists of India, the Druids among the Celts and Galatians' I.

The classical Greeks had identified the barbarians as those who 14 From Adam to Confusio Linguarum could not even articulate their speech. It now seemed that these very mumblings were of a sacred language, filled with the promise of tacit revelations Festugiere I. I have given a summary of the cultural atmosphere at this time because, albeit in a delayed fashion, it was destined to have a deep influence on our story.

Although no one at the time proposed the reconstruction of a perfect language, the need for one was, by now, vaguely felt. We shall see that the suggestions, first planted during these years, flowered more than twelve centuries later in humanistic and Renaissance culture and beyond ; this will constitute a central thread in the story I am about to tell. In the meantime, Christianity had become a state religion, expressed in the Greek of the patristic East and in the Latin still spoken in the West.

After St Jerome translated the Old Testament in the fourth century, the need to know Hebrew as a sacred language grew weaker. This happened to Greek as well. A typical example of this cultural lack is given by St Augustine, a man of vast culture, and the most important exponent of Christian thought at the end of the empire. St Augustine, however, knew no Hebrew; and his knowledge of Greek was, to say the least, patchy cf. Marrou This amounts to a somewhat paradoxical situation: the man who set himself the task of interpreting scripture in order to discover the true meaning of the divine word could read it only in a Latin translation.

He did not entirely trust the Jews, nurturing a suspicion that, in their versions, they might have erased all references to the coming of Christ.

The only critical procedure he would allow was that of comparing translations in order to find the most likely version. In this way, St Augustine, though the father of hermeneutics, was certainly not destined to become the father of philology. From Adam to Confusio Linguarum 15 There is one sense in which St Augustine did have a clear idea of a perfect language, common to all people.

But this was not a language of words; it was, rather, a language made out of things themselves. He viewed the world, as it was later to be put, as a vast book written with God's own finger.

Those who knew how to read this book were able to understand the allegories hidden in the scriptures, where, beneath references to simple earthly things plants, stones, animals , symbolic meanings lay.

This Language of the World, instituted by its creator, could not be read, however, without a key; it was the need to provide such a key that provoked a rapid outflowing of bestiaries, lapidaries, encyclopedias and imagines mundi throughout the Middle Ages.

This represents a tradition that will resurface in our own story as well: European culture will sometimes seize upon hieroglyphs and other esoteric ideograms, believing that truth can only be expressed in emblems or symbols.

Still, St Augustine's symbolic interests were not combined with the longing to recover a lost tongue that someone might, or ought to, speak once again. For Augustine, as for nearly all the early Fathers, Hebrew certainly was the primordial language. It was the language spoken before Babel. After the confusion, it still remained the tongue of the elected people. Nevertheless, Augustine gave no sign of wanting to recover its use.

He was at home in Latin, by now the language of the church and of theology. Several centuries later, Isidore of Seville found it easy to assume that, in any case, there were three sacred languages - Hebrew, Greek and Latin - because these were the three languages that appeared written above the cross Etymologiarum, ix, 1.

With this conclusion, the task of determining the language in which the Lord said 'Fiat lux' became more arduous. If anything, the Fathers were concerned about another linguistic puzzle: the Bible clearly states that God brought before Adam all the beasts of the field and all the fowl of the air. What about the fish? Did Adam name the fish? Maybe it seemed inconvenient dragging them all up from 16 From Adam to Confusio Linguarum the briny deep to parade them in the garden of Eden.

We may think this a slight matter; yet the question, whose last trace is to be found in Massey's Origins and Progress of Letters published in cf. White II, , was never satisfactorily resolved, despite Augustine's helpful suggestion that the fish were named one at a time, as they were discovered De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim, XII, Between the fall of the Roman Empire and the early Middle Ages, when Europe had still to emerge, premonitions of its linguistic future lurked unrecorded.

New languages came slowly into being. It has been calculated that, towards the end of the fifth century, people no longer spoke Latin, but Gallo-Romanic, Italico-Romanic or HispanoRomanic. While intellectuals continued to write Latin, bastardizing it ever further, they heard around them local dialects in which survivals of languages spoken before Roman civilization crossed with new roots arriving with the barbarian invaders.

It is in the seventh century, before any known document written in Romance or Germanic languages, that the first allusion to our theme appears. It is contained in an attempt, on the part of Irish grammarians, to defend spoken Gaelic over learned Latin.

In a work entitled Auracepit na n-Eces 'the precepts of the poets' , the Irish grammarians refer to the structural material of the tower of Babel as follows: 'Others affirm that in the tower there were only nine materials, and that these were clay and water, wool and blood, wood and lime, pitch, linen, and bitumen These represent noun, pronoun, verb, adverb, participle, conjunction, preposition, interjection.

This is part of an argument that the Gaelic language constituted the first and only instance of a language that overcame the confusion of tongues. It was the first, programmed language, constructed after the confusion of tongues, and created by the From Adam to Confusio Linguarum 17 seventy-two wise men of the school of Fenius. The canonic account in the Precepts shows the action of the founding of this language It was then that the rules of this language were constructed. All that was best in each language, all there was that was grand or beautiful, was cut out and retained in Irish.

Wherever there was something that had no name in any other language, a name for it was made up in Irish. As long as the proper order of its elements was respected, this ensured a sort of iconic bond between grammatical items and referents, or states of things in the real world.

Why is it, however, that a document asserting the rights and qualities of one language in contrast to others appears at this particular moment? A quick look at the iconographic history increases our curiosity. There are no known representations of the Tower of Babel before the Cotton Bible fifth or sixth century. It next appears in a manuscript perhaps from the end of the tenth century, and then on a relief from the cathedral of Salerno from the eleventh century. After this, however, there is a flood of towers Minkowski It is a flood, moreover, that has its counterpart in a vast deluge of theoretical speculation originating in precisely this period as well.

It seems, therefore, that it was only at this point that the story of the confusion of tongues came to be perceived not merely as an example of how divine justice humbled human pride, but as an account of a historical or metahistorical event. It was now the story of how a real wound had been inflicted on humanity, a wound that might, in some way, be healed once more.

This age, characterized as 'dark', seemed to witness a reoccurrence of the catastrophe of Babel: hairy barbarians, 18 From Adam to Confusio Linguarum peasants, artisans, these first Europeans, unlettered and unversed in official culture, spoke a multitude of vulgar tongues of which official culture was apparently unaware. It was the age that saw the birth of the languages which we speak today, whose documentary traces - in the Serments de Strasbourg or the Carta Capuana - inevitably appear only later.

Facing such texts as Sao ko kelle terre, per kelle fini ke ki contene, trenta anni le possette parte Sancti Benedicti, or Pro Deo amur et pro Christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, the European culture becomes aware of the confusio linguarum. Yet before this confusion there was no European culture, and, hence, no Europe.

What is Europe anyway? It is a continent, barely distinguishable from Asia, existing, before people had invented a name for it, from the time that the unstoppable power of continental drift tore it off from the original Pangea. In the sense we normally mean it, however, Europe was an entity that had to wait for the fall of the Roman Empire and the birth of the RomanoGermanic kingdoms before it could be born.

Perhaps even this was not enough, nor even the attempt at unification under the Carolingians. How are we going to establish the date when the history of Europe begins? The dates of great political events and battles will not do; the dates of linguistic events must serve in their stead. In front of the massive unity of the Roman Empire which took in parts of Africa and Asia , Europe first appears as a Babel of new languages.

Only afterwards was it a mosaic of nations. Europe was thus born from its vulgar tongues. European critical culture begins with the reaction, often alarmed, to the eruption of these tongues. Europe was forced at the very moment of its birth to confront the drama of linguistic fragmentation, and European culture arose as a reflection on the desriny of a multilingual civilization.

Its prospects seemed troubled; a remedy for linguistic confusion needed to be sought. Some looked backwards, trying to rediscover the language spoken by Adam. Others looked ahead, 19 aiming to fabricate a rational language possessing the perfections of the lost speech of Eden. From Adam to Confusio Linguarum Side-effects The story of the search for the perfect language is the story of a dream and of a series of failures.

Yet that is not to say that a story of failures must itself be a failure. Though our story be nothing but the tale of the obstinate pursuit of an impossible dream, it is still of some interest to know how this dream originated, as well as uncovering the hopes that sustained the pursuers throughout their secular course.

Put in this light, our story represents a chapter in the history of European culture. It is a chapter, moreover, with a particular interest today when the peoples of Europe - as they discuss the whys and wherefores of a possible commercial and political union - not only continue to speak different languages, but speak them in greater number than ten years ago, and even, in certain places, arm against one another for the sake of their ethno-linguistic differences.

We shall see that the dream of a perfect language has always been invoked as a solution to religious or political strife. It has even been invoked as the way to overcome simple difficulties in commercial exchange. The history of the reasons why Europe thought that it needed a perfect language can thus tell us a good deal about the cultural history of that continent.

Besides, even if our story is nothing but a series of failures, we shall see that each failure produced its own side-effects. Punctually failing to come to fruition, each of the projects left a train of beneficial consequences in its wake. Each might thus be viewed as a sort of serendipitous felix culpa: many of today's theories, as well as many of the practices which we theorize from taxonomy in the natural sciences to comparative linguistics, from formal languages to artificial intelligence and to the cognitive sciences , were born as side-effects of the search for a perfect language.

It 20 From Adam to Confusio Linguarum is only fair, then, that we acknowledge these pioneers: they have given us a lot, even if it was not what they promised. Finally, through examining the defects of the perfect languages, conceived in order to eliminate the defects of the natural ones, we shall end up by discovering that these natural languages of ours contain some unexpected virtues.

This can finally serve us as consolation for the curse of Babel. A Semiotic Model for Natural Language In order to examine the structure of the various natural and artificial languages that we shall be looking at, we need a theoretical model to use as our point of reference. This will be supplied by Hjelmslev A natural language or any other semiotic system is articulated at two levels or planes.

There is an expressionplane, which, in natural languages, consists of a lexicon, a phonology and a syntax. There is also a content-plane, which represents the array of concepts we can express. Each of these two levels can be subdivided into form and substance, and each arises through organizing a still unshaped continuum.

Realizing through concrete utterances the possibilities provided by the expression-form, we produce expression-substances, like the words that we utter or the text that you are now reading. In elaborating its expression-form, a language selects, out of the continuum of sounds that it is theoretically possible for the human voice to make, a particular subset of phonemes, and excludes other sounds which therefore do not belong to that language.

In order for the sounds of speech to become meaningful, the words formed from them must have meanings associated with them; they must, in other words, possess a content. The content-continuum represents everything we can talk or think about: it is the universe, or reality physical or mental , to which our language refers.

Each language, however, organizes the way in which we talk or think about reality in its own particular way, through a content-form. Examples of the way in which the form of content organizes our world might be our arrangement of colours in series from light to dark, or from red to violet; the way we use notions such as genus, species and family to organize the animal kingdom; the way we use semantically opposed ideas, such as high v.

By content-substance we mean the sense that we give to the utterances produced as instances of the expressionsubstance. The mode of organizing content varies from language to language. Different cultures may divide the world of colour according to some criterion other than spectral wavelengths, and consequently recognize and name colours that our culture does not acknowledge. Search Upload Book. Download Books Umberto Eco pdf. Umberto Eco. Close Ad. What are you looking for Book " Umberto Eco "?

But in a fateful turn the joke becomes all too real, and when occult groups, including Satanists, get wind of the Plan, they go so far as to kill one of the editors in their quest to gain control of the earth. Orchestrating these and other diverse characters into his multilayered semiotic adventure, Eco has created a superb cerebral entertainment.

He delves into an array of topics, from sports to media to what he calls the crisis of reason. Translated by William Weaver.

Eco is a founder of modern semiotics and widely known for his work in the philosophy of language and aesthetics.