Kircher and Leibniz were both illustrations of serendipity: both misunderstood Chinese writing, but the former, looking for the China of his hermetic dream, contributed to a future understanding of Chinese writing, while the latter, looking for the mathematical awareness of Fu-hsi, contributed to development of modern logic. But if we can be happy for every case of serendipity, we cannot forget that Columbus did miscalculate the size of the earth and that both Kircher and Leibniz did not follow the golden rule of sound cultural anthropology.
But what does sound cultural anthropology mean? I am not among those who believe there are no rules for interpretation, for even a programmatic misinterpretation requires some rules: I believe that there are at least intersubjective criteria to tell if an interpretation is a bad one, in the very sense in which we are sure that Kircher misinterpreted some aspects of Egyptian and Chinese culture and that Marco Polo did not really see unicorns. However, the real problem does not so much concern rules as our eternal drive to think that our rules are the golden ones.
The real problem of a critique of our own cultural models is to ask, when we see a unicorn, if by any chance it is not a rhinoceros.
4 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 Lull 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 Moslems 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 cabalistic 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’harmonie étymologique des langues, 1606), where, for example, the author shows how from the Hebrew word batar was derived the Latin synonym dividere. Shuffling the letters, the word becomes tarab, and from tarab derives the Latin tribus, which then leads to distribuo and finally to dividere.1 Zacen means “old”; transposing the radicals one gets zanec, whence the Latin senex, and with a subsequent shift of letters comes cazen, whence in Osean 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 sulphuric 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; and Cyrano de Bergerac mentioned other planetary languages several times, both in Les estais et les empires de la lune and Les estais et les empires du soleil.
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 (1677–79), 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: Lodwicks Common Writing (1647), Dalgarno’s Ars Signorum (1661), and Wilkins’s Essay Towards a Real Character (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 five hundred (in folio!) of Wilkins’s, the most voluminous and complete
