Serendipities: Language and Lunacy

Having struggled to get beyond the first section of this book for what is alarmingly revealed to me by Goodreads as all but a year, and then having completed it in the space of a day or two, my conclusion is this:
this is not a book to read last thing at night, first thing on a sunday morning, when drunk, ill or exhausted, irritated by children, employers or clients, or in any other way distractable from what is without doubt a mental task of no small order.

Eco is rarely light reading and this collection is less so than many of his others. In the right space however and with sufficient resources at hand he is, as always, delightful, hilarious, provocative, illuminating and persuasive.

Umberto Eco is best known for his book, "The Name of the Rose" which was made into a movie starring Sean Connery. He was, however, a literary critic and university professor. For this book, he has his philosopher's hat on.

It is a fascinating collection of five essays about language revised from lectures Eco gave in the 1990s. The lectures can be read separately, but they are related and make a good set. In them, Eco speculates on aspects of language, including the efforts over the ages to search for an original Hebrew, language of Adam; the evolution of language through misunderstandings, conquests and exchange; creation of a universal dictionary (much like the universal language of mathematics). Although there is much to absorb here, show more Eco's arguments are well laid out with broad cultural references, and beautifully written. show less

Somewhere in an earlier Alomodovar film, maybe Flower of the Secret, a character describes a scenario for a film, one which actually A would eventually create as Volver. I really like that, the inclusion. Eco anticipates his Cemetery of Prague with a devilish delight in this one, little surprise as nearly all of PC, outside of the protagonist, is grounded in historical evidence. I liked this dizzying book, though the final section did leave me grasping, if not gasping.

A collection of essays about various historical ideas on the subject of language. The first essay, "The Force of Falsity" is actually about false ideas which have had significant impacts on history and culture in general, but that certainly applies to a lot of the language-related concepts he talks about in the rest of the book. The second, "Languages in Paradise," is mostly about the search for the language supposedly spoken by Adam in the Garden of Eden, with particular attention to what Dante had to say on the subject. Number three, "From Marco Polo to Leibniz," is about European misconceptions about Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chinese pictograms. Number four, "The Language of the Austral Land," looks at the idea of artificial show more languages constructed so as to be self-evidently based on the logic of reality, mainly by means of examining a parody version. And the last, "The Linguistics of Joseph de Maistre" is a detailed takedown of one particular person's mystical view of the origin and evolution of language.

It's kind of an odd little book, really. Eco doesn't seem especially interested in giving a broad overview of his topic, but rather on poking into the specific little corners of it that interest him. It is, on the whole, probably a bit more detailed, dense and scholarly than I'd have preferred. I found that whenever his topic was something I already had some familiarity with, I got a fair bit out of it and appreciated Eco's thoughts and insights, and whenever he touched on subjects I had little knowledge of, I got a little lost. show less

I liked Name of the Rose and Island of the Day Before but I love Foucalts Pendulum.

This is a lovely and wonderous little book.
Peter Bruegel's Tower of Babl on the cover makes it even better.
I bathe in ancient history, origins of language, odd religions, psychic archeology, magick and the occult, and semiotics.
Geurilla ontology.
This book is about the serach for the a priori perfect pre-Adamic language. It used to be assumed that it was Hebrew. Early thinkers thought an infant left completely alone would naturally start speaking Hebrew. It was the language with which God conversed with Adam and the linguistic roots that Adam used to name everything.
It's about the fascinating failures of attempts to reconstruct and establish an show more architectonically perfect system of ideas composed of mutual dependences and strict classifications from the general to the particular.
It would, for instance, solve the librarian's dilemma at where to catalog a book (Dewey s system leaves a lot tobe desired and complimentary books at opposite ends of the library....)
Eco speaks of mentalese, a hopeful proposed language "written in the very convulutions of our brains, capable of supplying the deep structure of every expression in any natural language."
Borges plays with the idea and quotes from the Foucalt's description of the Chinese encyclopedia Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Recognitions":
CLASSIFICATION OF ANIMALS:
-those that belong to the Emperor
-embalmed ones
-those that are trained
-suckling pigs
-mermaids
-fabulous ones
-stray dogs
-those included in the present classification
-those that tremble as if they were mad
-innumerable ones
-those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush
others
-those that have just broken a flower vase
-those that look like flies from far away....

Wow.
Loving it. We are getting closer to a polydimensional encyclopedia with hypertext nowadays.
And Alembert could have been have been talking about Wikipedia hundreds of years ago:
"...a labyrinth, a tortuous path, composed of diverse branches, some of which converge towards a same center...and since departing from it , it is not possible to follow all the paths at once---the choice is determined by the nature of the different spirits..."

Interesting, funny, thoght-provoking, and an excellent translation by my favorite translator of Italian, William Weaver. (Is it too geeky to have a favorite translator? I love Cleary, too.)

BUY, BORROW, or BURN?
BORROW show less

More language than lunacy, some of it almost too academicky, but Eco’s the kind of semiotician we’d like to drink with. Dante, Borges, Prester John, the cage of fundamentalism, god mumbling with an accent.

Jack’s Abby Calyptra Session IPL
Uinta Organic Hazel Amber Wheat

I greatly enjoyed the 'The Force of Falsity' with its many examples of how falsehoods end up have great consequences and historical impact. 'Languages in Paradise' was interesting but I admit to not knowing all of the references Eco made in the essay. I had never been aware of the inconsistency between the story of the Tower of Babel and Genesis 10. The search for the original sacred language is a fascinating concept in itself.