16. Hillgarth (1971: 283) states that Pico, more interested in Kabbalism than in the Ars of Llull, cited Llull because he was better known than the Hebrew Kabbalah. For a subtle difference of opinion on this point, see Zambelli (1995[1965]: 59, n. 14).
17. La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo, Nuovamente Ristampata & posta in luce, da Thomaso Garzoni di Bagnacavallo. Aggiuntovi in questa nuova Impressione alcune bellissime Annotazioni a discorso per discorso (Venice: Appresso Roberto Maietti, 1599).
18. Artis kabbalisticae, sive sapientiae divinae academia: in novem classes amicissima cum breuitate tum claritate digesta (Paris: Apus Melchiorem Nondiere, 1621).
19. Traité des chiffres, Ou Secretes Manieres d’Escrire (Paris: Chez Abel L’Angelier, 1587).
20. Cryptomenytices et cryptographiae libri ix (Lüneburg: Excriptum typis Johannis Henrici Fratrum, 1624).
21. De lampade combinatoria Lulliana (Wittenberg: Zacarius Cratius, 1587), inserted into the 1598 edition of Llull’s works along with De Lulliano Specierum Scrutinio, De Progressu Logicae Venationis and De Lampade Venatoria Logicorum.
22. In Sphaeram Ioannis de Sacro Bosco Commentarius (Rome: Apud Victorium Helianum, 1570.
23. The dates of composition are uncertain (ca. 1644–1648); the work was probably published at Leszno in 1648.
11
The Language of the Austral Land
The subject of a perfect language has appeared in the cultural history of every people. Throughout the first period of this search, which continued until the seventeenth century, this utopia consisted in the search for the primigenial Hebrew in which God spoke to Adam or that Adam invented when giving names to the animals and in which he had had his first dialogue With Eve. But already in Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia another possibility had been broached: that God had not given Adam primordial Hebrew but rather a general grammar, a transcendental form with which to construct all possible languages.
But this possibility was situated on the two horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, it was possible to conceive of a Chomskian God, who gave Adam some deep syntactical structures common to every language subsequently created by the human race, obeying a universal structure of the mind (without waiting for Chomsky, Rivarol, an eighteenth-century author, had defined French as the language of reason, because its direct order of discourse reproduces the logical order of reality). On the other hand, it could be supposed that God had given Adam some semantic universals (such as high/low, to stand up, to think, thing, action, and so on), a system of atomic notions by means of which every culture organizes its own view of the world.
Until the arrival of Humboldt, even if one accepted the so-called Epicurean hypothesis by which every people invents its own language to deal with its own experience, no one dared prefigure anything similar to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: that it is language that gives form to our experience of the world. Thinkers like Spinoza, Locke, Mersenne, and Leibniz admitted that our definitions (of man, gold, and so on) depend on our point of view about these things. Nobody, however, denied that it was possible to design a general system of ideas that somehow reflected the way the universe works.
Still, even before Dante, Ramon Llull had conceived the idea that there were universal notions, present in the language and in the thought of every people; he even believed that, by articulating and combining these concepts common to all men, it would be possible to convince the infidels—namely, the Muslims and the Jews—of the truth of the Christian religion.
This idea was revived at the dawn of the seventeenth century, after the discovery of Chinese ideograms, which were the same in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (though pronounced differently), for these different peoples referred to the same concepts. The same thing, it was said, happens with numbers, where different words refer to the same mathematical entity. But numbers possessed another attractive aspect: independently of the variety of languages, all peoples (or very many of them) indicated them with the same cipher or character.
The idea that began to circulate, especially in Anglo-Saxon circles, inspired by the Baconian reform of knowledge, was this: postulate a priori a system of semantic universals, assign to each semantic atom a visual character or a sound, and you will have a universal language. As for the grammar, it would be a question, according to the project, of reducing the declensions or the conjugations themselves in order to derive the various elements of speech from a same root, indicating them with diacritical signs or some other criterion of economy.
The first idea of a universal character appeared in Francis Bacon and was to produce in England an abundant series of attempts, of which we would mention only those of George Dalgarno, Francis Lodwick, and John Wilkins. These inventors of languages, which will be called philosophic and a priori, because they were constructed on the basis of a given philosophical view of the world, no longer aimed merely at converting the infidel or recovering that mystic communion with God that distinguished the perfect language of Adam but rather at fostering commercial exchange, colonial expansion, and the diffusion of science. It is no accident that most of these attempts were linked to the work of the Royal Society in London, and many of the results—apparent failures—of these utopists contributed to the birth of the new scientific taxonomies.
But this project, even if abundantly stripped of the mystic-religious connotations of earlier centuries, had another feature in common with the yearned-for perfect language of Adam. It was said of Adam that he had given “proper” names to things, the names that the things should have as they expressed their nature. In earlier centuries and still in the heyday of the occult and the kabbalistic speculations of the seventeenth century (consider, above all, Athanasius Kircher), this kinship between names and things was understood in terms of onomatopoeia, on the basis of far-fetched etymologies. To give an idea of the flavor of these ways of thinking, it suffices to quote Estienne Guichard (L’harmomie étymologique des langues, Paris: Le Noir 1606), where, for example, the author shows how from the Hebrew word batar was derived the Latin synonym dividere (147). Shuffling the letters, the word becomes tarab, and from tarab derives the Latin tribus, which then leads to distribuo and finally to dividere. Zacen means “old”; transposing the radicals one gets zanet, whence the Latin senex, and with a subsequent shift of letters comes zanec, whence in Oscan casnar, from which the Latin canus would be derived (247).
In subsequent attempts, the criterion of correspondence, or isomorphism between word and thing, is, by contrast, “compositional”: the semantic atoms are named arbitrarily, but their combination is motivated by the nature of the designated object. This criterion is similar to that followed by chemistry today: calling hydrogen H, oxygen O, and sulphur S is surely arbitrary, but calling water H2O or sulfuric acid H2SO4 is motivated by the chemical nature of these compounds. If either the order or the nature of the symbols were altered, another possible compound would be designated. Naturally this language is universal because, while each people indicates water with a different linguistic term, all are able to understand and write chemical symbols in the same way.