The Dream of a Perfect Language
Part IV
A lecture presented by Umberto Eco
at
The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America
November 26, 1996
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 la 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.
|