Mi amas la energion en tiu-cxi video. Mi identigxas foje ke mi igxas ekstremulo en kelkaj ideologioj.
Sometimes I go to ideological Extremes. Billy Joel expresses in in song and dance here.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1xlbq_billy-joel-i-go-to-extremes_music#.USjkJeh8s4Y
Mi speciale amas la pied-baton je 2:24. I love the leg-kick at 2 mintues and 24 seconds.
Sometime in 2013 I discovered that Billy Joel has long had an alcohol problem, perhaps a source for this song??
Saturday, February 23, 2013
Friday, February 22, 2013
Monday, February 18, 2013
Saturday, February 16, 2013
Esperanto in the Israeli Newspapers 1976-1987
My
collection of Hebrew articles on Esperanto mostely dated pre-computer:
1976-1987 or summer of 2000 when I lived in or visited Israel.
http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151344470998964.472447.670528963&type=3
http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151344470998964.472447.670528963&type=3
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
Politikistoj-humoristoj-esperantistoj
Benign master of diplomacy
October 24 2002
Ralph Harry helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and wrote the first draft of the ANZUS treaty.
Ralph Lindsay Harry, AC, CBE Australian diplomat 1917-2002
"Fifty years ago a young Mr Ralph Harry sat down with the NATO
Treaty and quietly drafted what was to become the ANZUS Treaty," began a
story in The Financial Review September last year. By then Ralph
Harry was 84 and the last living member of the group of diplomats and
politicians who negotiated ANZUS.
The Department of Foreign Affairs was launching a volume of ANZUS documents and the man whom The Financial Review
called "the unsung hero of the ANZUS pact" was guest of honour. He
explained that, using the NATO treaty as a guideline for what he
thought Australia would be able to get away with, he wrote the ANZUS
Treaty and then set it aside.
The documents, continued The Financial Review, "record that
after returning from talks with the US representative, Mr John Foster
Dulles, the then secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Mr Alan
Watt, said in Mr Harry's presence that the US was prepared to look at a
draft.
"'What a pity we don't have a draft. I think we could be in
business,' Mr Watt had said. At this point Mr Harry produced his draft,
like the proverbial rabbit from a hat. The rest, as they say, is
history."
Harry, who has died aged 85, was recognised by his peers and
political masters as a consummate professional diplomat with a mastery
of the conventions and methods of diplomacy and politics. Having acted
for a period as director of ASIS, he was also known as a skilled
intelligence analyst and cryptographer. Little escaped his gaze and, to
the discomfiture of many, nothing he observed was ever forgotten.
Underlying these formidable formal skills, however, was a life-long
emotional commitment to the betterment of his fellow men and women
through the promotion of international law and institutions. There was
little he did or said that did not have this aim.
Ralph Lindsay Harry was born in Geelong, Victoria, on March 10, 1917,
the youngest of four children - his siblings were Egbert, Millicent
and Marjorie - of Arthur Hartley Harry and the former Ethel Roby Holder.
Arthur Harry was at the time a senior classics master at Geelong
College, one of Victoria's oldest and finest public schools. The
family's circumstances were modest and Harry was brought up to be
frugal, reticent and hardworking, with a reverence for academic
achievement and the value of education.
Harry's father moved to Launceston in 1922 to become classics master,
then headmaster, of Launceston Grammar School. He wanted to build a
house for his family in Launceston; the family in the meantime went
to Adelaide to live with Ethel's mother, Lady Holder, the widow of Sir
Frederick Holder. Sir Frederick was a journalist and preacher who became
premier of South Australia and, as a consequence of his deep
involvement in the federal movement in Australia, was appointed speaker
of the first federal parliament in 1901. He died suddenly during a
parliamentary debate in 1909.
He was to become the most prominent role model in Ralph Harry's
life. Harry attributed his commitment to public service to his
grandfather's example of tireless commitment to church and state and
was, throughout his life, proud of all that Holder had achieved.
The family was reunited in 1923 after the completion of Arthur's
house in Mowbray Heights, on the banks of the Tamar River. Harry became a
student at Launceston Grammar School in 1924 and was dux of his class
in each of his years there. He also represented his school in football
and athletics.
Although Harry was a brilliant mathematician, his father's poor
financial situation, and the bursaries that classics distinctions
provided, required him to follow the non-science stream. Another result
of his family's straitened circumstances was poor early nutrition, which
badly affected his eyesight.
Harry left school in 1934 after receiving the school's award for the
best all-round scholar, sportsman and leader, and a general university
scholarship. He sat for the Commonwealth Public Service exam and came
first in Tasmania and second in Australia.
During his undergraduate studies in law he worked as a clerk in the
Hobart ordnance stores. He also became deeply involved in the
Presbyterian church and the Australian Christian Students' movement, and
was a member of the University Student Representative Council.
Harry graduated with first-class honours in law in 1938 and was
awarded the Tasmanian Rhodes Scholarship. He arrived in Oxford to
undertake his BA in early 1939, after working his way to England in a
cargo boat.
As a Rhodes scholar, Harry was expected to contribute to the sporting
life of the college and found his niche in rowing. He became captain of
boats at Lincoln and was invited to trial for the Oxford blue boat, but
declined. With the onset of war in Europe increasingly likely, he
wanted to concentrate on finishing his degree.
Harry made a quick visit to Amsterdam and The Hague in the summer of
1939 for a World Christian Youth Movement congress and was there when
Germany invaded Poland. In letters to his family, he recounted how he
had stood in the deserted Hall of Justice of the Palace of Peace,
established after the 1914-18 war. It was August 29, 1939, the day on
which the Dutch government mobilised its armed forces, and he swore
that, "I, for one, would not lose faith in the ultimate triumph of
peace and justice for which the Palace of Peace has been, and shall
again be, in the centre."
He spent the rest of his life working to realise that ideal. He
maintained a profound belief in the banishment of all forms of war,
poverty and oppression, but rather than simply state high principle, he
recognised the need to devote himself to specific spheres where he felt
able to make a change.
These included the promotion of collective security between nations
through the UN, the foundation and development of regional groupings in
the economic and security area, the development and enforcement of
international law, particularly in trade, the rights of refugees and
human rights and the promotion of education. He was always willing to
consider new and radical ideas.
Harry completed his degree in 1940 and after an unsuccessful attempt
to join the British army returned to Australia to join the recently
formed Department of External Affairs. In 1942, he joined the AIF, in
which he served as an officer and intelligence analyst until 1943,
mostly in New Guinea. He was then recalled to the department to be
posted to the Australian High Commission in Ottawa, Canada, where he
worked from 1943 to 1945.
In 1945 the San Francisco Conference was convened to agree on the
Charter for the United Nations. Harry was attached to the Australian
delegation, led by Dr H.V. ("Doc") Evatt and participated in the
processes by which the UN was formed. In 1948 he became an Australian
delegate to the UN - that same year Evatt was elected president of the
UN General Assembly.
During this seminal period, Harry worked on the establishment and
development of the International Atomic Energy Commission; weapons
disarmament in the UN Commission for Conventional Armaments; the
establishment, on behalf of Australia, of the US-Australia Air
Transportation Agreement, under which Australia was granted the air
routes to North America now enjoyed by Qantas; the deliberations on the
formation of the state of Israel and the UN Commission on Human Rights,
chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt.
Harry's proudest accomplishments were his substantial contribution,
in the UN commission, to the drafting and adoption of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, and his role in persuading the United
States to make available to Australia, and a small group of other
nations, radio-isotopes for medical research and clinical application.
All of this was achieved while he was barely 30 years old.
After a further period in the Australian embassy in Washington, DC,
he returned to Canberra in 1949. The following few years saw intense
activity in Australian foreign affairs. Decolonisation and independence
had arrived in India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Burma and Indonesia; the
communist revolution occurred in China in 1949; war in Korea broke out
in 1950 and French control in Indochina was being disputed. Percy
Spender, Australia's minister for external affairs from 1949-51,
promoted the need for a strategic alliance between the US and Australia
and Harry was co-opted into his negotiating team with instructions to
prepare the first draft of the ANZUS treaty. After intensive negotiation
the treaty was signed in September 1951 and remains one of the
underpinnings of Australia's security and defence position.
Harry's first diplomatic mission was as consul-general and UN
representative in Geneva from 1953-56, followed by his appointment as
Australian commissioner in Singapore from 1956-57.
In 1957, on the basis of his intelligence work in the AIF and
external affairs, Harry was asked by Richard (later Lord) Casey, who had
succeeded Spender as minister for external affairs, to investigate and
report on the structure and operation of the recently formed Australian
Security Intelligence Service (ASIS). He moved to Melbourne late in
1957 to begin work on the report, which recommended substantial changes
in the financing, operating structure and accountability of the service.
He agreed to replace the then director, Alfred Brookes, and to remain
director during the reconstruction period. He completed his term in
1960.
Such was his concern for the security of ASIS that his connection
with it was only revealed with the publication in 1989 of the book Oyster,
an expose by Brian Toohey and William Pinwill of the Australian
security intelligence apparatus. Not even his family had been aware of
his involvement and he kept no records of ASIS in his personal papers,
unlike Casey, who maintained an extensive political diary of his
intelligence involvement.
From 1960 until his retirement in 1978 Harry continued to serve
Australia with distinction in many senior posts. He led Australia's
delegations to many UN conferences including those on labour, health,
trade and development and economics.
He also led Australia's delegation to the Third UN conference on the
Law of the Sea which resulted in the adoption of a wholly revised
Convention on the Law of the Sea. In that conference he became the
chairman of the committee on dispute resolution and played a decisive
role in the success of the treaty negotiation. He was also given
responsibility within the Department of Foreign Affairs (as it had
become) for the management of Australia's Antarctic policy and treaty
relationships.
Harry was Australia's ambassador to Belgium and the European
Community from 1965-68; to South Vietnam during the war years of
1968-70; to the Federal Republic of Germany from 1971-75, and to the UN
as Australia's permanent representative from 1975-78.
After his retirement he was invited by Sir Garfield Barwick to become
the director of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, and
served in that role until 1981. He was appointed CBE in 1963 and AC in
1980.
Throughout his life Harry maintained an interest in the international
language Esperanto. Ignoring the sceptics - including those in his own
family - he was an active evangelist for the Esperanto cause, and a
prolific Esperanto writer, conference-goer, lexicographer, translator
and administrator. He was a committed promoter of the potential of an
international language to bring down the barriers of suspicion and
intolerance between nations.
He wrote several books on Esperanto, as well as The Diplomat Who Laughed
(1983), his first book, which he hoped would "do something to combat
the peril of beastly seriousness in the diplomacy of the '80s", The North Was Always Near (1995) and No Man Is a Hero (1997).
Harry was curious, careful, kindly and studious. He was a fine bridge
player, a keen gardener, cook and preserver, as well as a passionate
devotee of cryptic crosswords and mathematical puzzles. He continued to
follow international affairs and was regularly consulted on the history
of Australian diplomacy and foreign affairs.
Harry's wife Elsie died in 1994. He is survived by his three
children, John Harry, Penny Clarey and Virginia Braden Woolley and their
families.
John Harry
Ralph Harry helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and wrote the first draft of the ANZUS treaty.
Black and Puerto Rican....Jews?
It hit me as a great surprise that one parent of each of the most famous or powerful "Puerto Rican" and most famous "Black" journalists were Jewish. In the case of Geraldo Rivera, he was raised Jewish (Jewish mother), married a Jew and raised his children Jewish. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geraldo_Rivera
In the case of Elinor Ruth Tatum of Amsterdam News, I don't know if there is any notable relationship with her to Judaism. She seem to be a good black spokesperson: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ocx5aDfv4s It seems Tatums mother was Jewish too.
Now that I've read that Elinor Ruth Tatum specialized in the Swedish Govement Model, I am particularly interested in meeting her. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Tatum
http://forward.com/articles/103600/why-s-a-jewish-woman-running-a-black-paper/
In the case of Elinor Ruth Tatum of Amsterdam News, I don't know if there is any notable relationship with her to Judaism. She seem to be a good black spokesperson: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ocx5aDfv4s It seems Tatums mother was Jewish too.
Now that I've read that Elinor Ruth Tatum specialized in the Swedish Govement Model, I am particularly interested in meeting her. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Tatum
http://forward.com/articles/103600/why-s-a-jewish-woman-running-a-black-paper/
La Israela Centro: Lapid/Modi'in (Lapid-lando)
Mi interesigxis pri tiu cxi artikolo cxar mi sciis malmulton pri Modi'in, kie delonge Amri Wandel logxas. Mi ankau' neniam vizitis...ankau' en 2000 dum/post UK. Gxi traktas temon ke tre alta pocento de la urbeto inter Tel Aviv kaj Jerusalemo vocx-donis por la nova politika partio Estas Estonteco/Yes Atid fondita de Yair Lapid, plej fama kiel jxurnalisto.
A Letter From Lapid Country
Modi’in gave Lapid 27 percent of its vote. What does it want in return?
People overseas don’t understand the amazing success of Yair Lapid in
Israel’s January 22 parliamentary elections. He hardly said a word about
the Palestinians, the peace process, terrorism, war — all those things
that Israelis are supposedly preoccupied with every waking minute.
But I understand. For the past 15 years, I’ve been living in the hardcore of Lapidism, surrounded by it. Modi’in, a sparkling but sterile-looking, monotonously beige bedroom community of 80,000 midway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, built in 1996, smack up against the Green Line, is one of 21 prosperous towns that gave a plurality of votes (in our case, 27%) to Lapid’s party, Yesh Atid (There Is a Future). But with all due respect to Tel Aviv, Herzliya, Kfar Saba and Lapid’s other strongholds, I believe Modi’in represents Lapidism at its strongest.
We’re as middle class as any of those 20 other towns, but the people here are younger, mainly in their 30s, not rich like Lapid’s pluralities in Caesarea, Savyon and Kfar Shmaryahu. So when he talks about the high cost of housing and about the burden of army service that falls on the middle class, it falls harder here.
“We both work, we have two kids, the mortgage is choking us to death, we barely finish the month…. Yes, my husband does army reserve,” said “Anat,” a psychological counselor and Lapid voter in her early 30s, shopping in Modi’in’s sleek, glass-enclosed mall. “He touched on all the sensitive issues in our lives.” (None of the interviewees are being identified by name; they’re my neighbors, and this is not going to be an entirely flattering picture of the community.)
The other issue Lapid talked about was, of course, the ultra-Orthodox, the Haredim, and how they’re being supported and protected by all the people who do what they, in the main, don’t: serve in the army and work for a living. Resentment of the Haredim, not to say fear and loathing of them, is the one political passion that seems to animate the folks around here. Last summer they got upset over how the Haredim from Modi’in Illit, the giant settlement on the other side of the Green Line, were “taking over” our biggest park. And when the mayor of Modi’in Illit said the settlement’s new archaeological site, an excavated Second Temple-era agricultural village, “will be open only to the ultra-Orthodox public… without the distortions and disruptions of other places, where there is fear of hearing false opinions,” the mayor of our town retaliated during Sukkot by barring entry to the park to anyone whose national identification card didn’t list a Modi’in address.
But that was just the latest example. From day one, Modi’in has made a point of having no Haredi neighborhoods, and every time a news item or rumor went out that some Haredi operator had his eye on a vacant hill for a new ultra-Orthodox neighborhood, the municipality would publicize an opinion poll showing that if a Haredi neighborhood were built in the city, 114% of the residents would move out. This is an overwhelmingly secular town, and people don’t want streets to be blocked off on the Sabbath; they don’t want Haredi poverty and crowding and yeshivas, and they don’t like sending their kids to the army when the Haredim don’t. Modi’in consistently has the highest rate of conscripts and combat soldiers of any Israeli town.
“I have two children who served in the army, my daughter was an officer, and they don’t even start college until they’re in their early 20s. I don’t see why the Haredim can’t do the same,” said “Esti,” a business consultant in her mid50s who voted for Lapid. “He strikes me as a lounge lizard,” she acknowledged, “but he understands what’s important to people, and I liked a lot of the candidates he put on his Knesset slate.”
The last thing that stood out about Lapid’s campaign was how he
didn’t talk about “the situation,” except to say, as an afterthought,
that he was against “extremism” and in favor of a “diplomatic process.”
Basically, he campaigned as if there were no occupation, no
Palestinians, no Middle East. And that describes the outlook in Modi’in
more so than the outlook in just about any other Israeli city, because
Modi’in is right next door to the West Bank — and the people here just
look right through it. They, or rather we, drive to and from Jerusalem,
past army checkpoints along a highway that runs alongside the high
concrete separation wall, and on which Palestinians are forbidden to
drive ever since a few fatal attacks at the start of the second
intifada, more than a decade ago. Palestinian construction workers sneak
into town, and many sleep over in the building sites; the police
sometimes arrest and fine them, but to people here, they’re invisible.
On the whole, Modi’in residents don’t want to know about the Palestinians, the occupation, the situation; nobody talks about it. As long as there’s no terror, there’s no problem — and there’s virtually no terror in Israel. Here, right next door to the West Bank, Jewish teenagers roam around all night, and the only danger is from other Jewish teenagers (no Israeli Arabs live in this city) who may be drunk and looking for a fight. Last November, at the end of Operation Pillar of Defense in Gaza, a bomb went off on a Tel Aviv bus, injuring nearly 30 people, and the terrorist turned out to be an Israeli Arab from the nearby village of Taibeh who worked at the McDonald’s in the Modi’in mall. At McDonald’s! For us suburbanites, it was a thrilling brush with danger and notoriety.
“I didn’t care that Lapid didn’t talk about the Palestinians and the conflict; it’s not important to me. What’s important to me is the economy, and Lapid represented my interests. I’m a man of the middle class,” said “Eli,” 40, a freelance journalist for Russian-language media abroad.
Since the fearsome second intifada burned out eight years ago, politics hasn’t really touched the middle-class high achievers here. During the disengagement from Gaza, during Operation Cast Lead, during any of the tumultuous events that filled the news media in Israel and abroad, the answer you got in the shops, parks and streets to the question “How are you doing?” remained, unfailingly, “Excellent!” It wasn’t always true, of course, and even when it was true, an excellent life in Israel required long, hard work to finance it, but Modi’in is a “quality” city with quality people — parents who are endlessly involved in their children’s education and development, kids who have everything, a city with health clubs and high-tech company cars. It’s a place without Arabs, without Haredim, without poor neighborhoods. Coming from Los Angeles, I am reminded of the San Fernando Valley.
This is Lapid Country: La La Land, only with compulsory army duty.
It’s Israel in the period after the second intifada. The West Bank,
however, really is next door, whether you live in Modi’in or anywhere
else in this country. Gaza is, too, and so is the rest of the Middle
East. May Lapid and his silent plurality enjoy their fortified
dreamscape while it lasts.
On the whole, Modi’in residents don’t want to know about the Palestinians, the occupation, the situation; nobody talks about it. As long as there’s no terror, there’s no problem — and there’s virtually no terror in Israel. Here, right next door to the West Bank, Jewish teenagers roam around all night, and the only danger is from other Jewish teenagers (no Israeli Arabs live in this city) who may be drunk and looking for a fight. Last November, at the end of Operation Pillar of Defense in Gaza, a bomb went off on a Tel Aviv bus, injuring nearly 30 people, and the terrorist turned out to be an Israeli Arab from the nearby village of Taibeh who worked at the McDonald’s in the Modi’in mall. At McDonald’s! For us suburbanites, it was a thrilling brush with danger and notoriety.
“I didn’t care that Lapid didn’t talk about the Palestinians and the conflict; it’s not important to me. What’s important to me is the economy, and Lapid represented my interests. I’m a man of the middle class,” said “Eli,” 40, a freelance journalist for Russian-language media abroad.
Since the fearsome second intifada burned out eight years ago, politics hasn’t really touched the middle-class high achievers here. During the disengagement from Gaza, during Operation Cast Lead, during any of the tumultuous events that filled the news media in Israel and abroad, the answer you got in the shops, parks and streets to the question “How are you doing?” remained, unfailingly, “Excellent!” It wasn’t always true, of course, and even when it was true, an excellent life in Israel required long, hard work to finance it, but Modi’in is a “quality” city with quality people — parents who are endlessly involved in their children’s education and development, kids who have everything, a city with health clubs and high-tech company cars. It’s a place without Arabs, without Haredim, without poor neighborhoods. Coming from Los Angeles, I am reminded of the San Fernando Valley.
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Volunteers and NGO's
The Jewish Forward magazine had two good articles about NGO's and Volunteerism.
La gazeto, jud-tema, Forward (Antau'en), havis du bonajn artikolojn pri Ne-registaraj Organizoj kaj
Voluntulemo.
1.With Little Oversight, Newer Not-For-Profits Use Older Groups for Tax-free Status
Kun Malmuta Super-rigardo, Pli novaj Sen-profit-celaj Organizoj Utiligas Malnovaj Grupojn por Imposxt-ekzempta Statuso
This is related but not the same as the paper edition:
http://forward.com/articles/164941/startup-non-profits-get-help-from-bigger-partners/?p=all
2. Repair the World's New CEO Boosts Volunteer Funding as Others Cancel Trips.
Estro de Ripari la Mondon Subtenas Fondusigon de Voluntulado dum Aliaj Nuligas Vojagxojn.
http://www.pressdisplay.com/pressdisplay/viewer.aspx
La gazeto, jud-tema, Forward (Antau'en), havis du bonajn artikolojn pri Ne-registaraj Organizoj kaj
Voluntulemo.
1.With Little Oversight, Newer Not-For-Profits Use Older Groups for Tax-free Status
Kun Malmuta Super-rigardo, Pli novaj Sen-profit-celaj Organizoj Utiligas Malnovaj Grupojn por Imposxt-ekzempta Statuso
This is related but not the same as the paper edition:
http://forward.com/articles/164941/startup-non-profits-get-help-from-bigger-partners/?p=all
2. Repair the World's New CEO Boosts Volunteer Funding as Others Cancel Trips.
Estro de Ripari la Mondon Subtenas Fondusigon de Voluntulado dum Aliaj Nuligas Vojagxojn.
http://www.pressdisplay.com/pressdisplay/viewer.aspx
Monday, February 4, 2013
Prisoners in Israel: Hot House/Lockup
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E5UgVkINuw
This is an 8 part Youtube series with a discussion in the last 3 segments.
A similar American TV show, Lockup, has also produced an indepth program about Israeli prisons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockup_%28TV_series%29
but I haven't found any correct links yet.
This is an 8 part Youtube series with a discussion in the last 3 segments.
A similar American TV show, Lockup, has also produced an indepth program about Israeli prisons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockup_%28TV_series%29
but I haven't found any correct links yet.
Saturday, February 2, 2013
Umberto Eco Pleads for Communication--Esperanto
The Dream of a Perfect Language
A lecture presented by Umberto Eco
November 26, 1996
Last year appeared the English translation of my book on The Search for a Perfect Language. It is 400 pages long and I have no intention of summarizing here a book which is in itself a summary: Der Turmbau von Babel by Arno Borst, which concerns only the historical discussion on the confusion of tongues (not the search for a perfect one), is 6 big volumes long, and the current literature on perfect languages lists hundreds and hundreds of projects. After the publication of my book I am pursued by people asking me what a perfect language is and how does it work. I repeat that if one writes a book on Donald Duck this does not mean that Donald Duck exists or that the author believes it exists. The search for a perfect language represented and still represents an impossible dream.
However such a dream has obsessed mankind through the centuries and this evening I'll to pick up only some aspects of my story in order to show that a reflection on perfect languages can help us to understand some of the reasons why our natural and abundantly imperfect languages work so well.
The myth of the confusion of tongues can be found in every culture. Sticking to the European culture and to its origins, my story has the advantage of beginning at the Beginning. Genesis (2, 19 ff), says that "out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air: and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them." It is not at all clear on what basis Adam actually chose the names he gave to the animals. The Vulgate says that Adam called the various animals nominibus suis, that is, "by their own names." Nice question. Did Adam give the animals the names that, by some extra-linguistic right, were already due to them, or did he give them those names we still use on the basis of his conventional decision? The common traditional opinion was that Adam gave the animals names that reflected their inner essence.
For the rest, a long discussion lasted until the XVII century, whether Adam did or did not give names to fishes - since they are not mentioned in the Bible and it is difficult to figure out how God succeeded in bringing them into the Garden.
In Genesis 11 we are told that after the Flood, "the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech". Yet, human beings in their vanity conceived a desire to rival the Lord, and thus to erect a tower that would reach up to the heavens. To punish their pride and to put a stop to the construction of the Babel tower, God confused their languages.
Latin and Greek civilization were not disturbed by the plurality of languages. They simply identified their own tongue as the language of Reason, and considered the Barbarians as stuttering people, speaking no language at all. Even the First Church Fathers did not feel a great embarrassment because of the confusion of tongues. They assumed that Hebrew was the original idiom of mankind, but they peacefully wrote in Greek or Latin.
A lecture presented by Umberto Eco
November 26, 1996
Last year appeared the English translation of my book on The Search for a Perfect Language. It is 400 pages long and I have no intention of summarizing here a book which is in itself a summary: Der Turmbau von Babel by Arno Borst, which concerns only the historical discussion on the confusion of tongues (not the search for a perfect one), is 6 big volumes long, and the current literature on perfect languages lists hundreds and hundreds of projects. After the publication of my book I am pursued by people asking me what a perfect language is and how does it work. I repeat that if one writes a book on Donald Duck this does not mean that Donald Duck exists or that the author believes it exists. The search for a perfect language represented and still represents an impossible dream.
However such a dream has obsessed mankind through the centuries and this evening I'll to pick up only some aspects of my story in order to show that a reflection on perfect languages can help us to understand some of the reasons why our natural and abundantly imperfect languages work so well.
The myth of the confusion of tongues can be found in every culture. Sticking to the European culture and to its origins, my story has the advantage of beginning at the Beginning. Genesis (2, 19 ff), says that "out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air: and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them." It is not at all clear on what basis Adam actually chose the names he gave to the animals. The Vulgate says that Adam called the various animals nominibus suis, that is, "by their own names." Nice question. Did Adam give the animals the names that, by some extra-linguistic right, were already due to them, or did he give them those names we still use on the basis of his conventional decision? The common traditional opinion was that Adam gave the animals names that reflected their inner essence.
For the rest, a long discussion lasted until the XVII century, whether Adam did or did not give names to fishes - since they are not mentioned in the Bible and it is difficult to figure out how God succeeded in bringing them into the Garden.
In Genesis 11 we are told that after the Flood, "the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech". Yet, human beings in their vanity conceived a desire to rival the Lord, and thus to erect a tower that would reach up to the heavens. To punish their pride and to put a stop to the construction of the Babel tower, God confused their languages.
Latin and Greek civilization were not disturbed by the plurality of languages. They simply identified their own tongue as the language of Reason, and considered the Barbarians as stuttering people, speaking no language at all. Even the First Church Fathers did not feel a great embarrassment because of the confusion of tongues. They assumed that Hebrew was the original idiom of mankind, but they peacefully wrote in Greek or Latin.
The confusion of languages became a crucial problem only when Europe faced the birth of the
vulgar tongues. We cannot find representations of the Tower of Babel before the fifth or sixth
century, and very few until the eleventh century. After this, however, there is a flood of towers.
FIGURE Confronted with the drama of linguistic fragmentation, the European culture started
speculating about a remedy for linguistic confusion. Some looked backwards, trying to retrieve
the language spoken by Adam. Others looked ahead, thinking of Language of Reason
possessing the perfection of the lost speech of Eden.
In the seventh century Irish grammarians, in a work titled The precepts of the poets, said that that the Gaelic language was created after the confusion of tongues by the 72 wise men of the school of Fenius, through a curious `cut and paste' operation on all the languages born after the dispersion - so that the best of every language was selected and retained in Irish, which was perfect because preserved the original isomorphism between words and things.
In a way Dante Alighieri tried to do the same: in his De vulgari eloquentia, since the perfect forma locutionis (probably for Dante a sort of universal grammar) had disappeared with the disaster of Babel, he took as his task the creation of a volgare illustre, a noble vernacular, to be chased as a "perfumed panther", which had to display the same revelatory perfection of the lost language of Adam.
It is very difficult to reconcile the invention of a new national language with the mystical persuasion that the only perfect idiom was the Hebrew spoken by Adam. If Dante really believed so, he should have written his Divine comedy in Hebrew. Likewise, in the XV century Pico della Mirandola tried to revive the Kabbalistic tradition by manipulating the biblical Hebrew (badly learned from his friend Flavius Mithridates) but in fact he wrote in Latin his pseudo-Hebrew lucubrations. Perfect languages are very difficult to master.
In the XVI and XVII century many tried to go back to Hebrew. In 1667, Mercurius van Helmont published an Alphabeti veri naturalis Hebraici brevissima delineatio where, in order to teach the deaf-mutes, shows why Hebrew is the only language that can be learned in a natural way: in making the sounds of Hebrew the movements of tongue, palate, uvula, and glottis reproduced the shapes of the corresponding Hebrew letters. Figure
For other authors the problem was to demonstrate that Hebrew was so perfect that its virtues had been transferred to the Western languages. In 1606, Estienne Guichard wrote his L'harmonie étymologique des langues starting from the premise that Hebrew was the simplest language because in it "all words are simple, and their substance consists of but three radicals". Manipulating these radicals through inversion, anagrams, and permutations in the best Kabbalistic tradition, Guichard provided his etymologies. In Hebrew, the verb batar means to divide. How can we prove that Latin dividere comes from batar? Simple: by inversion, batar produces tarab; tarab then becomes the Latin tribus and, from there, turns into distribuo and dividere. Zacen means old. Rearranging the radicals, we get zanec from which derives Latin senex. A further rearrangement and we have cazen, from which derives the Oscan word, casnar, which is the root of the Latin canus, elder. Obviously, by this method we might equally prove that the English head comes from the late Latin testa, since the anagram of: testa gives eatts (Figure).
Such a furious search for etymologies eventually ended by implementing serious work in biblical studies and comparative linguistics, but it also produced a curious "nationalistic" trend. If the language one speaks directly derives from Hebrew, why then not to consider one's national idiom as the most perfect one?
For Giovanni Nanni, or Annius (Commentatio super opera diversorum auctorum de antiquitatibus loquentium of 1498), the Tuscan dialect was a perfect one because, before it was colonized by the Greeks, Etruria had been settled by Noah and his descendants. This thesis was received by
In the seventh century Irish grammarians, in a work titled The precepts of the poets, said that that the Gaelic language was created after the confusion of tongues by the 72 wise men of the school of Fenius, through a curious `cut and paste' operation on all the languages born after the dispersion - so that the best of every language was selected and retained in Irish, which was perfect because preserved the original isomorphism between words and things.
In a way Dante Alighieri tried to do the same: in his De vulgari eloquentia, since the perfect forma locutionis (probably for Dante a sort of universal grammar) had disappeared with the disaster of Babel, he took as his task the creation of a volgare illustre, a noble vernacular, to be chased as a "perfumed panther", which had to display the same revelatory perfection of the lost language of Adam.
It is very difficult to reconcile the invention of a new national language with the mystical persuasion that the only perfect idiom was the Hebrew spoken by Adam. If Dante really believed so, he should have written his Divine comedy in Hebrew. Likewise, in the XV century Pico della Mirandola tried to revive the Kabbalistic tradition by manipulating the biblical Hebrew (badly learned from his friend Flavius Mithridates) but in fact he wrote in Latin his pseudo-Hebrew lucubrations. Perfect languages are very difficult to master.
In the XVI and XVII century many tried to go back to Hebrew. In 1667, Mercurius van Helmont published an Alphabeti veri naturalis Hebraici brevissima delineatio where, in order to teach the deaf-mutes, shows why Hebrew is the only language that can be learned in a natural way: in making the sounds of Hebrew the movements of tongue, palate, uvula, and glottis reproduced the shapes of the corresponding Hebrew letters. Figure
For other authors the problem was to demonstrate that Hebrew was so perfect that its virtues had been transferred to the Western languages. In 1606, Estienne Guichard wrote his L'harmonie étymologique des langues starting from the premise that Hebrew was the simplest language because in it "all words are simple, and their substance consists of but three radicals". Manipulating these radicals through inversion, anagrams, and permutations in the best Kabbalistic tradition, Guichard provided his etymologies. In Hebrew, the verb batar means to divide. How can we prove that Latin dividere comes from batar? Simple: by inversion, batar produces tarab; tarab then becomes the Latin tribus and, from there, turns into distribuo and dividere. Zacen means old. Rearranging the radicals, we get zanec from which derives Latin senex. A further rearrangement and we have cazen, from which derives the Oscan word, casnar, which is the root of the Latin canus, elder. Obviously, by this method we might equally prove that the English head comes from the late Latin testa, since the anagram of: testa gives eatts (Figure).
Such a furious search for etymologies eventually ended by implementing serious work in biblical studies and comparative linguistics, but it also produced a curious "nationalistic" trend. If the language one speaks directly derives from Hebrew, why then not to consider one's national idiom as the most perfect one?
For Giovanni Nanni, or Annius (Commentatio super opera diversorum auctorum de antiquitatibus loquentium of 1498), the Tuscan dialect was a perfect one because, before it was colonized by the Greeks, Etruria had been settled by Noah and his descendants. This thesis was received by
Guillaume Postel, a passionate student of the Hebrew tradition, who simply preferred to transfer
the Etruscan heritage to the Celts. In the Flanders Goropius Becanus (Jan van Gorp) in his
Origines Antwerpianae of 1569 demonstrated on etymological grounds that the original perfect
language was Dutch, particularly the dialect of Antwerp: the ancestors of Antwerpians were the
Cimbrians, the direct descendants of the sons of Japheth, who had not been present under the
Tower of Babel, and, consequently, had been spared the confusio linguarum. Becanus claimed
that his thesis was also proved by the facts that Dutch had the highest number of monosyllabic
words, possessed a richness of sounds superior to all other languages, and favored at the
highest degree the formation of compound words.
A Swedish candidacy was supported in 1671 by Georg Stiernhielm (De linguarum origine praefatio) and in 1688 his fellow-countryman Andreas Kempe, in his Die Sprachen des Paradises narrates of a conversation between God and Adam, where God speaks in Swedish and Adam in Danish, and Eve is seduced by a French-speaking serpent. This was certainly a parody, but was a symptom of a real debate. Olaus Rudbeck, in his Atlantica sive Mannheim vera Japheti posterorum sedes ac patria of 1675, demonstrated that Sweden was the home of Japheth and his line, and that from this racial and linguistic stock all the Gothic idioms were born. Rudbeck identified Sweden with the mythical Atlantis, the land of the Hesperides, from which civilization had spread to the whole world.
The idea of a German linguistic primacy existed even before Luther, for whom German was the language closest to God. In 1533 Konrad Pelicanus (Comnentaria bibliorum) set out the analogies between German and Hebrew, and in the Baroque period, Georg Philipp Harsdörffer (Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele, 1641) claimed that the German language:
speaks in the languages of nature, quite perceptibly expressing all its sounds. [...] It thunders with the heavens, flashes lightening with the quick moving clouds, radiates with the hail, whispers with the winds, foams with the waves, creaks with the locks, sounds with the air, explodes with the canons; it roars like the lion, lows like the oxen, snarls like the bear, bells like the stag, bleats like the sheep, grunts like the pig, barks like the dog, whinnies like the horse, hisses like the snake, meows like the cat, honks like the goose, quacks like the duck, buzzes like the bumble bee, clucks like the hen, strikes its beak like the stork, caws like the crow, coos like the swallow, chirps like the sparrow. [...] On all those occasions in which nature gives things their own sound, nature speaks in our own German tongue. For this, many have wished to assert that the first man, Adam, would not have been able to name the birds and all the other beasts of the fields in anything but in our words, since he expressed, in a manner conforming to their nature, each and every innate property and inherent sound; and thus it is not surprising that the roots of the larger part of our words coincide with the sacred language.
Leibniz condamned with heavy irony these and other theories, but he supported the Celto- Scythian hypothesis, according to which there was a Celtic language common both to the Gauls and the Germans, deriving from the Scythians, and in some way having Semitic origins. Thus he concluded that "Teutonic has best preserved its natural and Adamitic aspect" , and that the Germanic language seemed most primitive. We must take into account that every instance of linguistic nationalism always has political reasons. Do not forget that even Heidegger said the only good languages for philosophy are Greek and German (and this is why it is so difficult to translate Heidegger into English).
In the British context, Rowland Jones (The Circles of Gomer, 1771) argued that "the Celtic dialects and knowledge derived their origin from the circles of Trismegistus, Hermes, Mercury or Gomer... [and] the English language happens more peculiarly to retain its derivation from that purest fountain of languages. In the same century Antoine de Rivarol (De l'universalité de la langue française 1784) wondered why to look for a universal language, since a perfect one already existed and was French. In French the word-order (first subject, then verb, and last object) mirrors a natural logic in accordance with the requirements of common sense, its phonetic
A Swedish candidacy was supported in 1671 by Georg Stiernhielm (De linguarum origine praefatio) and in 1688 his fellow-countryman Andreas Kempe, in his Die Sprachen des Paradises narrates of a conversation between God and Adam, where God speaks in Swedish and Adam in Danish, and Eve is seduced by a French-speaking serpent. This was certainly a parody, but was a symptom of a real debate. Olaus Rudbeck, in his Atlantica sive Mannheim vera Japheti posterorum sedes ac patria of 1675, demonstrated that Sweden was the home of Japheth and his line, and that from this racial and linguistic stock all the Gothic idioms were born. Rudbeck identified Sweden with the mythical Atlantis, the land of the Hesperides, from which civilization had spread to the whole world.
The idea of a German linguistic primacy existed even before Luther, for whom German was the language closest to God. In 1533 Konrad Pelicanus (Comnentaria bibliorum) set out the analogies between German and Hebrew, and in the Baroque period, Georg Philipp Harsdörffer (Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele, 1641) claimed that the German language:
speaks in the languages of nature, quite perceptibly expressing all its sounds. [...] It thunders with the heavens, flashes lightening with the quick moving clouds, radiates with the hail, whispers with the winds, foams with the waves, creaks with the locks, sounds with the air, explodes with the canons; it roars like the lion, lows like the oxen, snarls like the bear, bells like the stag, bleats like the sheep, grunts like the pig, barks like the dog, whinnies like the horse, hisses like the snake, meows like the cat, honks like the goose, quacks like the duck, buzzes like the bumble bee, clucks like the hen, strikes its beak like the stork, caws like the crow, coos like the swallow, chirps like the sparrow. [...] On all those occasions in which nature gives things their own sound, nature speaks in our own German tongue. For this, many have wished to assert that the first man, Adam, would not have been able to name the birds and all the other beasts of the fields in anything but in our words, since he expressed, in a manner conforming to their nature, each and every innate property and inherent sound; and thus it is not surprising that the roots of the larger part of our words coincide with the sacred language.
Leibniz condamned with heavy irony these and other theories, but he supported the Celto- Scythian hypothesis, according to which there was a Celtic language common both to the Gauls and the Germans, deriving from the Scythians, and in some way having Semitic origins. Thus he concluded that "Teutonic has best preserved its natural and Adamitic aspect" , and that the Germanic language seemed most primitive. We must take into account that every instance of linguistic nationalism always has political reasons. Do not forget that even Heidegger said the only good languages for philosophy are Greek and German (and this is why it is so difficult to translate Heidegger into English).
In the British context, Rowland Jones (The Circles of Gomer, 1771) argued that "the Celtic dialects and knowledge derived their origin from the circles of Trismegistus, Hermes, Mercury or Gomer... [and] the English language happens more peculiarly to retain its derivation from that purest fountain of languages. In the same century Antoine de Rivarol (De l'universalité de la langue française 1784) wondered why to look for a universal language, since a perfect one already existed and was French. In French the word-order (first subject, then verb, and last object) mirrors a natural logic in accordance with the requirements of common sense, its phonetic
system guarantees sweetness and harmony, and in comparison with French German is too
guttural, Italian too soft, Spanish too redundant, English too obscure.
Let me now consider another effect produced by the fascination of Hebrew tradition. In order to find the roots of this approach we must go back to an Hebrew treatise written between the third and fourth centuries, the Sefer Jetzirah, or Book of Creation, in which it is outlined the idea that the world was created by God through a manipulation of alphabetic letters.
The principle of the permutation of the letters offered two possibilities. The permutation technique could be applied to the whole text of the Torah (with its thousands and thousands of letters),or to the series of the names of God, and this was typical of the so-called Kabbalah of Names, which permitted ecstatic experiences. But the Sefer Jetzirah also suggested that the permutation could be also implemented on the finished packet of the 22 letters of the alphabet. FIG. (page from Sefer)
Twenty-two foundation letters... And He created with them the whole creation and everything to be created in the future... He fixed them on a wheel like a wall with 231 gates and He turns the wheel forward and backward. (ii, 3)
How did He combine, weigh and interchange them? Aleph with all and all with Aleph; Beth with all and all with Beth...(ii, 5) How did He combine them? Two stones build two houses, three stones build six houses, four stones build twenty four houses, five stones build a hundred and twenty houses, six stones build seven hundred and twenty houses, seven stones build five thousand and forty houses. Begin from here and think of what the mouth is unable to say and the hear is unable to hear" (iv, 16).
Not only mouth and hear are unable to spell out what happens afterwards, but even a personal computer would have severe difficulties in doing it. In mathematics this is called factorial calculus. Figure Kircher. With a finite alphabet one can produce a finite but enormously high number of combinations. It is easy to imagine how this dizzying number of possibilities must have appealed to those who dreamed of a perfect language. If each element of the alphabet corresponded to an idea, then the language would offer the possibility of combining them so producing true philosophical or theological propositions. And if these ideas represented things, then this language would allow one to discover all the connections of reality.
Such was the ars magna of Raymond Lully (XIII-XIV century). FIG. Wheel and rows. To each of the nine letters represented in the wheel we can assign five rows of concepts, namely nine Principia Absoluta, nine Principia Relativa, nine Questions, nine Subjects, nine Virtues and nine Vices. Once assigned a given set of values to the letters, one starts rotating the wheels and can produce a very high number of concepts. Lull thought of his mathematically perfect language as an intellectual instrument for the conversion of the infidel. According to the legend, he went among the Muslims, showed his wheel, and - unconvincing as it method was - was killed.
Lully was however still thinking of a finite system of primitive notions portraying the structure of a rational universe. In fact the definitions he gives of his basic elements severely limits their possibility of combination. If the Ars produced a proposition like the world is eternal, it had to be rejected because it was wrong. Lully acts as one who mixes up the letters ABC in order to produce anagrams. Three items can produce six anagrams but, according to the English lexicon, only CAB and BAC make sense, and the rest must be disregarded as irrelevant. In Lully's ontology, a very structured system of truths limits the chances offered by the combinatorial art.
But Lully's idea went beyond Lully's intentions. Once proposed the possibility that different concepts can be assigned to the letters, why to stop at a finite set of conceptual units? Moreover,
Let me now consider another effect produced by the fascination of Hebrew tradition. In order to find the roots of this approach we must go back to an Hebrew treatise written between the third and fourth centuries, the Sefer Jetzirah, or Book of Creation, in which it is outlined the idea that the world was created by God through a manipulation of alphabetic letters.
The principle of the permutation of the letters offered two possibilities. The permutation technique could be applied to the whole text of the Torah (with its thousands and thousands of letters),or to the series of the names of God, and this was typical of the so-called Kabbalah of Names, which permitted ecstatic experiences. But the Sefer Jetzirah also suggested that the permutation could be also implemented on the finished packet of the 22 letters of the alphabet. FIG. (page from Sefer)
Twenty-two foundation letters... And He created with them the whole creation and everything to be created in the future... He fixed them on a wheel like a wall with 231 gates and He turns the wheel forward and backward. (ii, 3)
How did He combine, weigh and interchange them? Aleph with all and all with Aleph; Beth with all and all with Beth...(ii, 5) How did He combine them? Two stones build two houses, three stones build six houses, four stones build twenty four houses, five stones build a hundred and twenty houses, six stones build seven hundred and twenty houses, seven stones build five thousand and forty houses. Begin from here and think of what the mouth is unable to say and the hear is unable to hear" (iv, 16).
Not only mouth and hear are unable to spell out what happens afterwards, but even a personal computer would have severe difficulties in doing it. In mathematics this is called factorial calculus. Figure Kircher. With a finite alphabet one can produce a finite but enormously high number of combinations. It is easy to imagine how this dizzying number of possibilities must have appealed to those who dreamed of a perfect language. If each element of the alphabet corresponded to an idea, then the language would offer the possibility of combining them so producing true philosophical or theological propositions. And if these ideas represented things, then this language would allow one to discover all the connections of reality.
Such was the ars magna of Raymond Lully (XIII-XIV century). FIG. Wheel and rows. To each of the nine letters represented in the wheel we can assign five rows of concepts, namely nine Principia Absoluta, nine Principia Relativa, nine Questions, nine Subjects, nine Virtues and nine Vices. Once assigned a given set of values to the letters, one starts rotating the wheels and can produce a very high number of concepts. Lull thought of his mathematically perfect language as an intellectual instrument for the conversion of the infidel. According to the legend, he went among the Muslims, showed his wheel, and - unconvincing as it method was - was killed.
Lully was however still thinking of a finite system of primitive notions portraying the structure of a rational universe. In fact the definitions he gives of his basic elements severely limits their possibility of combination. If the Ars produced a proposition like the world is eternal, it had to be rejected because it was wrong. Lully acts as one who mixes up the letters ABC in order to produce anagrams. Three items can produce six anagrams but, according to the English lexicon, only CAB and BAC make sense, and the rest must be disregarded as irrelevant. In Lully's ontology, a very structured system of truths limits the chances offered by the combinatorial art.
But Lully's idea went beyond Lully's intentions. Once proposed the possibility that different concepts can be assigned to the letters, why to stop at a finite set of conceptual units? Moreover,
why to bound from the beginning the letters to concepts? Figure Selenus. See for instance how in
1624 Gustavus Selenus conceived of a cipher which could combine 25 series of 24 tuples, where
any solution can be correct since the cipher simply transforms symbols into symbols, and the
procedure is uninterested in the semantic value of the coupling. If with Lully there was an
elementary syntax limited by a strictly limited semantics, now it is possible to think of more
complex syntax, without any semantic limitation.
In 1622, Paul Guldin wrote a Problema aritmeticum de rerum combinationibus in which he calculated the number of possible locutions generated by 23 letters. He took into account neither the question of whether the resulting sequences had a sense, nor even if they were capable to being pronounced at all. The locutions could consist of anything from 2 to 23 letters; he did not allow repetitions. He arrived at a result of more than 70,000 billion billions. To write out all these locutions would require more than a million billion billions letters. To conceive of the enormity of this figure, he asked the reader to imagine writing all these words in huge books: each of these books had a thousand pages; each of these pages had a hundred lines; each of these lines could accommodate 60 characters. One would need 257 million billions of these books. Where would you put them all? Guldin then made a careful volumetric study, imagining shelf space and room for circulation in the libraries that might store a consignment of these dimensions. If you housed the books in large libraries formed by cubes whose sides measured 432 feet, the number of such cubical buildings (hosting 32 millions of volumes each) should be more than 8 billions. And where then would you put them all? Even exhausting the total available surface space on the planet earth, one would still find room for more than 7 billions of books!
In 1636 father Marin Mersenne, in his Harmonie universelle asked how many musical sequences that can be generated upon an extension of three octaves, comprising 22 notes, without repetitions (shades of future twelve-tone compositions!). Mersenne observed that to write down all these songs would require enough reams of paper to fill in the distance between heaven and earth, even if every sheet contained 720 songs and every ream was so compressed so as to be less than an inch thick. In fact the number of possible songs amounted to 1.124 billions of billions. By dividing this figure for the 362, 880 songs contained in each ream, one would still obtain a 16 digits figure, whilst the number of inches between the center of the Earth and the stars is only 28 thousands of billions (a 14 digits figure). Anyone who wished to copy out all these songs a thousand per day would have to write for more than 22 billion years.
Mersenne and Guldin were anticipating Borges' Babel Library ad abundantiam. Not only this, Guldin observed that if the numbers are these, who can marvel at the existence of so many different natural languages? The Ars was now providing an excuse for the confusio linguarum. It justifies it, however, by showing that it is impossible to limit the omnipotence of God.
Are there more names than things? How many names, asks Mersenne (Harmonie, II, 72), would we need if we were to give more than one to each individual? If Adam really did give names to everything, how long would he have had to spend in Eden? In the end, the languages of man limit themselves to the naming of general ideas and of species; to name an individual thing, an indication with a finger is usually sufficient (p. 74). If this were not so, it might easily "happen that for every hair on the body of an animal and for each hair on the head of a man we might require a particular name that would distinguish it from all others. Thus a man with 100,000 hairs on his head and 100,000 more on his body would need to know 200, 000 separate words to name them all" (p 72-73). Yet such an artificial language would place man in competition with God, who has the privilege of knowing all things in their individual nature.
This capacity to conceive of a quasi-infinite series of combinations depends on the fact that, unlike Lull, Mersenne and others were no longer calculating upon concepts but rather of simple alphabetic sequences, pure elements of expression with no inherent meaning, uncontrolled by no orthodoxy other than the limits of mathematics itself.
In 1622, Paul Guldin wrote a Problema aritmeticum de rerum combinationibus in which he calculated the number of possible locutions generated by 23 letters. He took into account neither the question of whether the resulting sequences had a sense, nor even if they were capable to being pronounced at all. The locutions could consist of anything from 2 to 23 letters; he did not allow repetitions. He arrived at a result of more than 70,000 billion billions. To write out all these locutions would require more than a million billion billions letters. To conceive of the enormity of this figure, he asked the reader to imagine writing all these words in huge books: each of these books had a thousand pages; each of these pages had a hundred lines; each of these lines could accommodate 60 characters. One would need 257 million billions of these books. Where would you put them all? Guldin then made a careful volumetric study, imagining shelf space and room for circulation in the libraries that might store a consignment of these dimensions. If you housed the books in large libraries formed by cubes whose sides measured 432 feet, the number of such cubical buildings (hosting 32 millions of volumes each) should be more than 8 billions. And where then would you put them all? Even exhausting the total available surface space on the planet earth, one would still find room for more than 7 billions of books!
In 1636 father Marin Mersenne, in his Harmonie universelle asked how many musical sequences that can be generated upon an extension of three octaves, comprising 22 notes, without repetitions (shades of future twelve-tone compositions!). Mersenne observed that to write down all these songs would require enough reams of paper to fill in the distance between heaven and earth, even if every sheet contained 720 songs and every ream was so compressed so as to be less than an inch thick. In fact the number of possible songs amounted to 1.124 billions of billions. By dividing this figure for the 362, 880 songs contained in each ream, one would still obtain a 16 digits figure, whilst the number of inches between the center of the Earth and the stars is only 28 thousands of billions (a 14 digits figure). Anyone who wished to copy out all these songs a thousand per day would have to write for more than 22 billion years.
Mersenne and Guldin were anticipating Borges' Babel Library ad abundantiam. Not only this, Guldin observed that if the numbers are these, who can marvel at the existence of so many different natural languages? The Ars was now providing an excuse for the confusio linguarum. It justifies it, however, by showing that it is impossible to limit the omnipotence of God.
Are there more names than things? How many names, asks Mersenne (Harmonie, II, 72), would we need if we were to give more than one to each individual? If Adam really did give names to everything, how long would he have had to spend in Eden? In the end, the languages of man limit themselves to the naming of general ideas and of species; to name an individual thing, an indication with a finger is usually sufficient (p. 74). If this were not so, it might easily "happen that for every hair on the body of an animal and for each hair on the head of a man we might require a particular name that would distinguish it from all others. Thus a man with 100,000 hairs on his head and 100,000 more on his body would need to know 200, 000 separate words to name them all" (p 72-73). Yet such an artificial language would place man in competition with God, who has the privilege of knowing all things in their individual nature.
This capacity to conceive of a quasi-infinite series of combinations depends on the fact that, unlike Lull, Mersenne and others were no longer calculating upon concepts but rather of simple alphabetic sequences, pure elements of expression with no inherent meaning, uncontrolled by no orthodoxy other than the limits of mathematics itself.
Such was the way followed by Leibniz - at least in some of its proposals for a universal language
- a way which led eventually to modern formal logic. Lullian Ars Magna thus became step by step
a cogitatio caeca, a blind calculus between free variables, to which an indefinite number of
meanings can be bound, so that the combinational laws of the expressions can lead to the
discovery of new possible connections between things or ideas. FIG. Leibniz.
The two case I have up to now considered are opposite both in their aims and in their results. (I) By electing a given natural language as the heir of the primeval Hebrew, one makes certainly a strong ideological statement, but one does not find a perfect substitute for a pre-existing natural language. Be it Dutch or German, Sweedish or English, such a privileged language will still display all the flaws of the natural ones and it would be difficult to demonstrate how it really mirrors the nature of things. (ii) By looking for a strictly formalized language one can maneuver, as Lully did, abstract theological concepts, or, as Lebniz proposed, mathematical entities of philosophical ideas, but cannot speak, neither perfectly nor imperfectly, of our everyday affairs, as the imperfect post-Babelic natural languages do.
Is there a perfect language which can really substitute, in a better and more precise way, natural languages? This was the problem of the inventors of so called a priori languages of the XVII century, among whom the most skilled and famous was John Wilkins. I must say that I have a great respect for Wilkins and that in my book I tried to show that he was the first to have (albeit in a confused way) the first notion of a Hypertext. His attempt was a paramount one and his failure was due, among other reasons, to the fact that he was trying to establish a scientific a taxonomy at a time in which natural sciences were still groping their own way. But let me say how, even though Wilkins had implemented such a perfect taxonomy, his project would have collapsed.
In order to understand what happened (and I am sorry to ask you this scholarly effort), let us use as parameter the model for a semiotic system supplied by Hjelmslev (FIGURE)
Every semiotic system can be analyzed in two planes, Expression and Content. Each plane can be subdivided into form and substance, and each arises through organizing a still unshaped continuum. For natural languages, the expression-form is represented by the phonological system, by the lexical repertoire, and by the rules of syntax. Realizing through concrete utterances the possibilities provided by the expression-form, we produce expression-substances, like the words that I am actually uttering.
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 (let us say very simply that we recognize objects such as trees, animals, square roots, parental relationships and so on).
In order to be able to convey meaning, a natural language must establish a correlation between elements (or units) of the expression-form and elements (or units) of the content-form. In verbal languages, Expression-form and Content-form are not conformal. This means that they are structured according to different criteria: the relationship between the two planes is arbitrary, and variations of expression do not automatically imply a point-to-point variation of the corresponding content. There are also of cases of conformality: think for instance of a clock, where the movement of the hands corresponds to the movement of the Earth around the Sun, but the slightest movement of the hands corresponds to a given movement of the Earth. The two planes are point-to-point conformal. On the contrary, in a verbal language, if, instead of dog, we utter log, we do not mean a different kind of dog, or of animal, but something radically different.
The fact that natural languages are non conformal can be translated in terms of double articulation. The units of first articulation (let me say, words) do convey meaning, while their
The two case I have up to now considered are opposite both in their aims and in their results. (I) By electing a given natural language as the heir of the primeval Hebrew, one makes certainly a strong ideological statement, but one does not find a perfect substitute for a pre-existing natural language. Be it Dutch or German, Sweedish or English, such a privileged language will still display all the flaws of the natural ones and it would be difficult to demonstrate how it really mirrors the nature of things. (ii) By looking for a strictly formalized language one can maneuver, as Lully did, abstract theological concepts, or, as Lebniz proposed, mathematical entities of philosophical ideas, but cannot speak, neither perfectly nor imperfectly, of our everyday affairs, as the imperfect post-Babelic natural languages do.
Is there a perfect language which can really substitute, in a better and more precise way, natural languages? This was the problem of the inventors of so called a priori languages of the XVII century, among whom the most skilled and famous was John Wilkins. I must say that I have a great respect for Wilkins and that in my book I tried to show that he was the first to have (albeit in a confused way) the first notion of a Hypertext. His attempt was a paramount one and his failure was due, among other reasons, to the fact that he was trying to establish a scientific a taxonomy at a time in which natural sciences were still groping their own way. But let me say how, even though Wilkins had implemented such a perfect taxonomy, his project would have collapsed.
In order to understand what happened (and I am sorry to ask you this scholarly effort), let us use as parameter the model for a semiotic system supplied by Hjelmslev (FIGURE)
Every semiotic system can be analyzed in two planes, Expression and Content. Each plane can be subdivided into form and substance, and each arises through organizing a still unshaped continuum. For natural languages, the expression-form is represented by the phonological system, by the lexical repertoire, and by the rules of syntax. Realizing through concrete utterances the possibilities provided by the expression-form, we produce expression-substances, like the words that I am actually uttering.
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 (let us say very simply that we recognize objects such as trees, animals, square roots, parental relationships and so on).
In order to be able to convey meaning, a natural language must establish a correlation between elements (or units) of the expression-form and elements (or units) of the content-form. In verbal languages, Expression-form and Content-form are not conformal. This means that they are structured according to different criteria: the relationship between the two planes is arbitrary, and variations of expression do not automatically imply a point-to-point variation of the corresponding content. There are also of cases of conformality: think for instance of a clock, where the movement of the hands corresponds to the movement of the Earth around the Sun, but the slightest movement of the hands corresponds to a given movement of the Earth. The two planes are point-to-point conformal. On the contrary, in a verbal language, if, instead of dog, we utter log, we do not mean a different kind of dog, or of animal, but something radically different.
The fact that natural languages are non conformal can be translated in terms of double articulation. The units of first articulation (let me say, words) do convey meaning, while their
phonetical components (units of second articulation) do not. If I draw a trilobate figure assuming
that it represent a clover, and then I add a lobe, I have represented a four-leafed clover: the two
planes are conformal. If on the contrary I write the word clover and then I re-write it, let me say,
with a double final r o with a double l, I have not denoted a four-leafed clover, as well as, if I write
cover, by eliminating the l, I have not represented a clover deprived of one leave. The two planes
are non conformal. Such an arbitrariness always looked an infelicitous result of the Babel curse,
to the eyes of the searchers for a perfect language. How beautiful would be a language where the
word for dog not only naturally and evidently portrayed all the properties of a dog, but also where
every minimal modification of the world expressed any minimal variation of the nature, the
behavior, the properties of a dog.
In order to design characters that directly denote notions (if not the things themselves that these notions reflect), it was necessary to design a system of primitive notions, by composition of which every thought could be expressed. That is why these languages were called as philosophical and a priori.
In his Essay towards a Real Character John Wilkins constructed a table of 40 Major Genera subdivided into 251 characteristic Differences. From these he derived 2,030 Species which appear in pairs. Then Wilkins assigned a real character to every Genus, Species and Difference. In fact, he proposed two types of language: (i) the first, an ideogrammatic form of writing, vaguely Chinese in aspect, was destined to appear in print but never to be pronounced, (ii) the second, were the characters were intended to be pronounced. Since it is easier to understand the latter, I will take from it the few example which follow.
FIGURE represents Wilkins' own illustration of the signs characterizing the 40 Major Genera as well as the signs used to indicate Differences and Species. Genera are represent by expressions such as B , Ba, Be and so on. Differences are marked by nine consonants (B, D, G, P, T, C, Z, S, N). The Species can be expressed by adding a third vowel or diphthong to the Genus+Differences syntagm. Thus, according to the example provided by Wilkins, if De signifies Element, then Deb must signify the third difference of the element, which is Fire, and Deb will denote the first species, which is Flame. Figure.
In this system the choice of the letters is arbitrary, but the disposition of the letters aims at mirroring the composition of ideas. The two planes are so reciprocally isomorphic as to determine each other. If in Deb one replaces the second b with t (thus producing Det ), then a different concept is expressed, namely Rainbow.
Looking back at FIGURE , it is however evident that there are only nine signs or letters to indicate either Differences or Species. To record more than nine species to specify a second group of nine species an L is added after the first consonant in the pronunciation of the name, and to specify a third group a R is added. Therefore if G pe is normally Tulip (third species of the fourth difference of the genus "Grasses classified by leaf"), Gl pe is Ramsom because the addition of the L means that the final e no longer indicates the third species in the genus but the twelfth (FIGURE ).
Yet it is precisely at this point that we come across a curious accident. In the example we just gave, I had to correct Wilkins' text (p. 45). The text uses the normal English terms tulip and ramsom, but designates them in the character by the terms G de and Gl de rather than G pe and Gl pe. One only has to go back and check this in the tables to see that this must be a misprint: in the tables, we see that G de is malted barley. Regardless of whatever botanical affinities the plants might possess, the words tulip and barley are phonetically dissimilar, and thus unlikely ever to be confused with each other. In this philosophical language, however, members of the name species are easy to muddle either phonetically or graphically. Without constant double- checking against the tables, it is difficult to avoid misprints and misunderstandings. This happens because in a language of real characters every element of the expression plane is obliged to
In order to design characters that directly denote notions (if not the things themselves that these notions reflect), it was necessary to design a system of primitive notions, by composition of which every thought could be expressed. That is why these languages were called as philosophical and a priori.
In his Essay towards a Real Character John Wilkins constructed a table of 40 Major Genera subdivided into 251 characteristic Differences. From these he derived 2,030 Species which appear in pairs. Then Wilkins assigned a real character to every Genus, Species and Difference. In fact, he proposed two types of language: (i) the first, an ideogrammatic form of writing, vaguely Chinese in aspect, was destined to appear in print but never to be pronounced, (ii) the second, were the characters were intended to be pronounced. Since it is easier to understand the latter, I will take from it the few example which follow.
FIGURE represents Wilkins' own illustration of the signs characterizing the 40 Major Genera as well as the signs used to indicate Differences and Species. Genera are represent by expressions such as B , Ba, Be and so on. Differences are marked by nine consonants (B, D, G, P, T, C, Z, S, N). The Species can be expressed by adding a third vowel or diphthong to the Genus+Differences syntagm. Thus, according to the example provided by Wilkins, if De signifies Element, then Deb must signify the third difference of the element, which is Fire, and Deb will denote the first species, which is Flame. Figure.
In this system the choice of the letters is arbitrary, but the disposition of the letters aims at mirroring the composition of ideas. The two planes are so reciprocally isomorphic as to determine each other. If in Deb one replaces the second b with t (thus producing Det ), then a different concept is expressed, namely Rainbow.
Looking back at FIGURE , it is however evident that there are only nine signs or letters to indicate either Differences or Species. To record more than nine species to specify a second group of nine species an L is added after the first consonant in the pronunciation of the name, and to specify a third group a R is added. Therefore if G pe is normally Tulip (third species of the fourth difference of the genus "Grasses classified by leaf"), Gl pe is Ramsom because the addition of the L means that the final e no longer indicates the third species in the genus but the twelfth (FIGURE ).
Yet it is precisely at this point that we come across a curious accident. In the example we just gave, I had to correct Wilkins' text (p. 45). The text uses the normal English terms tulip and ramsom, but designates them in the character by the terms G de and Gl de rather than G pe and Gl pe. One only has to go back and check this in the tables to see that this must be a misprint: in the tables, we see that G de is malted barley. Regardless of whatever botanical affinities the plants might possess, the words tulip and barley are phonetically dissimilar, and thus unlikely ever to be confused with each other. In this philosophical language, however, members of the name species are easy to muddle either phonetically or graphically. Without constant double- checking against the tables, it is difficult to avoid misprints and misunderstandings. This happens because in a language of real characters every element of the expression plane is obliged to
denote a precise content. Wilkins language has only a first articulation. Nothing in it is devoid of
meaning, nothing is purely differential.
This means that in a language composed of real characters any alteration of a character entails a change of sense. This makes pretty difficult the creation of neologism, especially for unknown things of which we still ignore the nature. In other words if I find an unknown flower, I can decide to give it a name (let say marigoldus Humberti) before understanding to which family it belongs. I can call a person Mary even without knowing the date and place of her birth, or the name of her parents. On the contrary, in Wilkins language, in order to name something, one should first know the whole of its properties and its precise place in a tree of genera and species.
Suppose we want to transform the character Det (Rainbow) into Den : we would obtain a character that necessarily denote the first species of the ninth difference of the genus Element. Unfortunately there is no such species recorded in Wilkins tables. We can only conclude that the character unequivocally designates an as yet to be discovered content, and that even if the content remains undiscovered, the character has at least told us the precise point where the corresponding idea should be found. But what is that `point'? If the tables were analogous to the periodic table in chemistry, then we really would know what to look for. The periodic table contains boxes which, though momentarily empty, might, one day, be filled. Yet the language of chemistry is rigorously quantitative; the table gives the number and atomic weight of each missing element. An empty space in Wilkins' classification, however, merely tells us that there is a hole at that point; it does not tell us how we should to fill it up, or why the hole appears in one space rather than another. So no one can coin a new word before having rearranged the entire system of knowledge.
Thus we understand why our imperfect natural languages have a double articulation. It is a condition for tentative creativity and a guarantee that many mistakes in speaking or writing can be detected as such - without thinking, in a sort of psychoanalytical obsession, that every lapsus, even a typo, conceals a hidden meaning.
These explorations in the history of perfect languages are not a mere archeological endeavor. The problems faced by Wilkins are reappearing today (albeit in more sophisticated forms) in the framework of many researches in Artificial Intelligence, in the theories of a computational nature of Mind (supposedly articulating a Language of Thought or Mentalese), as well in the researches on mechanical translation.
We know what a predicament translation represents for natural languages. It has been told that every language is a system in itself and that radical translation is impossible, except one is able to find a perfect language of Mind. Such a parameter for every translation was judged as essential by Walter Benjamin: since it is impossible to reproduce all the linguistic meanings of the source-language into a target-language, one is forced to place one's faith in the ideal convergence of all languages. In each language " taken as a whole, there is a self-identical thing that is meant, a thing which, nevertheless, is accessible to none of these languages taken individually, but only to that totality of all of their intentions taken as reciprocal and complementary, a totality that we call Pure Language (reine Sprache)" (Benjamin 1923). This reine Sprache would not be a real language. If we think of the mystic and Cabalistic sources which were the inspiration for Benjamin's thinking, we begin to sense the impending ghost of sacred languages, of something more akin to the secret genius of the Primeval Language than to the ideal of the a priori languages.
In many of the most notable projects for mechanical translation, there exists a notion of a parameter language, which does share many of the characteristics of the a priori languages. There must, it is argued, exist a tertium comparationis which might allow us to shift from an expression in language A to an expression in language B by deciding that both are equivalent to an expression of a metalaguage C. If such a tertium really existed, it would be a perfect language.
This means that in a language composed of real characters any alteration of a character entails a change of sense. This makes pretty difficult the creation of neologism, especially for unknown things of which we still ignore the nature. In other words if I find an unknown flower, I can decide to give it a name (let say marigoldus Humberti) before understanding to which family it belongs. I can call a person Mary even without knowing the date and place of her birth, or the name of her parents. On the contrary, in Wilkins language, in order to name something, one should first know the whole of its properties and its precise place in a tree of genera and species.
Suppose we want to transform the character Det (Rainbow) into Den : we would obtain a character that necessarily denote the first species of the ninth difference of the genus Element. Unfortunately there is no such species recorded in Wilkins tables. We can only conclude that the character unequivocally designates an as yet to be discovered content, and that even if the content remains undiscovered, the character has at least told us the precise point where the corresponding idea should be found. But what is that `point'? If the tables were analogous to the periodic table in chemistry, then we really would know what to look for. The periodic table contains boxes which, though momentarily empty, might, one day, be filled. Yet the language of chemistry is rigorously quantitative; the table gives the number and atomic weight of each missing element. An empty space in Wilkins' classification, however, merely tells us that there is a hole at that point; it does not tell us how we should to fill it up, or why the hole appears in one space rather than another. So no one can coin a new word before having rearranged the entire system of knowledge.
Thus we understand why our imperfect natural languages have a double articulation. It is a condition for tentative creativity and a guarantee that many mistakes in speaking or writing can be detected as such - without thinking, in a sort of psychoanalytical obsession, that every lapsus, even a typo, conceals a hidden meaning.
These explorations in the history of perfect languages are not a mere archeological endeavor. The problems faced by Wilkins are reappearing today (albeit in more sophisticated forms) in the framework of many researches in Artificial Intelligence, in the theories of a computational nature of Mind (supposedly articulating a Language of Thought or Mentalese), as well in the researches on mechanical translation.
We know what a predicament translation represents for natural languages. It has been told that every language is a system in itself and that radical translation is impossible, except one is able to find a perfect language of Mind. Such a parameter for every translation was judged as essential by Walter Benjamin: since it is impossible to reproduce all the linguistic meanings of the source-language into a target-language, one is forced to place one's faith in the ideal convergence of all languages. In each language " taken as a whole, there is a self-identical thing that is meant, a thing which, nevertheless, is accessible to none of these languages taken individually, but only to that totality of all of their intentions taken as reciprocal and complementary, a totality that we call Pure Language (reine Sprache)" (Benjamin 1923). This reine Sprache would not be a real language. If we think of the mystic and Cabalistic sources which were the inspiration for Benjamin's thinking, we begin to sense the impending ghost of sacred languages, of something more akin to the secret genius of the Primeval Language than to the ideal of the a priori languages.
In many of the most notable projects for mechanical translation, there exists a notion of a parameter language, which does share many of the characteristics of the a priori languages. There must, it is argued, exist a tertium comparationis which might allow us to shift from an expression in language A to an expression in language B by deciding that both are equivalent to an expression of a metalaguage C. If such a tertium really existed, it would be a perfect language.
The only alternative would be to discover a natural language which is so "perfect" (so flexible and
powerful) to serve as tertium comparationis. In 1603, the Jesuit Ludovico Bertonio (Arte de
lengua Aymara) described the Aymara language (still partially spoken by Indians living between
Bolivia and Peru) as endowed with an immense flexibility and capability of accommodating
neologisms, particularly adapted to the expression of abstract concepts, so much so as to raise a
suspicion that it was an artificial invention. Later this language was described as the language of
Adam, founded upon necessary and immutable ideas", a philosophical language if ever there
were, and obviously somebody discovered that it had Semitic roots.
Recent studies have established Aymara is not based on an Aristotelian two-valued logic (either True or False), but on a three-valued logic it is, therefore, capable of expressing modal subtleties which other languages can only capture through complex circumlocutions. Thus there have been proposals to use Aymara to resolve all problems of computer translation. Unfortunately, it has been demonstrated that the Aymara would greatly facilitate the translation of any other idiom into its own terms, but not the other way around. Thus, because of its perfection, Aymara can render every thought expressed in other mutually untranslatable languages, but the price to pay for it is that (once the perfect language has resolved these thoughts into its own terms), they cannot be translated back into our natural native idioms. Aymara is a Black Hole.
It is not this evening that we can discuss the possibility of a new scientific Aymara and how to overcome all the predicaments of an allegedly perfect language. Thus let me conclude with a temporary remark, quoting an Arab writer of the tenth o eleventh century, Ibn Hazm.
According to him, in the beginning there existed a single language given by God, thanks to which Adam was able to understand the quiddity of things. This tongue provided a name for every thing, and a thing for each name. But if such a prior language existed, why should have men undergone the unprofitable task of inventing other idioms? And if it did not exist, which was the source of our natural languages? The only explanation is that there was an original language which included all others. The confusion did not depend on the accidental invention of new languages, but on the fragmentation of a unique tongue that existed ab initio and in which all the other were already contained. It is for this reason that all men are still able to understand the revelation of the Koran, in whatever language it is expressed. God made the Koranic verses in Arabic in order that they might be understood by His chosen people, not because the Arabic language enjoyed any particular privilege. In whatever language men may discover the spirit, the breath, the perfume, the traces of the original polylinguism.
Let us accept that suggestion coming from afar. Our mother tongue was not a single language but rather a complex of all languages. Perhaps Adam never received such a gift in full; it was promised to him. Thus the legacy that he has left to all his sons and daughters is the task of winning for themselves the full and reconciled mastery of the Tower of Babel.
Which means, even in this country where it seems that English is the vehicular universal language, but different people at every corner of New York City speak a different tongue, to be tentatively polyglots is the only chance for mutual understanding.
Once a young American met Roman Jakobson who was starting his teaching in this country and said to him: "Professor, I rushed here to learn from you, but your classes are given in Russian, and I do not understand it." Jakobson (who was told to speak Russian in forty languages) answered: "Try!"
I thank you for having generously tried, this evening, to understand my pidgin English as it were your own perfect language.
Recent studies have established Aymara is not based on an Aristotelian two-valued logic (either True or False), but on a three-valued logic it is, therefore, capable of expressing modal subtleties which other languages can only capture through complex circumlocutions. Thus there have been proposals to use Aymara to resolve all problems of computer translation. Unfortunately, it has been demonstrated that the Aymara would greatly facilitate the translation of any other idiom into its own terms, but not the other way around. Thus, because of its perfection, Aymara can render every thought expressed in other mutually untranslatable languages, but the price to pay for it is that (once the perfect language has resolved these thoughts into its own terms), they cannot be translated back into our natural native idioms. Aymara is a Black Hole.
It is not this evening that we can discuss the possibility of a new scientific Aymara and how to overcome all the predicaments of an allegedly perfect language. Thus let me conclude with a temporary remark, quoting an Arab writer of the tenth o eleventh century, Ibn Hazm.
According to him, in the beginning there existed a single language given by God, thanks to which Adam was able to understand the quiddity of things. This tongue provided a name for every thing, and a thing for each name. But if such a prior language existed, why should have men undergone the unprofitable task of inventing other idioms? And if it did not exist, which was the source of our natural languages? The only explanation is that there was an original language which included all others. The confusion did not depend on the accidental invention of new languages, but on the fragmentation of a unique tongue that existed ab initio and in which all the other were already contained. It is for this reason that all men are still able to understand the revelation of the Koran, in whatever language it is expressed. God made the Koranic verses in Arabic in order that they might be understood by His chosen people, not because the Arabic language enjoyed any particular privilege. In whatever language men may discover the spirit, the breath, the perfume, the traces of the original polylinguism.
Let us accept that suggestion coming from afar. Our mother tongue was not a single language but rather a complex of all languages. Perhaps Adam never received such a gift in full; it was promised to him. Thus the legacy that he has left to all his sons and daughters is the task of winning for themselves the full and reconciled mastery of the Tower of Babel.
Which means, even in this country where it seems that English is the vehicular universal language, but different people at every corner of New York City speak a different tongue, to be tentatively polyglots is the only chance for mutual understanding.
Once a young American met Roman Jakobson who was starting his teaching in this country and said to him: "Professor, I rushed here to learn from you, but your classes are given in Russian, and I do not understand it." Jakobson (who was told to speak Russian in forty languages) answered: "Try!"
I thank you for having generously tried, this evening, to understand my pidgin English as it were your own perfect language.
Brian Barker's Good Response to English Preachers
Brian Barker
English is certainly not the World's lingua franca.
I live in London and if anyone says to me “everyone speaks English” my answer is “Listen and look around you”. If people in London do not speak English then the whole question of a global language is completely open.
The promulgation of English as Europe’s “lingua franca” is impractical and linguistically undemocratic. I say this as a native English speaker!
Impractical because communication should be for all and not only for an educational or political elite. That is how English is used internationally at the moment, and historically how Latin was used. That solution did not work either :(
Undemocratic because minority languages are under attack worldwide due to the encroachment of majority ethnic languages.
The link below is probably the best advert for Esperanto, as a lingua franca, I have ever seen :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rp5IF41b8zs&feature=related
Neil's addendum:
I live in New York City. Look around: Half of one million hispanics can not speak English. Most of them can not write English beyond the level of a third-grader. Half a million Asian immigrants live in New York and perhaps ten percent will complete a doctorate using English....but half of the doctoral students (in Math and Science) will not speak fluently in English. Hundreds of thousands of Asians working in restaurants and grocery stories DO NOT SPEAK second-grade level English. English lovers and major language speakers preach your delusion around the world: let Africa remain 50% illiterate in the main former colonial languages: English, French and Portuguese.
We have part of the solution to 2 major problems: Illiteracy and Acquiring a Second Language towards Bilingualism. ESPERANTO IS ONE GREAT ANSWER.
The famed Umberto Eco said, not long ago, in New York City:
Which means, even in this country where it seems that English is the vehicular universal language, but different people at every corner of New York City speak a different tongue, to be tentatively polyglots is the only chance for mutual understanding.
Once a young American met Roman Jakobson who was starting his teaching in this country and said to him: "Professor, I rushed here to learn from you, but your classes are given in Russian, and I do not understand it." Jakobson (who was told to speak Russian in forty languages) answered: "Try!"
I thank you for having generously tried, this evening, to understand my pidgin English as it were your own perfect language.
I live in London and if anyone says to me “everyone speaks English” my answer is “Listen and look around you”. If people in London do not speak English then the whole question of a global language is completely open.
The promulgation of English as Europe’s “lingua franca” is impractical and linguistically undemocratic. I say this as a native English speaker!
Impractical because communication should be for all and not only for an educational or political elite. That is how English is used internationally at the moment, and historically how Latin was used. That solution did not work either :(
Undemocratic because minority languages are under attack worldwide due to the encroachment of majority ethnic languages.
The link below is probably the best advert for Esperanto, as a lingua franca, I have ever seen :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rp5IF41b8zs&feature=related
Neil's addendum:
I live in New York City. Look around: Half of one million hispanics can not speak English. Most of them can not write English beyond the level of a third-grader. Half a million Asian immigrants live in New York and perhaps ten percent will complete a doctorate using English....but half of the doctoral students (in Math and Science) will not speak fluently in English. Hundreds of thousands of Asians working in restaurants and grocery stories DO NOT SPEAK second-grade level English. English lovers and major language speakers preach your delusion around the world: let Africa remain 50% illiterate in the main former colonial languages: English, French and Portuguese.
We have part of the solution to 2 major problems: Illiteracy and Acquiring a Second Language towards Bilingualism. ESPERANTO IS ONE GREAT ANSWER.
The famed Umberto Eco said, not long ago, in New York City:
Which means, even in this country where it seems that English is the vehicular universal language, but different people at every corner of New York City speak a different tongue, to be tentatively polyglots is the only chance for mutual understanding.
Once a young American met Roman Jakobson who was starting his teaching in this country and said to him: "Professor, I rushed here to learn from you, but your classes are given in Russian, and I do not understand it." Jakobson (who was told to speak Russian in forty languages) answered: "Try!"
I thank you for having generously tried, this evening, to understand my pidgin English as it were your own perfect language.
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