From the Tree to the Labyrinth: Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation

by Umberto Eco

  like + foot = pedestal

  like + blood = crimson

  place + metal = mine

  officer + navy = admiral

  artist + star = astronomer

  voice + lion = roar

  From the point of view of linguistic precision, this is the weakest part of the project. In fact, Wilkins, who supplies a long list of examples of the correct application of such particles, warns that they are, in fact, examples. Therefore the list is open, and its enrichment depends on the inventiveness of the speaker. It seems almost that Wilkins, concerned about the mechanical quality of his language, is anxious to leave room for its users’ creativity. But once the user is free to apply these particles to any term, it is obvious that ambiguity will be hard to avoid.

  And so the artificial language loses its one virtue: that of denoting always and only the same thing with the same character.

  The Austral language (like the models it parodies) deliberately rejects the fundamental mechanism of every natural language, namely, double articulation. It is obvious how much double articulation (in which the units of second articulation are without meaning) can contribute to the free formation of neologisms. If, with three meaningless characters (p, c, f), I can compose six syntagma (pot, top, opt, pto, otp, tpo), and only three of these are admitted by the dictionary, the other three remain available for constructing neologisms or indicating the most subtle differences between otherwise similar entities. As long as they remain available, however, if they happen to appear in a context, they may be understood as errors in pronunciation or spelling.

  Foigny’s system, on the one hand, allows the creation of neologisms only through metaphor and, on the other, obliges us to seek out a meaning for every syntagm admitted by the ars combinatoria, because even the slightest phonetic or orthographic change immediately reflects on the content and denotes a different (and possible) entity.

  Finally, the last limitation of the Austral language is—as occurred with many a priori philosophical languages—the absolute casualness with which the primitives are chosen. We will not speak of the so-called Anonymous Spaniard (Pedro Bermudo), who in his 1654 Arithmeticus nomenclator classified the primitives, subdividing them into:

  (1) Elements (fire, wind, smoke, ash, hell, purgatory, and center of the earth). (2) Celestial entities (stars, lightning, rainbow). (3) Intellectual entities (God, Jesus, discourse, opinion, suspicion, soul, stratagem or specter). (4) Secular states (emperor, barons, plebs). (5) Ecclesiastical states. (6) Artificers (painter or sailor). (7) Instruments. (8) Affects (love, justice, lust). (9) Religion. (10) Sacramental confession. (11) Tribunal. (12) Army. (13) Medicine (doctor, hunger, enema). (14) Brute animals. (15) Birds. (16) Reptiles and fish. (17) Parts of animals. (18) Furnishings. (19) Foods. (20) Beverages and liquids (wine, beer, water, butter, wax, resin). (21) Clothing. (22) Silken stuffs. (23) Woolens. (24) Canvas and other textiles. (25) Navigation and spices (ship, cinnamon, anchor, chocolate). (26) Metals and coins. (27) Various artifacts. (28) Stones. (29) Jewels. (30) Trees and fruits. (31) Public places. (32) Weights and measures. (33) Numerals. (34–42) Various grammatical categories. (43) Persons (pronouns, forms of address such as His Eminence). (44) Travel (hay, road, robber) …

  But Wilkins himself, though he discussed his list with students of botany, mineralogy, and zoology, put under the heading of Economic Relations not only cases of kinship, in which distinctions appear distorted by criteria such as Progenitor/Descendant, Brother/Half-brother, or Coelebs/Virgin (Coelebs, however, comprises both the bachelor and the spinster, whereas Virgin seems to refer only to a female condition), but also acts that refer to intersubjective relationships, such as Direct/Seduce or Defense/Desertion. Among the Private Relations appear also Provisions, where we find Butter/Cheese but also Butchering/Cooking and Box/Basket.

  Note the sly way that Foigny breaks the homogeneity of the list of the four classic elements by adding salt, which, if anything, would belong to another chemical-alchemistic taxonomy, including also mercury and sulfur. But the slyness is not gratuitous precisely because Wilkins added to the four elements a fifth, evident one: the Meteor.

  As for the thirty-six accidentals, even if we know only eighteen of them, their heterogeneity is enough for us to infer that the list has prominent omissions. Here Foigny touches palpably the crucial question of the list of the primitives, and he resolves it more in the manner of the Anonymous Spaniard than in that of Wilkins, but only to insinuate (it seems) that, when it comes to incongruity, there is only a difference of degree between the two systems.

  The final comic element in the Austral language is that it does not clarify when a letter has a lexical function or when it is morphemathic. It seems that l, m, and p—placed in the first position—function as pronouns. But, in analyzing pa (thou lovest), Foigny speaks of the sweetness of the lover. Thus he assigns two letters with morphemathic functions the meaning they have when they define accidentals. The solution is comic because it allows us to think that lu (I work) must be interpreted with reference to the sweat produced by the earth, but in that case why would there be sweetness in pu (thou workest)?

  We cannot tell how consciously Foigny was being ironic about the fact that in the philosophical languages the entire grammar is semanticized, but this mischievousness is not to be overlooked.

  Criticism of a priori philosophical languages for the most part appears, as I have shown, in French satirical works. Perhaps this is not an accident: it was in France that the first radical criticism of the project took shape in the serious works of Dalgarno, Wilkins, and Lodwick.

  In 1629 the Minim friar Marin Mersenne sends his friend Descartes the project of a nouvelle langue by a certain des Vallées. In a letter to Mersenne on November 20, 1629, Descartes sends his impressions of that proposal. For every language, he says, it is necessary to learn a grammar and the meaning of the words. For the meaning of the words it would suffice to have a good dictionary, but the grammar is difficult. Nevertheless, if a grammar could be constructed free of the irregularities of the natural languages, which have been corrupted by use, the problem would be solvable. Thus simplified, this language would appear primitive compared to the others, which would appear as its dialects. And once the primitive terms were set (of which the terms of the other languages would be synonyms, such as aimer and to love), it would suffice to add the suffixes to obtain, for example, the corresponding substantive. Consequently, a system of universal writing could be developed in which every primitive term would be recorded with a number that would refer back to the synonyms in the different languages.

  All the same, there would still remain the problem of the sounds to choose for these terms, inasmuch as certain sounds are pleasant and easy for one people and unpleasant for another. The sounds would thus be difficult to learn: if a speaker used synonyms in his own language for the primitive terms, then he would not be understood by speakers of other nations, except in writing. Yet learning the entire lexicon would require great effort, and if that were necessary, there would seem to be no reason not to use an international language already known to many, such as Latin.

  Saying this, Descartes only repeated some ideas that were in the air in those decades. But at this point he saw that the central problem is something else altogether: to be able not only to learn but also remember the primitive nouns, these would have to correspond to an order of ideas, or of thoughts, that would have the same logic as the order of the numbers (where it is not necessary to learn them all but simply to generate them by succession). This problem coincides with another: that of a true philosophy able to define a system and distinct ideas. If a person were able to number all the simple ideas from which are then generated all the ideas that we are capable of thinking and to assign to each of these a character, we could then articulate, as we do with numbers, this sort of mathematics of thought. The words of our languages, on the other hand, refer to confused ideas.

  In conclusion, Descartes affirmed: “Now I believe that this l
anguage is possible and that the learning on which it depends could be found, by which peasants will be able to judge the truth better than philosophers do now. But I have no faith in ever seeing it used; it presupposes great changes in the order of things, and the whole world would have to be nothing more than an earthly paradise, which can be proposed only in the land of novels.”

  The criticism of Descartes was correct. Every attempt to establish an architectonically perfect system of ideas composed of mutual dependences and strict classification from the general to the particular would prove to be a failure. At the end of the eighteenth century Joseph-Marie de Gérando, in Des signes, would isolate the secret termite that was gnawing at all the previous systems: either you create a logical dictionary confined to a very limited notional field or an encyclopedia of all our knowledge, that is, either a necessary but insufficient order of concepts or the flexible, infinitely amplifiable and variable order of a library.

  On the other hand, Leibniz would acknowledge (in his Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain) that, having to depict the entire system of our learning, we would have a library where the doctrine of spirits could come under logic but also under morality, and all could come under the practical philosophy to the extent that it contributes to our happiness. A memorable story can be placed in the annals of universal history or in the specific history of a country or even in the biography of an individual. Anyone who is organizing a library often encounters the problem of deciding in which section a book should be cataloged.

  So the only thing to do would be to essay a polydimensional encyclopedia (a hypertext, as we would say today). We can almost hear, in advance, the project that would be theorized by D’Alembert at the beginning of the Encyclopédie, where he speaks of the Système Général des Sciences et des Arts as a labyrinth. The philosopher is he who can discover the secret routes of this labyrinth, its temporary branches, the reciprocal dependences that compose this enclosure like a globe. Consequently, “one can create as many different systems of human knowledge as there are world maps having different projections.… But often such an object, which because of one or several of its properties has been placed in one class, belongs to another class by virtue of other properties and might have been placed accordingly.”2

  The criticism of the Encyclopédíe puts an end to the dream of the grammar of ideas, even though further attempts would follow, down to our own day, when scholars are still studying the possibility of a so-called mentalese, a language written in the very convolutions of our brain, capable of supplying the deep structure of every expression in any natural language.

  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).

  1. 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.

  2. English translation: D’Alembert (1963: 46–49).

  3. See “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” in Borges (1964: 103).

  4. See “Doctor Brodie’s Report” in Borges (1972: 117).

  5. See “Tlön, Ucbar, Orbis Tertius” in Borges (1962: 8).

  12

  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 tende
ncy, 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.