But as Descartes had announced, it is not impossible to write of ideal languages in the land of novels. Foigny did it, and two and a half centuries later, Borges was to do it, too.
In Other Inquisitions, Borges (1964), studying “the language of John Wilkins” (which, by his explicit admission, he knew only through an encyclopedia entry), recognizes at once the incongruity of the classification of the Wilkinsian semantic primitives (he discusses specifically the subdivisions of stones), and it is in this same brief text that he invents the Chinese classification that Foucault quotes at the opening of Les mots et les choses. In this Chinese encyclopedia, entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Recognitions, “it is written that the animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.”3 Borges comes to the conclusion that no classification in the universe is not arbitrary and conjectural. But if it has to be arbitrary and conjectura1, why not leave room not for the satire of utopian projects but for the utopia of linguistic fancy?
Borges, on at least two other occasions, returns to the question of ideal languages. In “Dr. Brodie’s Report” Borges (1976) he examines the monosyllabic language of the Yahoos.
Each monosyllabic word corresponds to a general idea whose specific meaning depends on the context or upon accompanying grimaces. The word “nrz,” for example, suggests dispersion of spots and may stand for the starry sky, a leopard, a flock of birds, smallpox, something bespattered, the act of scattering, or the flight that follows defeat in warfare. “Hrl,” on the other hand, means something compact or dense. It stands for the tribe, a tree trunk, a stone, a heap of stones, the act of heaping stones, the gathering of the four witch-doctors, carnal conjunction or a forest. Pronounced in another manner or accompanied by other grimaces, each word may hold an opposite meaning.4
This language of the Yahoos is not at all impracticable, as it seems at first glance. Note that the apparent polysemia of the term is, so to speak, held together by certain primitive special signs common to all its meanings. The grimaces that accompany the emission of sound function like the metaphorical operators of Wilkins. For the rest, the language simply carries to extremes the tendency of actual natural languages to contain expressions that mean different things in different contexts, and Borges hastens to remind his readers that this should not be surprising; after all, in English, to cleave means both “to split” and “to cling to.”
Finally, in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” Borges (1998) speaks of a language structured spatially and not temporally, which proceeds not through agglutinations as in the languages so far examined but only by expressing temporal flow. In this language, nouns do not exist, but only impersonal verbs qualified by monosyllabic suffixes and prefixes with adverbial value. In brief, “there is no word corresponding to the word “moon,” but there is a verb which in English would be “to moon” or “to moonate.” “The moon rose above the river” would thus be written hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö, or literally: “upward behind the onstreaming it mooned” (which sounds like a quote from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake).5
The failure of the utopias of the a priori philosophical language has thus produced some interesting experiments in the Land of Novels that, instead of constructing perfect linguistic systems, have demonstrated how our imperfect languages can produce texts endowed with some poetic virtue or some visionary force. I consider this no small achievement.
This translation is a slightly revised version of the essay translated by William Weaver in Eco (1998b).
- The passage quoted here and subsequent quotations from the same author were presumably translated by Weaver from the Italian version cited by Eco, namely, Gabriel de Foigny. La terra australe, trans. Maria Teresa Bovetti Pichetto. Napoli: Guida, 1978. No page references are provided.
- English translation: D’Alembert (1963: 46–49).
- See “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” in Borges (1964: 103).
- See “Doctor Brodie’s Report” in Borges (1972: 117).
- See “Tlön, Ucbar, Orbis Tertius” in Borges (1962: 8).
- The Linguistics of Joseph de Maistre
In the story of the centuries-old search for a perfect language, a central chapter must be devoted to the rediscovery of a series of matrix languages or of a primordial mother tongue. For many centuries, the leading claimant for the position of mother tongue was Hebrew. Subsequently, other candidates would appear upon the scene (even Chinese, for example), but finally the search would lose its utopian fervor and its mystical tension as the science of linguistics was born and, with it, the Indo-European hypothesis (see Eco 1993: ch. 5).
For a long time, though, the idea of a primigenial language not only had a historical significance (rediscovering the speech of all mankind before the confusion of Babel) but also a semantic one. In fact, this primigenial language was supposed to incorporate a natural relationship between words and things. The primigenial language also had revelatory value for, in speaking it, the speaker would recognize the nature of the named reality. This tendency, which Genette (1976) has called “mimologism,” has an ancient and distinguished ancestry in Western tradition, its prime example being the Cratylus of Plato. The idea—already contested in the two previous centuries through the hypotheses known as Epicurean and polygenetic—underwent a crisis in what Rosiello (1976) would have called “the linguistic of enlightenment.” But this crisis occurred at the level of the official (which is another way of saying victorious) philosophical and linguistic culture, and the notion survived in many mystical and philosophical trends and has resurfaced even today in the work of those whom the nineteenth-century French tradition had begun calling les fous du langage.
I am indebted to Andrew White (1917: 2:189–208) for some suggestions on the way the mystical version of the monogenetic hypothesis was prolonged in the theosophical ambience of the late eighteenth century (in Louis-Claude de Saint Martin, De l’esprit des choses, for example) and among the French Catholic legitimists such as De Bonald (Recherches philosophiques, III, 2) and Lamennais (Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion). White also quotes Joseph de Maistre, an alluring clue, because Maistre represents a fusion of the themes of classic legitimism (of which he can be considered the initiator) and those of the theosophism hovering in the circles of Scottish and Templar masonry to which Maistre had at first belonged, though he broke with them for reasons of religious orthodoxy (reaffirming the authority of the Church and the pope against that of any clique of Illuminati).
In a debate on the subject, Raffaele Simone suggested that much of the search for a perfect language derived from a sort of neurotic uneasiness, because people would like to find in words an expression of the way the world works, and they are regularly disappointed. This is certainly true. In the legitimist tradition, the assertion of the sacrality of language aims not so much at reconstructing a primigenial language as at rediscovering the traces of our natural languages. The intent is first of all to question the materialistic claims of all the Epicurean, polygenetic hypotheses and then to reject every conventionalist theory as a way of separating language from the very source of Truth.
Since it is linguistically difficult to demonstrate that a relationship exists between words and the essence of things (not least because of the plurality of languages), the way followed by the monogeneticists does not differ much from that of the most fanciful etymologists of the past, Isidore of Seville at their head. The fact that many of these etymologies also reappear in some contemporary thought (in Heidegger, for example) only indicates the toughness of the dream, or perhaps an irrepressible need to have some contact with Being.
If we take a look at the text in which Maistre discussed at greatest length the nature of languages, his Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, we see that the first declarations simply repropose what is found even today among authors who hark back to tradition as the source of all knowledge, opposing the degenerate learning of a secularized culture, “modern,” “enlightened,” or “scientistic.”
Listen to what wise antiquity has to say about the first men; it will tell you that they were marvelous men, and that beings of a superior order deigned to favor them with the most precious communications. On this point there is no discord: initiates, philosophers, poets, history, fable, Asia and Europe, speak with one voice. Such agreement of reason, revelation, and every human tradition forms a demonstration that cannot be contradicted. So not only did men begin with science, but with a science different from our own, and superior to our own because it had a higher origin, which is what made it more dangerous. And this explains why science was always considered mysterious in principle, and why it was always confined to the temples, where the flame finally burned out when it could serve no purpose but to burn. (Second Dialogue 41)
But just when readers might expect proof of this theory, they always find themselves confronted by inconsistent, circular arguments. Maistre recalls that Julian the Apostate in one of his discourses called the sun “the seven-rayed god,” and he wonders
