[T]he “effort to realize the idea of the perfect language” is common to all languages, and the business of the linguist is to investigate to what extent and with what means the various languages approach this idea.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, citing Wilhelm von Humboldt in Truth and Method1
A strictly universal language, whatever it may be, will certainly, by necessity and by its natural bent, be both the most enslaved, impoverished, timid, monotonous, uniform, arid, and ugly language ever. It will be incapable of beauty of any type, totally uncongenial to imagination […] the most inanimate, bloodless, and dead [entity], a mere skeleton, a ghost of a language […] it would lack life even if it were written by all and universally understood; indeed it will be deader than the deadest of languages which are no longer either spoken or written.
Giacomo Leopardi, Tutte le opere 2
In this chapter I want to propose a new frame of reference for studying and evaluating the achievements of humanists and scholastics in the Renaissance. I am aware of the long history of debates that have galvanized opinions on most of the issues of the period. Nonetheless, I am encouraged to proceed because it has become increasingly clear to me that the contributions of these two major traditions have been neither rightly understood nor properly evaluated. Research on humanism has emphasized the new departures made by humanists in the fields of language, literature, history and the arts. Research on late scholasticism has focused on the theories of logic or dialectic in the context of the trivium including the auxiliary disciplines of grammar and rhetoric. The rise of Renaissance Studies has encouraged scholars to think beyond disciplinary boundaries and consider the broader implications of the ideas of their favored authors and subjects. In that spirit I want to place the work of three renaissance thinkers—two humanists and one scholastic—within the history covered in Umberto Eco’s The Search for the Perfect Language.3 The humanists are Lorenzo Valla and Juan Luis Vives; the scholastic is Paul of Venice.4 This new framework provides an opportunity to stand back from conventional topics that have divided, and often bedeviled, discussion of the two traditions, and to examine their differences from a fresh perspective. We hope to show that many of the ideas that have been thought to set the two traditions apart in fact point to similarities between them. Areas of mutual disagreement presuppose common interests and the possibility of seeing how the traditions of humanism and scholasticism complement one another.
The chapter has three parts: Part I introduces the concept of “the perfect language” and summarizes its textual, religious and secular background. Part II sketches the ambiance of Eco’s study and then reviews some representative attempts to discover or invent the perfect language. Part III identifies several themes that are relevant to the concept of perfect language in the humanist and scholastic traditions.
In The Search for the Perfect Language Umberto Eco poses the central questions that led medieval and early modern thinkers to search for the perfect language. The European concept of a perfect language originates in the Hebrew Bible’s account of creation and a view about the language that Adam spoke before the dispersal of Noah’s children (Genesis 10) and the confusion of tongues at Babel (Genesis 11). Adam’s language is assumed to have been a clear and truthful expression of the natures of things. Eco examines more than two dozen major attempts from medieval to modern times to discover a language like Adam’s, a perfect language. He cites or alludes to still more dozens of similar projects little known outside the field of historical linguistics. Although Eco’s book has been received as a history of early modern linguistics, it has some notable omissions. Some of these result from Eco’s confessed passion for antique books on imaginary, artificial, mad and occult languages that comprise his “Bibliotheca Semiologica Curiosa, Lunatica, Magica et Pneumatica”—a “mainstay,” he tells us, in writing the present book.5 He devotes a great deal of discussion to fringe movements and oddities but neglects to mention several thinkers of major importance. Because searches for the perfect language flourished in the Renaissance, Eco elaborates the views of Pico della Mirandola, Marsilius Ficino, Nicholas of Cusa and Giordano Bruno, but he alludes to other humanist and scholastic thinkers only incidentally. With the exception of one reference to Roger Bacon, who believed that all languages share a universal grammatical core, he chides scholastics for presiding over an “ossified,” “artificial” idiom of Latin in contrast with Dante’s Tuscan vernacular.6 Briefly acknowledging that Dante wrote De vulgari eloquentia in the scholastic Latin style, he ignores the notable contributions of scholastics to language theory and the semiotic fields of syntax and semantics. He cites humanists for their fascination with an obscure text on hieroglyphics and for the recovery of Hebrew. However, he omits their restoration of classical Latin to replace medieval Latin as a scholarly language in the search for “the perfect language.”7 Eco later refers to “the years between the crisis of scholasticism and the beginning of the Renaissance”; however, he nowhere discloses the nature of an alleged “crisis” or its effects on the Renaissance.8 Admittedly, the scope of Eco’s study is vast, and the theories he discusses are quite complex. Moreover, he explores them in considerable detail with characteristic originality and insight. In light of these virtues, the limitations of the study are understandable and most omissions excusable. He examines “true and proper” languages that embody perfection in some important sense: namely, (1) original or mystically perfect languages, for example, Hebrew, Egyptian or Chinese, (2) reconstructed languages, (3) artificially constructed languages that exemplify perfections in (a) structure or function (a priori philosophical languages of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), (b) universality (a posteriori international languages of the nineteenth century) and (c) practicality (polygraphies). Finally, he treats magic languages “whose perfection is extolled on account of either their mystic effability or their initiatic secrecy.”9 Eco excludes a number of languages, for example, (a) dreamlike, fictitious and glottomanic languages as well as bricolage, pidgin or natural tongues and jargons created to facilitate communication between linguistically distinct cultures, and (b) formal languages such as logic except as they relate to 3a above. Dante’s “illustrious vernacular” is the starting point for examining all of the selected types of language. In this context, it seems reasonable to consider both the literary Latin of the humanists and the formalized Latin of the scholastics as candidates for “perfect” languages. Humanists such as Valla clearly thought that classical Latin was a perfect language. Vives even declares it to be so.10 Scholastic Latin is more difficult to classify. Since it enabled students who spoke vernacular dialects to learn the technical languages of university instruction and research it might be regarded as a pidgin language and thus excluded from Eco’s study. However, it was also a formal language used to analyze other languages, and that qualifies it as an a priori philosophical language. Finally, insofar as it facilitated translation between Latin and the vernaculars it served as a “parameter language”—one used to mediate between two or more languages. In Chapter 6 we will offer evidence to support the thesis that scholastic logic performed these functions. In Part III of this chapter we offer some additional reasons for including both humanism and scholasticism within the framework of Eco’s survey.
Although the origin of language is shrouded in mystery, anthropological studies of the emergence of human cultures normally account for it, just as modern linguistics explains it, in a variety of ways.11 The mythologies tell us that language is a gift bestowed by a god, such as the deities Bhraspati or Vac in the Rig Veda.12 Traditional European scholarship on the origin of language has taken the Hebrew book of Genesis as a starting point, and that is where Eco begins.
The story of God’s gift of language to Adam is familiar. It is mysteriously folded within the tale of Eve’s creation.13
Yahweh God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him a helpmate.’ So from the soil Yahweh God fashioned all the wild beasts and all the birds of heaven. These he brought to the man to see what he would call them; each one was to bear the name that the man would give it. The man gave names to all the cattle, all the birds of heaven and all the wild beasts. But no helpmate suitable for man was found for him. So Yahweh God made the man fall into a deep sleep.14
When Adam is said to “name” the animals, his activity seems to have involved more than simple labeling. Some have gone so far as to say that Adam knew the essential natures of each thing, so that the words he applied would faithfully represent what each thing is. But this seems to stretch the text. Minimally, Adam appears to have been capable of uttering in the presence of the appropriate animals names like “lion,” “elephant,” and so on, or truthful sentences such as “This is a lion,” “This is an elephant.” Since no other human language user yet existed, it is questionable why Adam would have engaged in this monumental linguistic act. Nonetheless, he performed other linguistic acts such as speaking with God and understanding what God said to him. This included the instruction that “he may eat of all of the trees in the garden with one exception”: that he “not eat fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” Once Eve had been created, she also spoke Adam’s language and used it in her fatal conversation with the serpent.
When God returned to the garden he found Adam hiding and ashamed of his nakedness. Knowing that his command had been disobeyed, God reviled the serpent; then he foretold the future of humans. Because of her sin, Eve and her children would give birth in pain, and she would be subject to Adam. Because of his sin, Adam would toil on the earth and sweat his brow until he would return to the earth from whence he came. Adam is barred from eating fruit from the tree of life lest he gain immortality, and he and Eve are cast out of the Garden of Eden. Yahweh God clearly spells out the consequences of their fateful act.
The biblical narrative continues to tell about the descendants of Adam and Eve, the early Patriarchs as well as Noah and the flood. Noah had only three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth. However, these fellows were quite prolific, and in time the earth was populated with their offspring. All went well until the children of Noah reached a plain in the land of Shinar. There they built a town and a tower that would reach up to heaven.
Now Yahweh came down to see the town and the tower that the sons of man had built. “So they are all a single people with a single language!” said Yahweh. “This is but the start of their undertakings! There will be nothing too hard for them to do. Come let us go down and confuse their language on the spot so that they can no longer understand one another.” Yahweh scattered them thence over the whole face of the earth, and they stopped building the town. It was named Babel therefore, because there Yahweh confused the language of the whole earth.15
How is the confusion of tongues to be interpreted? At the very least, it implies that the languages spoken by some workers on the tower could not be understood by others. Their inability to understand one another impaired their work, and the project could not be completed. Eco detects an inconsistency between Genesis chapters 10 and 11.16 Chapter 10 describes how Noah’s offspring were spread across the land. Japheth’s children were settled “according to their countries and each of their languages, according to their tribes and their nations.” Ham’s sons were dispersed “according to their tribes and languages, [and] according to their countries and nations.” And Shem’s sons were also distributed “according to their tribes and languages, and according to their countries and nations.” Thus, Noah’s sons propagated tribes that migrated to distant lands and each tribe was settled “according to its own language.” Since there was a multiplication of languages before Babel, Eco asks why the confusion of tongues should have been considered a punishment. Clearly, the existence of many languages before Babel was not a problem. Despite all of the special languages spoken by the offspring of Japheth, Ham and Shem, everyone understood the speech of his neighbors. After Babel things were different.
In the early 1920s Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Whorf proposed an influential theory about human language.17 They claimed that every language is the result of common agreement and that “its terms are absolutely obligatory” for all of its users. The language that we speak instills in our minds a linguistic system that compels us to organize our concepts in determinate ways. In a word, language causes thought. Given that persons in different cultures speak different languages, they have different mindsets, experiences and expressions that are not intelligible to those who speak other languages. In this way the different languages are rendered “incommensurable” with one another. As a consequence the languages are not translatable and communication between people who speak them is impossible. Citing Benjamin Whorf and Willard Quine, Eco refers to their “rather extreme” thesis about the nature of human languages: “[T]here are experiences, recognized by other cultures and capable of being expressed in their languages, which are neither recognized by our own, nor even capable of being expressed in our languages.”18 And later: “[E]ach language [is] a ‘holistic’ universe expressing the world in a way that could never be wholly translated into any other language.”19 Although Eco’s own view of linguistic relativism is not entirely clear, near the end of the book he states as a “fact” that “different languages present the world in different ways, sometimes mutually incommensurable.”20 I submit that the principle of the incommensurability of human languages is relevant to the biblical accounts of language. In Genesis 10 we have multilingualism, but the many languages were “commensurable.” Despite differences of culture, mental outlook and experience, those who spoke them could communicate with one another and their languages were inter-translatable. In Genesis 11 the languages became “incommensurable.” Whatever caused the disruption, after Babel people could not understand their neighbors’ speech. The fact that human languages became at that point incommensurable was the central consequence of Babel and the principal significance of the confusio linguarum. Later thinkers sought “the perfect language” that could mend that wound.
In addition to overcoming a major obstacle to human communication, early Christians had even greater reason to be concerned about the confusion of tongues. They believed that a Holy Spirit facilitates the expression of faith through language. If human communication were in jeopardy, the faith could be neither shared nor propagated. Of all the major world religions Christianity has experienced the greatest dissemination of ideas across diverse linguistic cultures. This phenomenon is no accident. The New Testament account of the gift of tongues at Pentecost was believed to be both an antidote to the confusion of tongues in the Old Testament and an anticipation of the spread of Christianity throughout a multilingual world.
When Pentecost day came round, they had all met in one room, when suddenly they heard what sounded like a powerful wind from heaven, the noise of which filled the entire house in which they were sitting; and something appeared to them that seemed like tongues of fire; these separated and came to rest on the head of each of them. They were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak foreign languages as the Spirit gave them the gift of speech.
Now there were devout men living in Jerusalem from every nation, and at this sound they all assembled, each one bewildered to hear these men speaking his own language. They were amazed and astonished. “Surely,” they said, “all these men speaking are Galileans? How does it happen that each of us hears them in his own native language? Parthians, Medes and Elamites; people from Mesopotamia, Judaea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Lybia round Cyrene; as well as visitors from Rome—Jews and proselytes alike—Cretans and Arabs; we hear them preaching in our own language about the marvels of God.” Everyone was amazed and unable to explain it; they asked one another what it all meant. Some, however, laughed it off. “They have been drinking too much new wine,” they said.21
Despite the last disparaging remark, the text records that Peter went on to preach quite soberly about the teachings of Jesus, his death and resurrection. Surprisingly, Eco does not cite the event at Pentecost until the very last pages of his book; yet the experience at Pentecost was highly symbolic and had great significance for later Christian thought about the nature and possibilities of human language. Eco suggests two interpretations of the words that the apostles spoke on that day: gossolalia and xenoglossia. The former is “an ecstatic language that all could understand.”22 The latter is simply polyglotism, the capacity to speak in different languages; and “since all of the apostles were understood at once it may have been a sort of mystic service of simultaneous translation.”23 Eco’s characterization of the apostle’s language as “ecstatic” and “mystical” is questionable since the text goes on to say that the speakers performed rather ordinary communicative functions. On the former view that the apostles were speaking a kind of babble, the gift of tongues would have been of merely ephemeral value, of little use for expressing belief, a silly event. The latter reading that recognizes translation and the possibility of reliable communication between speakers of diverse languages not only accords with the text: it anticipates the entire course of medieval learning. Whichever interpretation one prefers, and apart from claims of divine intervention, the apostles were able to surmount the differences between languages: somehow the incommensurability of languages had been overcome. Medieval culture was built on a rich inheritance from the ancient world. The religious traditions of Judaism, Islam and Christianity thrived on a wealth of translated materials, and all of the sources of learning were ancient texts in foreign tongues. The glosses, expositions and commentaries on those texts prepared the way for later practices in the art of translation. The thirteenth-century surge in translation of ancient materials into the vernaculars enabled those languages to supplant Latin in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. With the voyages of exploration translation became indispensable to cross-cultural communication and the development of commerce in the early modern world. Its effects remain today in computer languages and the world-wide reach of the internet. For all of these reasons it is not surprising that late medieval and early renaissance scholars joined the search for the perfect language: they sought to recover or invent a language that was pure and truthful in the way of Adam’s original tongue.
It is not possible, or even necessary, to review here all of the projects that sought to discover “the perfect language.” For that readers should consult Eco’s fascinating and comprehensive book. In the next few paragraphs we can only sketch the ambiance of those efforts before focusing on the strains of thought that are most relevant to understanding the contributions of humanists and scholastics to this tradition. They are: (1) Dante’s late medieval views about language, (2) early modern searches for the perfect language and (3) the rise of a priori philosophical languages. Although Eco’s final verdict is that most, if not all, of the efforts to realize “the dream” of the perfect language failed, the failures are instructive. We will note them especially as they pertain to the views of humanists and scholastics.
As in his other works Eco adopts a basic model for the study of language derived from Louis Hjelmslev.24 This model has certain virtues especially in relation to linguistics. It distinguishes between a content-plane and an expression-plane. The content-plane of a language comprises the normal units of signification or meaning; the expression-plane comprises the actual words that a particular language uses to express content. These words make up the bulk of the lexicon. Within each plane the model recognizes three factors—form, substance and continuum. For a natural language the expression form includes the phonological system, the lexicon and the rules of syntax. These elements produce the concrete utterances and inscriptions. The model posits a parallel three-part structure for the content-plane. The content-continuum comprises everything that humans can conceive or talk about. The content-form organizes the content-continuum in a particular way. The content-substance is just the sense that speakers give to an utterance or inscription on the expression-plane. This model is useful in accounting for natural languages that have interpreted content; however, it is less useful for languages with uninterpreted expressions, such as artificial languages that have place-holders for content-words. It is also needlessly complex and obscures some distinctions that are important for a comparison of humanist and scholastic approaches to language.
Fortunately, Eco also resorts to a second model in commenting on particular languages: that is, semiotics that distinguishes between the semantical, syntactical and pragmatic aspects of language.25 Semantics concerns those parts of a language related to meaning, signification and truth. Syntax treats the structure and organization of a language, and pragmatics deals with the ways in which a language is used. Consistent with both models, we distinguish between the form and the content of language. By “form” we mean whatever factors structure a language and make up its syntax. We understand “syntax” broadly to include not only the surface grammar that is described by traditional grammarians but also the logical structure that is examined by logicians and linguists. By “content” we intend whatever the words uttered by a language user signify. Normally, these comprise the majority of words in the standard dictionaries of a language. While we agree in principle with the idea that languages constitute holistic systems—that is, that a language can express an understanding (or misunderstanding) of the world—we question whether languages “organize the totality of our vision of the world.”26 We suspend judgment about the Whorfian hypothesis that languages, at bottom, are “incommensurable” and thus untranslatable.
At the end of the thirteenth century Roger Bacon expounded his theory of signs, and paused to reflect on the fact that someone at some point lays down (imposit) the meanings of words in a language. His subject is artificial languages, but the same holds for those who first imposed the words of a natural language.
But if someone objects that not just anyone ought to impose names but only the wise, I reply that there are two reasons for imposing names: sometimes it occurs for the composition of the language of some dialect, and then it could not come about just by anyone but by an expert in the art of imposing, since it is necessary that one first fabricate an unlimited number of non-signifying vocal sounds, paying attention to how many ways two letters can be combined, how many ways three, thus up to six, because the largest syllable is made up of six letters, e.g. “branch” (stirps), and this is to be seen with respect to all the letters of the alphabet so that one may discover all the primitive words (primitivas), all of which must be monosyllables by nature because the principles (principia) are minimal in quantity, and these perhaps would suffice. Next he would form derivatives and make them two-syllable, which perhaps would suffice if they were multiplied as much as possible. Next, once there was an unlimited supply of vocal sounds, it is necessary that the first vocal sounds be imposed for primary things, and the second ones, namely, the derivatives, be imposed for secondary things, which are connected (annexae) to the first, and such a construction of a language is not just for anyone but for the expert. For I indeed concede: few are the languages constructed in this way by means of the sincere art of orthography, wherein all the things were observed which are owed to a language in its most powerful (potissimo) state. The Latin language falls far short of this art, and so it is difficult to speak with facility (prompte) unless a person use[s] it from youth. But sometimes languages are entirely constructed by art, e.g., those of the ancient Saxons and Angles and the like, and they are very concise languages because of the fact that all the elements that pertain to the art are observed in them. For all the primitive elements are monosyllables and the derivative things are disyllables, and so [such languages] are easy to construct, but there is some difficulty with respect to the substance of the sound to be generated. I say, therefore, that to impose in such a way that an artificial language results is not a task for just anyone but for the wise.27
Bacon’s text offers a prelude of things to come in the search for the perfect language. His vision of mathematics as prior to all of the sciences as well as grammar and logic anticipated an ideal of later thinkers who sought a universal grammar underlying all particular languages.28 His discrimination of the primitive units of a language, their composition from simples to complexes and their derivative forms, is a preview of hierarchical language systems that developed over the next 700 years. These ideas along with those of speculative grammar and the logica modernorum were part of the intellectual culture in which Dante articulated his bold new theory of language.29
As the greatest poet of the Latin Middle Ages, Dante’s best-known poem was written in the vernacular, and he is, perhaps, the strongest defender of the intrinsic value of vernacular languages. Although Dante argues on behalf of his own Tuscan dialect, his claims are general and clearly intended to support the primacy of all vernaculars. Dante’s views about the origin of human language gave rise to later controversies between humanists and scholastics.30 Dante was steeped in the writings of the best Latin authors and knew well the Latin that became the language of the Church, the university and the professions. In the Il Convivio Dante praises classical Latin for its nobility, virtue and beauty.31 First, it is nobler than the vernaculars because it has a permanent form and is not subject to change. Vernaculars by contrast are unstable and change according to the vagaries of human taste. Second, it is more virtuous than the vernaculars because it operates according to its proper nature and performs its function of expressing the concepts of the mind. Moreover, Latin can express many ideas that the vernaculars cannot. Finally, Latin is more beautiful than the vernaculars because its parts are in proper harmony with one another. This is reasonable since art has created Latin, whereas usage produces the vernaculars. Latin’s constancy is secured by the art of grammar. By contrast, the vernacular is simply raw usage of a language without formal grammar and is, therefore, prior to art.32
Having extolled Latin in Il Convivio, in De vulgari eloquentia Dante argues for the superiority of vernacular languages over Latin.33 His primary reasons are the following. Latin must be learned from study, few people can become proficient in it, and most of those who master it do so for personal gain and ignoble motives. Latin is a dead language; vernaculars are living languages. For that reason Latin is “artificial,” whereas vernaculars are “natural.” Where ancestry and social status lead to the cultivation of Latin, people speak vernaculars out of the natural nobility of the human soul. Vernaculars offer each person an opportunity to achieve nobility through the practice of moral virtue regardless of social station. Vernaculars are not produced by art; they originate in human nature, and that is the basis of their superior value. Vernaculars grow organically. They are the first languages that people speak at birth—our “mother tongues.” Dante may have come to appreciate natural language from his knowledge of Aquinas who taught that it is preferable to know through natural means—that is, by perception and reason—than second-hand on the word of someone else. Aquinas gives priority to knowledge acquired naturally over that derived from authority. Knowing something on the basis of belief is second best to knowing it first-hand by one’s own natural powers.34 Vernaculars develop in the changing lives of ordinary people subject to the vagaries of time, location and circumstance. Their variety is due to the changeable character of human life. Dante’s admiration for vernacular languages was not uncritical. He gives many examples of Italian vernaculars that are harsh or imbalanced, and he argues that literary vernaculars should be refined through imitation of the best classical authors. In time, the art of grammar will produce a lexicon and a syntax giving the vernacular a stability and regularity comparable with that of classical Latin. Dante’s ideal for a refined Italian vernacular has four properties. It is illustrious, cardinal, courtly (aulic) and curial. A vernacular is illustrious when well-trained poets have weeded out the unseemly aspects of its dialects, have enhanced its power to persuade and have gained honor and glory through their writing. A vernacular is cardinal because it is perfected by usage among the leaders of the society who, in turn, influence popular speech. It is courtly because it is fit to be used in the ruling quarters of the land. Even Italy with no single government can support a language spoken daily within the common court of reason. It is curial because it embodies a just balance as in a system of justice. Guided by these standards, Dante set about transforming his favored Tuscan dialect into the elegant language of the Comedia.
On the question of original language Dante believed that Adam received neither a particular language, namely, Hebrew, nor a general faculty of language.35 Rather Adam’s gift was a grasp and command of linguistic form (forma locutionis). This idea calls for interpretation. Eco translates a crucial passage from Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia (1303 CE):
[I]t is precisely this form (the forma locutionis) that all speakers would make use of in their language had it not been dismembered through the fault of human presumption, as I shall demonstrate below. By this linguistic form Adam spoke: by this linguistic form spoke all of his descendants until the construction of the Tower of Babel—which is interpreted as the “tower of confusion”: this was the linguistic form that the sons of Eber, called Hebrews after him, inherited. It remained to them alone after the confusion, so that our Saviour, who because of the human side of his nature had to be born of them, could use a language not of confusion but of grace. It was thus the Hebrew tongue that was constructed by the first being endowed with speech.36
Commenting on this passage, Eco claims that the original gift was a set of principles from which a language could be made. Steven Botterill’s translation of the sentence before this passage relates form even more closely to the parts of language:
Returning, then, to my subject, I say that a certain form of language was created by God along with the first soul: I say “form” with reference both to the words used for things, and to the construction of words, and to the arrangement of the construction …37
On the basis of this passage Eco claims that Dante was influenced by speculative grammar and may have meant something like the rules of a universal grammar. Speculative grammarians were also called modistae because they emphasized the ways that language signifies (modi significandi). The modistae taught that words primarily signify thoughts and that sentences are expressions of complex thoughts. They affirmed a strict correspondence between the signifying functions of thought (modi intelligendi or cognoscendi), language (modi significandi) and things (modi essendi). Since these ideas were known in Bologna, Professor Maria Corti has argued that they influenced Dante.38 Because it challenged traditional grammar, speculative grammar was highly controversial in both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Humanists who denied that grammar is prescribed by reason and affirmed the primacy of usage were especially critical of it.
Whatever Dante may have borrowed from the modists, he expressly adopts Aquinas’s principles of scriptural interpretation. His exposition of Il Convivio, tract II, expounds the fourfold senses of scripture, and affirms the primacy of the literal or historical sense of language in determining the truth of allegory.39 But the logic of the literal sense of language was the main subject-matter of scholastic logic (logica modernorum) in Dante’s world. In the Comedia, Dante refers to Peter of Spain whose Summulae logicales were known throughout Italy. His tract on syncategorematic words that give language its structure and form could well have been the source for Dante’s idea of linguistic form. In sum, Dante aspired to craft an “illustrious vernacular” that could express universal truth and be, in effect, a “perfect” language.
Eco goes considerably beyond Maria Corti’s controversial thesis. He suggests that the principles of universal grammar enabled Adam to structure the lexicon and the syntax of the first language: the forma locutionis was a “sort of innate mechanism, in the same terms as Chomsky’s generative grammar.”40 Later he writes even more boldly, “[D]ante’s forma locutionis is not a language but the universal matrix for all language.”41 But a matrix for all languages has a syntactical core as can be seen in Chomsky’s concept of “deep structure” as opposed to “surface structure.” In other words, generative grammar requires a logic and a conception of logical form. Logical form is also central to scholastic theories of language, and this would be evidence that scholastic logic influenced Dante.42
On the European continent strong religious reasons often motivated those who searched for the perfect language. Attempts to recover the lost language of Adam gained momentum as problems arose in the late medieval Church. Thinkers sought a language that could help mend relations between the Eastern and Western divisions of Christendom. The first European who proposed a perfect language was the Catalan philosopher Raymond Llull. He was driven by a religious motive to convert the Saracens to Christianity. Llull’s Ars Magna is a work of great originality. It presents a language that can be generated systematically from a set of primitive predicates. The system of rules he called the combinatorial art (ars combinatoria). A basic alphabet of nine letters from B through K less J are assigned to basic predicates of two kinds, “absolute” and “relative.” These are, in turn, correlated with subjects of the predicates, corresponding virtues and vices as well as a set of related questions. Possible combinations of these factors are systematically represented in four figures. By simple mechanical manipulations of letters one can produce a very large number of sentences. The goal is to generate as many combinations of the elementary units as possible and then to decide which of the resulting sentences are demonstrably true. Llull’s system attracted many admirers in the Renaissance—for example, Nicholas of Cusa and Giordano Bruno. Llull’s combinatorial rule—the idea that the meaning of a whole expression is a function of the meaning of its parts—is an important principle in most modern theories of language. However, his art was applied to the small number of predicates that he selected, and hence lacks the universality and completeness necessary for a perfect language. Despite the large number of sentences generable from the elements, Llull arbitrarily rejected sentences that he believed to be false, and for that reason his system fails to obtain the degree of formality that is needed to fulfill its purpose. Not surprisingly, several scholars have concluded that his system has little relevance to the history of formal logic.43
Spanish and Provençal cabbalists including Abraham Abulafia led a second stream of efforts to invent a perfect language based on the mystical number four. In the Jewish tradition the tetragrammaton was a vocalization and re-combination of the Hebrew alphabet to form the Hebrew word “YHWH.”44 Because it could be manipulated in a multiplicity of ways to produce strings of intelligible discourse and presumably true sentences, Hebrew was regarded by Cabbalists and renaissance Llullists as the perfect language. The existence of the Hebrew language from ancient times and a belief that Adam spoke it gave rise to the “monogenetic hypothesis”—the notion that all human languages descend from a common root. This idea has had both supporters and detractors. It dominated the earlier searches for the perfect language. Its plausibility was challenged most strongly by research in anthropology. The voyages of exploration encountered peoples whose languages had no apparent connection with ancient Hebrew. Thus, the question: How can Genesis explain their origin? Isaac Peyrera (Isaac de La Peyrère, a Swiss Christian with a Murano Jewish name) had an answer to this puzzle. His pre-Adamite theory asserted that humans existed before Adam, and that Genesis tells not of the origin of the entire human race but only of the Jewish people.45 Thus, one can question whether Adam’s language was the root of all human languages. Eco notes that the tenth-century Islamic scholar al-Maqdisi had already affirmed the existence of races prior to Adam.46 In fact, the theory traces back to ancient times.47 As we will show, the question of whether human languages are genetically one or many is relevant to humanist and scholastic approaches to language. Eco examines, in turn, the iconographic languages of Egyptian hieroglyphics, Chinese ideographics, magic languages (for example, those of Paracelsus and the Rosicrucians) as well as sign languages developed for the deaf. To these we can add Cistercian sign language used in the medieval cloister. Each of these languages was thought to embody some special wisdom about the nature of things and hence claimed status as a perfect language. Polygraphic languages symbolized directly the nature of things and were thought to express ancient wisdom.48 Athanasius Kircher, whose scholarship spanned Egyptian hieroglyphics, Chinese and the secret language of Hermes Tresmegistus, combined mathematics and hieroglyphics into a code that was later known to Leibniz. Finally, Eco canvasses the works of mystics, magicians and mathematicians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that recognized the unlimited nature of human language as a vehicle for expressing the infinite potential of human thought. With these thinkers there was an important shift in approach to the study of language. Galileo had observed that the great book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. Others would see that mathematics also held a key to the nature of human language. Increasingly, attention focused not on actual languages but on notational systems that could represent the elementary units and syntactical structures of language. “Unlike Llull, Mersenne, Guldin, Clavius and others [w]ere no longer calculating upon particular concepts [that is, predicates in a real or imagined language] but rather upon simple alphabetic sequences, pure elements of expression with no inherent meaning, controlled by no orthodoxy other than the limits of mathematics itself.”49 To see how that idea grew, we will need to discuss what Eco calls “a priori philosophical languages.” The projects of George Dalgarno, John Wilkins and Francis Lodwick pointed the way toward a tradition of mathematical logic that continues from Leibniz through the present day. Finally, since Eco’s work is part of The Making of Europe series, he concludes with a survey of international auxiliary languages, so-called a posteriori languages such as Esperanto.50
Dante’s identification of perfect language with “the illustrious vernacular” initiated the modern search for the perfect language among the vernaculars. Following the broad range of efforts from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries outlined above, it was left to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers to bring the venture to a new level of investigation. Where Dante and other early modern thinkers gave priority to natural languages, later thinkers sought to develop artificial languages that could serve as a universal medium for rational discourse and thus be considered “perfect.” Eco finds the inspiration for this pursuit in several sources. In the sixteenth century François Viète devised the first systematic notation for mathematics by allowing alphabetic letters to stand for both known constants and for variables known and unknown.51 Inspired by Viète, Descartes formulated geometric problems algebraically and invented modern analytic geometry. As part of his program to reform philosophy he proposed a new universal mathematics (mathesis universalis). This discipline “should contain the primary rudiments of human reason and extend to the discovery of truths in any field whatever.”52 Despite early interest in artificial languages on the part of Continental thinkers, Eco marks the beginning of work on a priori philosophical languages in Britain in the seventeenth century. As we will show later, a logic containing elements of such a language developed there as an accessory to a new physics and migrated to Italy in the late fourteenth century. Originally a secular movement distanced from religion in England, it later regained a religious purpose on the Continent in the philosophy of G.W. Leibniz. British thinkers identified Latin with the Roman Church and were motivated to find an alternative to Latin as a universal language. They also saw the benefits of a universal language to promote British commerce. Francis Bacon had criticized the ambiguities inherent in natural languages and pointed the way toward a new language that could be used in the cultivation of science. He proposed a basic alphabet of characters that would signify precisely concepts of the mind. Jan Komensky (Comenius), a Hussite reformer who settled in England, also criticized the ambiguities of ordinary usage and advocated a universal artificial language. In the seventeenth century several thinkers assembled and organized the content words of a language that would be “perfect” in the sense of unambiguous, universal and true.
Francis Lodwick, George Dalgarno and John Wilkins are the leading British thinkers who attempted to formulate artificial universal languages on the basis of content-words. All employed a methodology inspired by Llull. They first identified a set of primitive concepts from which all other concepts could be derived. Second, they organized the primitives into systems that model the organization of content. Third, they devised a catalog of “characters” to signify the semantical primitives. In this context the word “character” has a special meaning. A character is an arbitrary sign that indicates unequivocally a discrete semantical primitive.53 Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning and De augmentis scientiarum contrasted conventional alphabetic expressions with “real characters.” The former represent letters or words. The latter stand for things or notions and are comparable, he believed, to units in the ideographic languages of the Far East. A “character” behaves like a notational symbol in modern mathematics or logic. When combined according to standard rules of deduction (the combinatory art) these primitives would yield the desired sentential expressions. Despite the fact that these constructed languages resemble natural languages and contain many of their features, they were intended to be independent autonomous systems. Because selection of primitive terms entails considerable philosophical speculation, Eco calls them “a priori philosophical languages.”54 The systems of characters are precise notational representations that offer linguistic maps of whatever can be thought or spoken.
While these thinkers knew of Aristotle’s classificatory systems (that is, categories and predicables) and the method of dichotomous division, they pursued their projects in diverse ways. Francis Lodwick sought to reduce all content words to verbs or action words, and he organized all questions of meaning around that principle. In this regard his work resembles that of ancient Sanskrit grammarians who traced nouns to verbal roots. George Dalgarno’s Ars Signorum (1661) arranged the primitives under “being” and then divided being into substance, accidents and artifacts; these were further divided into genus and species. All of these systems faced the problem of selecting the primitive concepts. Where “primitive” is defined as “simple,” the problem is how to decide the appropriate level of simplicity. Dalgarno limited the basic general terms to 17, yet his effort to classify and subdivide artifacts as well as accidents led him to some inconvenient consequences. He discovered that the ultimate species numbered between 4,000 and 10,000. The fact that individuals have an indefinite number of accidents further complicated an already unwieldy system. The project to construct a language on the basis of its content-words was proving difficult if not impossible. Nonetheless, Dalgarno fashioned a precise system of characters to represent the elements of human discourse, and by a method of derivation he generated basic sentences about objects in the world.
John Wilkins’ Essay toward a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668) presents the best example of an “a priori philosophical language.” In several hundred pages Wilkins assembles 40 genera and 251 types of differences (differentia). From this stock he is able to generate names of 2,030 species of real-world objects. Wilkins’ methodology is flawed because he intermingles dichotomous division (that is, a genus divided into two opposing species) of substances with multiple division of accidents, and, as Eco observes, “the whole system begins to spin out of control.”55 Like other theorists, Wilkins borrows some taxonomic systems from biology, and it becomes clear that his subdivisions are often dictated by mnemonic efficiency rather than standards of biological observation. One critic claimed that Wilkins lumped together pre-scientific taxonomies and folk taxonomy. Another commented that Wilkins had confused classification with division. Eco gives an extensive critique of Wilkins’s methodology and in the end declares that it fails to do what Wilkins intended, namely, to secure human knowledge of the natures of things: “We should, by learning the Character (precise sign) and the Names of things, be instructed likewise in their Natures.”56 The failure of Wilkins’s artificial language shows the difficulties inherent in constructing a language on the basis of its content-words. This problem beset all such efforts from Llull to Wilkins. Although he admired some of the projects that we have described, and even tried several of his own, Leibniz discovered that a language cannot be erected on content-words alone. Nor, indeed, are content-words even a primary consideration. Problems in this approach to language occur at every level, including the selection and classification of primitive terms, the method of derivation and the ultimate subjects of the entire linguistic system. It is important to establish a definite set of primitives, but how are these to be selected? If one takes “simplicity” to be the standard of selection, how can one know when one has arrived at the simplest term? Every concept admits of further analysis and, if that is so, it is plainly not possible to arrive at a single, ultimate set of them. Concerning the primary subjects of predication, a similar problem arises. Every individual is composed of an indefinite number of accidental features; thus, it is impossible to determine at what point, or to what extent, the predicates generated by the system apply. Finally, as noted above, methods of derivation differ according to the principle of difference one adopts. It is impossible to say whether a rule of dichotomous or multiple division is more appropriate for any given genus. How should one apply a principle of difference, and which differences between things in the same genus are essential? But there is a deeper problem. The signification or meaning of a content-word cannot be decided in isolation. A dictionary definition records how a word has been, or is being, used. To determine what a word means at a given time and place a speaker must use the word in a sentence that can be understood within a larger context of sentences that the speaker admits. Circumstances of place and time are, of course, relevant to the meaning and truth-conditions of all of these sentences. But the content-words are not the most important part of a language. The logical words structure sentences and determine the logical syntax of a language. One may proceed in a language without knowing the meaning or definition of each and every content-word. It is often sufficient to simply mark the places of a content-word without understanding it. But one cannot proceed with an argument or develop a narrative on a given subject without the use of logical-words.
Leibniz also recognized the futility of constructing an artificial language based on a fixed set of primitive terms. During the course of his brilliant career Leibniz attempted to construct a lingua philosophica (also called lingua rationalis or lingua universalis).57 This is an artificial language designed to represent the structure of human thought “perfectly” or at least more perfectly than existing languages. He saw that the content-words of human language are inexhaustible and that any effort to contain them in a finite system would fail. Thus, his language gives priority to the syntactical components of language and uses place-holders for content-words. François Viète’s invention of a precise notational system for mathematics had greatly accelerated progress in that discipline, and Leibniz sought to find the characters or signs—an alphabet of thought—that could express all thoughts as accurately as arithmetical signs represent numbers. Once thoughts could be expressed unequivocally in written symbols, the path of reasoning would be perceptible to the senses and deduction would be mechanical. Philosophical disputes would be unnecessary. Should a difference of opinion arise, the parties would simply recast their views in the lingua philosophica and proceed to calculate their way to a resolution. Because he initiated the idea of using artificial symbols for both logical constants and individual variables, Leibniz is considered the founder of modern symbolic logic. By extending the idea of calculation beyond mathematics into every area of human thought, he is also considered the founder of mathematical logic. Thus, Leibniz begins to realize Descartes’s ideal of a mathesis universalis. He initiates a modern tradition that continues through the work of figures such as George Boole, Augustus de Morgan, Charles Peirce and Ernest Schroeder. Giuseppe Peano and Gottlob Frege furthered this tradition from the side of mathematics. In the early twentieth century Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead and Ludwig Wittgenstein consolidated the results of the earlier tradition. In the later twentieth century Rudolph Carnap, Alfred Tarski, W.V.O. Quine, Noam Chomsky and Donald Davidson showed how formal logic applies to the analysis of ordinary or natural language.
In this section we will reflect on three themes from Parts I and II that bear on a consideration of “the perfect language” in the humanist and scholastic traditions. Although scholars in both traditions believed that their favored languages were “perfect” in some sense, they had different standards of perfection, and these need to be examined and evaluated. While both thought that their languages were universal, they were well aware that not everyone spoke either classical or scholastic Latin. Just how did their languages exemplify the property of universality? Finally, if the perfect language can be found, a problem would remain: namely, how is it related to other languages? This raises the problem of communicability between languages, and the possibility of translation. Since these themes from the modern search for the perfect language recur in the following chapters, some discussion of them is in order.
Martin Davies has aptly described humanism as “a style of approach to the life of the mind.”58 Lorenzo Valla was dedicated to a vision of classical Latin as the foundation of Western civilization and as a major factor in the formation of the Western mind. Lodi Nauta declares: “[F]or Valla classical Latin is the perfect vehicle for the development of arts, sciences, law, literature, and communication …”59 Other commentators have been equally effusive about Valla’s vision of Latin. David Marsh: “In the preface to the first Book [of the Elegantiae] Valla draws a parallel between the Roman Empire and the Latin language, insisting on the superior cultural and historical importance of the language as the durable basis of Western civilization.”60 Ann Moss: “Valla gives to the high culture of western Europe an inalienable linguistic basis, and that basis is the Latin of ancient Rome: ‘for who were the greatest philosophers, the greatest orators, the greatest jurists, the greatest writers, but those who attached most value to using language well?’”61
Humanist paeans to the virtues of classical Latin echo Valla’s belief that classical Latin is the perfect language. It is perfect because it embodies the features of a perfect language noted by Quintilian: namely, authority (auctoritas), reason (ratio) or antiquity (vetustas), and use (usus).62 Each of these qualities deserves comment.
Where Quintilian had understood authority in terms of the speech of orators, historians and poets, Valla stresses the art of rhetoric. He agrees with Quintilian that “The judgment of the supreme orator is placed on the same level as reason, and even error brings no disgrace, if it results from treading in the footsteps of such distinguished guides.”63
Valla follows Quintilian in attributing majesty and sanctity to classical Latin because of its ancient origin. Valla’s ambition to extend the influence of classical Latin rhetoric into theology adds religious and spiritual dimensions to his concept of a perfect language.
Quintilian limits the concept of rationality to the practice of reasoning by analogy and to the orator’s use of etymology. Nonetheless, throughout his work, reason as exhibited in forensic argumentation is central to his methodology. For instance, he focuses on the sentence, proposition or judgment as the expression of truth. In Chapter 3 we will show how Quintilian’s methods of proof meet conventional standards of logical inference. Finally, Quintilian bears no hostility toward Aristotle whose theories of categories, predicables, syllogistic and various other principles of argumentation are very much in evidence in his work.
Quintilian firmly states that “Usage is [t]he surest pilot in speaking and we should treat language as currency minted with the public stamp.”64 Lodi Nauta’s commentary on the Dialectical Disputations elaborates: “the greatest of these [properties] is the consuetudo since speaking elegantly phrased Latin, in accordance with the linguistic usage of the great authors, is more important than following the rules of the art of grammar.”65 He goes on to observe that ‘consuetudo’ covers not only the customary practices of great Latin authors but also those who speak common vernaculars. As we will show, Valla’s concept of usage is considerably more complex—and controversial—than this sentence suggests.
According to Valla, Latin reached its highest point of development in the first century CE. The Barbarian invasions corrupted Latin in the Middle Ages, and a total renovation of that language was necessary if Western culture was to survive and again prosper. This could be accomplished only by a sustained effort to recover the linguistic styles and standards of its best authors, especially Cicero and Quintilian. Valla believed that Latin could not only save Western culture from medieval decadence: it could bring about its renewal. Ann Moss sees Valla’s contribution as an entirely new departure:
Valla sets in motion the Latin language turn, having evolved for himself a general theory that grounded culture in language and having grasped its full implications. Language will condition thinking, and the culturally contextualized language of ancient Rome, if once again it becomes the native language of the intellectual elite, will empower a renewal of all the disciplines of learning.66
Valla’s admiration of the classical Latin spoken by “the intellectual elite” and his contempt for the vernacular spoken by the masses is well documented. Silvia Rizzo concludes her study of Valla’s medieval heritage with a comment on the nature of Latin in the Elegantiae:
The sharp separation between the speech of the illiterate, governed exclusively by use (usus), and that of the literate, which has grammatical character and is therefore regulated by art (ars) and not by use (usus) (the usage naturally of the cultivated person and of writers) is the theoretical presupposition of [the Elegantiae] which, as was already observed, notwithstanding the continued reference to usage by the author, proposes a linguistic model substantially immobile and immutable, “a meta-historical language valid for all time, which can be learned equally well by the ancients and the moderns and which for both constitutes the most perfect instrument of knowledge at the disposal of man.”67
Valla’s leading modern commentator, Lodi Nauta, agrees: Valla thinks of Latin as “a timeless tool of expression and communication, transcending boundaries of time and place, as were—it was often assumed—the values and views expressed by that language.”68 In short, Valla believed that classical Latin was the perfect language.
Juan Luis Vives reaffirms this estimation of classical Latin. In De disciplinis he calls language “a sanctuary of learning” and “an instrument of human society,” and laments that there is not one language which all nations could use in common. Original sin is the cause of our having many languages. If it is not possible to have one language, there is a language Christians and others could use.
That one language should be both sweet-sounding, learned and eloquent. Sweetness exists in the sound of single, separate words or combinations of words. Learning consists in the proper designation of things; eloquence in the abundance and variety of words and phrases. All of these qualities would bring it about that men would speak this language willingly and would be able to express their feelings in the most fitting way, and their judgment would be increased by it. Such seems to me to be the Latin language, of those at least which men use and which are known to us. For that language would be the most perfect of all whose words would explain the natural meaning of things, such as it is reasonable to think was the language by which Adam gave names to each individual thing.69
According to his criteria of audible sweetness, erudition and eloquence, Vives testifies to the perfection of the Latin language. The highest grade of perfection would be attained by a language that expresses the essences of natural things. Vives here alludes to an essentialist approach to language that he apparently believes is closest to the language of Adam. Valla distanced himself from essentialist theories of language.
Although scholastics did not describe their idiom of Latin as “the perfect language,” from the thirteenth through the sixteenth century they developed systems of logic to account for meaning and truth in that language. As noted above, searches for the perfect language in Britain in the seventeenth century were mainly secular. In addition to British antipathy toward Roman Catholicism, they were motivated by commercial and scientific interests. Eco begins his account of a priori philosophical languages in the seventeenth century with Francis Lodwick, George Dalgarno, John Wilkins and Francis Bacon. There are good reasons, however, to mark the beginning of the British search for the perfect language in the first quarter of the fourteenth century when the rise of kinematics called for the development of a new scientific language.70 At Balliol and Merton Colleges, Oxford, four scholars followed the lead of Gerard of Brussels in applying geometry to astronomy, mechanics and the theory of motion. Thomas Bradwardine, William of Heytesbury, Richard Swinsehead and John Dumbleton crafted a new language to describe physical motion. Their most important discovery is a proof of the theorem basic to Galileo’s account of motion and velocity.71 It is called “the Merton Mean-Speed Theorem.” The physics of this period required a precise language that could be used to describe physical motion and was susceptible to scientific reasoning, demonstration and proof. In response to this need the school tradition introduced students to a new variety of logic, the terminist logic of late scholasticism. In the last quarter of the fourteenth century this logic migrated via the University of Bologna to Padua and Pavia.72 These centers of learning in northern Italy embraced the new physics and its logic. Paul of Venice’s Logica Parva, copied in more than 80 manuscripts and 26 editions, broadcast this logic to thousands of students in Italian universities throughout the fifteenth century.73
At its core scholastic logic contains five theories: (1) signification or meaning (significatio of categorematic terms), (2) co-signification (significatio of syncategorematic terms), (3) supposition or reference (suppositio), (4) inferences (consequentiae) and (5) proof (probatio). We will comment on each of these in turn.
Signification is that property of a word that calls something to the mind of a language user.74 It is the ordinary notion of nominal meaning or word-meaning. This would comprise all of the nouns and verbs, adjectives and adverbs that make up the normal vocabulary of a language. Scholastic logic accepts the ordinary meanings of such words as established by social convention and usage. Thus, the stock vocabularies of classical or medieval Latin—no less than those of vernacular languages—remain intact so far as scholastic logic is concerned. Logic is like grammar in this respect: it accepts and does not change the words of the language that it studies. For reasons we will discuss in Chapter 6, scholastic logic employs a sparse stock of significative terms—for example, “Sortes,” “Plato,” “man,” “ass,” “runs,” “sits”. It is important to keep in mind, however, that these words are only place-holders for signifying words used in Latin or other languages in particular contexts of utterance.
Co-signification is that property of certain words that have no meaning apart from their occurrence with signifying words. Co-signifying terms are particles such as “… and …,” “… or …,” “if … then …,” “all …,” “some …,” “only …,” “except …,” which structure the sentences in which they occur.
Supposition is a species of signification in which the meaning of a word is referred to an object—that is, either a word or a thing in the world. Signifying terms have supposition only in the context of a sentence. Every sentence has a determinate logical form. Logical form is the structure that remains when the non-logical or content words are disregarded or set aside. The logical form of a sentence is defined by the expressions that have logical force—that is, that determine the truth-conditions and logical implications of a sentence. Supposition rules are used to identify the logical forms of sentences. The logical form of a sentence is essential for two purposes: (1) it sets the conditions for deciding the truth or falsity of a sentence and (2) it shows the range of valid inferences that can be made from a sentence.
Inference rules (consequentiae) give the patterns of valid (and invalid) inferences between sentences. The Appendix lists more than five dozen rules of inference from the Logica Parva.
Finally, there is proof. Scholastic logic includes various methods of proof that are used to display the truth-conditions of sentences of determinate logical forms. All other areas of scholastic logic whose names are familiar—for example, obligations (obligationes), insolubles (insolubilia), sophisms (sophismata), are extensions or elaborations of the above theoretical matrix.
In Chapter 3 we will apply scholastic inference rules to examples of forensic argument in Valla’s Dialectical Disputations. Those rules are keyed to the co-signifying terms. For example, the rule of modus ponens applies to an implicative sentence where the antecedent is granted independently: “If Socrates runs, then Plato runs. Socrates runs. Therefore, Plato runs.” Modus tollens: “If Socrates runs, then Plato runs. Plato does not run. Therefore, Socrates does not run.” Modus ponens and modus tollens are argument forms that represent actual arguments expressed in a natural language. In ordinary narrative a sequence of sentences may be adduced to support or refute a particular conclusion. The supporting or refuting sentences (the premises) may be conjoined—that is, hooked together by ‘and’—to form the antecedent of single conditional sentence with the conclusion as its consequent. For example, “If Socrates runs, then Plato runs and Socrates runs, then Plato runs.” Here the above argument is re-expressed as a compound sentence and the argument’s validity or invalidity will correspond to the truth or falsity of the compound sentence.75 In the fourteenth century the rules of syllogism were incorporated into the rules of consequentiae so that they governed even syllogistic reasoning.76
The high standard of logical formality exhibited in scholastic logic shows a dedication to the main purpose of logic, namely, to maintain a principle of consistency in argumentation. Much has been made in the literature of “scholastic metalanguage” as if scholastics spoke an arcane idiom that somehow defied normal human comprehension.77 Scholastic logic was a metalanguage in the sense that it was a second-order language about a first-order language—that is, ordinary Latin or other languages. Humanist grammar was also a metalanguage, for it was second-order discourse about a first-order language, namely, classical Latin. They were similar also in that both metalanguages included within themselves their respective object-languages. Since it went beyond the categories of Latin grammar, scholastic metalanguage was considerably richer in semantical categories than humanist grammar. Moreover, it supported a formal system of quotation called “material supposition” (suppositio materialis) that was needed for a precise account of sentential truth. Scholastic methods of proof and demonstration met a high standard of transparency: that is, any claim that a sentence is true must be justified. Given its dedication to the principles of consistency and completeness as well as its requirement of provability with respect to truth, scholastic logic may claim a measure of perfection. Perhaps these were among the qualities that Pico della Mirandola had in mind when he expressed most eloquently the virtues of scholastic philosophy.78
Eco notes a major confusion in the history of searches for the perfect language: “Thinkers have confused the idea of a perfect language with that of a universal language.”79 As an early humanist, Valla claimed that classical Latin enjoyed the greatest universality of any Western language. Originally the language of the Latin people and the Roman Empire, Latin was perfected in the first century CE. As Roman political organization bound diverse populations together with a common language, Latin became a major civilizing influence. Since Latin was spoken throughout the Western world, it had a genuine claim to cultural universality. Its formative influence on the Western mind can be seen in the fact that it established the norms for speaking and writing for “virtually the entire human race.”80 This is, of course, an exaggeration. Modern population research estimates that the Roman Empire in the first century comprised, at most, one-fourth of humankind.81 Valla was convinced, however, that Latin expressed the truths on which Western civilization was built and could be restored.
As an empirical discipline that faithfully describes linguistic usage, grammar according to Valla also has a normative role in the reformation of Western culture. This view has led some to compare Valla’s concept of Latin grammar to speculative grammar. Speculative grammar was an a priori discipline that prescribed correct usage based on a strict correlation between thought, language and reality.82 As noted earlier, the speculative grammarians were called “modists” because they taught that thought (the modus cognoscendi) corresponds to what is said in language (modus significandi) and that that, in turn, corresponds to reality (modus essendi). “For the humanist Latin is not [like speculative grammar] an invention of the grammarians, but an historical language, born, developed and diffused through the use of speakers and writers.”83 Although Valla rejected speculative grammar because it placed reason above common usage, his own work cites classical Latin passages to establish norms of usage just as speculative grammar sought to do. For that reason Kristian Jensen asserts that “[Valla] saw his own work De Elegantiis linguae Latinae as a replacement for speculative grammar.”84 Although Valla did not intend it as a textbook, his Elegantiae greatly influenced the subsequent writing of grammars.
Keith Percival summarizes the importance of Valla’s contribution to modern linguistics:
In the areas of individual words and phraseology, the seminal work was Valla’s Elegantiae linguae Latinae. It is hard for us nowadays to appreciate the revolutionary nature of this work. The most distinctive feature of Valla’s method was made possible by the fact that he was so familiar with Latin literature that he was able to cite passages from classical authors whenever he needed an authority to support his prescriptions. This procedure was undoubtedly inspired by the example of Priscian’s Institutio, but it had never been used before Valla in the Middle Ages or the early Renaissance, and it started a trend of great historical importance. Grammarians had always paid lip service to the notion that grammar should be based on usage (usus), but none had hitherto attempted to do what Valla did, namely, to show specifically how to use Latin words correctly by quoting relevant examples from Roman authors. As a glance at any reputable comprehensive Latin grammar current today will show, this procedure is the one still followed by classical scholars writing on the Latin language.85
Published in 59 editions, Valla’s Elegantiae was an immensely popular and influential work. It is a great work for several reasons. First, it sought to restore classical Latin to its original status as a language whose lexicon and syntax are rich in both content and precision of expression. Assuming that Latin embodies the virtues of antiquity, authority, reason and usage, it exemplifies linguistic perfection in terms that both Valla and Quintilian affirm. As the native language of the Latin people who were spread throughout the Roman Empire, it could claim a universality of usage greater than that of other known languages. Second, the Elegantiae enhanced a growing field of Latin lexicography. As a source book, it influenced the writing of grammars and the teaching of Latin in the sixteenth century, and thus helped establish neo-classical Latin in the schools. Third, insofar as Latin came into use as a “natural” language, its relations to the vernaculars improved and Latin grammars were written in those languages. Fourth, as a model of philological investigation, the Elegantiae earned a rightful place in the early history of linguistics. Fifth, its purpose to reform theology was realized when Erasmus made the Elegantiae a model for the application of philological principles to textual criticism and scriptural exegesis. Whether one considers its past or present influence, therefore, classical Latin has enjoyed a measure of universality and Valla’s claims have, therefore, an initial plausibility.
Valla’s account of classical Latin, however, raises an important issue. On the one hand, it is the language of a particular people who lived at a particular historical time and place. It is confined to the mental outlook and cultural practices of one social group. On the other hand, as the language of the arts and sciences it transcends the particular circumstances of time and place that conditioned its use. This tension between the immanence and the transcendence of Latin runs throughout Valla’s work. To the extent that it remains unresolved, Valla’s claims for the universality of classical Latin are problematic.
Scholastics made three attempts to formulate a universal language. The first was speculative grammar that sought to correlate the elements common to thoughts (modus cognoscendi), language (modus significandi) and things (modus essendi). The second was the attempt to construct a universal mental language. Following Aristotle’s observation that thoughts and things are the same for all humans, whereas only the languages are different, some late medieval authors sought to determine the contents of mental language. They believed that concepts naturally signified things. Had they succeeded, they would have defined a universal mental language. The third and most successful attempt to articulate a universal language was scholastic term logic.
The theory of consequences was the heart of terminist logic just as the propositional calculus, its modern successor, is the foundation of modern systems of deduction. The logical constants, “… and …,” “… or …,” “if … then …,” “… if, and only if, …” that are essential to both were discovered in the forensic discourse of the ancient world. On the basis of his extensive study of ancient dialectic, Aristotle’s Topics first formulated rules of dialectical debate that eventually became the medieval consequentiae.86 A century later the Stoics articulated rules for inferential reasoning. Three centuries later Quintilian compiled a collection of forensic arguments for rhetorical instruction. Book II of Valla’s Dialectical Disputations reprints a selection of Quintilian’s examples verbatim. Unlike Aristotle, the Stoics and the scholastics, neither Quintilian nor Valla give rules for deciding between valid and invalid arguments. In a long history from Cicero’s Topica, through Boethius’ De topicis differentiis to Ockham’s Summa logicae, logicians transformed Aristotle’s topical rules into a system of rules comparable to today’s propositional calculus. By way of George Boole’s class logic and contributions from mathematics, the logical constants made their way into modern information technology. As the armature of modern computer languages, the same logical constants that were essential to scholastic logic support internet communications today and are basic principles in current accounts of linguistic structure. When we consider their ancient origin as well as their modern influence, the logical constants that were identified and formulated in scholastic logic give the language of that discipline a reasonable claim to universality.
Finally, scholastic logic was open to the emerging vernaculars that were spoken by most university students. Its methods of analysis and criteria of truth were applicable to those languages no less than to university Latin or classical Latin itself. As we will argue in Chapter 6, it served as a “pivot” or “parameter” language that could be used to translate university Latin into the vernaculars. As a translation language, it was indispensable to undergraduate learning. As a language that mediated between languages, it showed that languages were indeed commensurable and translatable into one another. In that respect it attained a high level of perfection.
The idea that human languages are, or can become, incommensurable has a long history. The confusio linguarum at Babel was just the occurrence of incommensurability between the languages spoken by the ancient Hebrews. The early Christians believed that this wound had been treated, if not healed, at Pentecost. Quite apart from Babel and Pentecost, however, the plurality of cultures and the diversity of languages emerging in the early modern world were reason enough to pose the question whether human languages are in fact or in principle incommensurable. Translation (translatio) understood as the substitution of one sentence in a source language by another sentence in a target language is familiar to everyone. It is a fact of everyday language usage. That human languages are successfully translated daily is empirical evidence against the thesis of the incommensurability of languages.
Having flirted with that thesis throughout The Search for the Perfect Language, Eco affirms that European culture is in need of a common language to mend its linguistic diversity, yet he warns of the limits of such a language.
[The limits] are the same as those of the natural languages on which these languages are modeled: all presuppose a principle of translatability. If a universal common language claims for itself the capacity to re-express a text written in any other language, it necessarily presumes that, despite the individual genius of any single language, and despite the fact that each language constitutes its own rigid and unique way of seeing, organizing and interpreting the world, it is still always possible to translate from one language to another.
However, if this is a prerequisite inherent [in] any universal language, it is at the same time a prerequisite inherent [in] any natural language. It is possible to translate from a natural language into a universal and artificial one for the same reasons that justify and guarantee the translation from a natural language into another.87
Despite these declarations, Eco says very little about ordinary translation. Instead he turns to mechanical translation and outlines a modest alternative to the perfect languages that are his main topic.
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 meta-language C. If such a tertium really existed, it would be a perfect language; if it did not exist, it would remain a mere postulate on which every translation ought to depend.88
The parameter language would not be a normal language but rather a comparative tool
… which might (if only approximately) be expressed in any language, and which might, furthermore, allow us to compare any two linguistic structures that seemed, in themselves, incommensurable. This instrument or procedure would be able to function in the same way and for the same reason that any natural language is able to translate its own terms into one another by an interpretative principle: according to Peirce, any natural language can serve as a metalanguage to itself …89
After all, “the perfect language” may not be a single universal language discovered or invented to replace all human languages. Because human beings grow up in diverse times and remote places, native languages and mother tongues will always be with us. Any discovered or invented “perfect language” would have to include them, and the question whether it included them successfully would have to be decided from the vantage point of a third language. Such a language would have to be a more modest thing altogether: an analytical language or method of analysis that facilitates faithful translation from one language to another. We propose to show in Chapter 6 that scholastic logic in the context of late medieval education was a language of this sort.
1 Gadamer 2004 [1975]: 437. The text to which Gadamer refers is translated by Buck and Raven as follows: “Differently expressed, we see in language man’s striving to wrest reality from the idea of linguistic perfection. To pursue this striving, and to represent it in its simplest, ultimate solution, is the occupation of the comparative linguist” (Humboldt 1971: 5).
2 Leopardi 1969: 814, cited in Eco 1995: 303.
3 Eco 1997 [1995]: 1.
4 For biography and background on these authors see: on Valla, Kraye 2001: 37-57; on Vives, Vives tr. Noreña 1990: Part I; on Paul of Venice, Perreiah 1986.
5 Eco 1997: 6.
6 Eco 1997: 44. “Grammatica una et eadem est secundum substantiam in omnibus linguis, licet accidentaliter varietur.” Bacon 1902: xxv, 27. See also: Murphy 1974: 43; Bursill-Hall 1971: 38; Sandys 1915: Vol. I, 595; Scaglione 1972: 123 ff.
7 Eco 1997: 145-6.
8 Eco 1997: 70.
9 Eco 1997: 2-3.
10 See below Chapter 5, Section I. 000
11 Bickerton 1995: 41 ff. Also, Calvin and Bickerton 2000; Calvin 2004; Pinker 1994.
12 O’Flaherty 1981. For Chinese and other Asian languages, see Leaman 2001: 308 ff.
13 All passages from Genesis and Acts are taken from Jones 1966. For useful commentary on the place of Hebrew in the perfect language debates, see Demonet 1992: 15-86, 131-187.
14 Genesis 2:18–21a (Jones 1966: 16).
15 Genesis 1:11 (Jones 1966: 26-27).
16 Eco 1995:9 ff.
17 Sapir 1921.
18 Eco 1997: 22.
19 Eco 1997: 113.
20 Eco 1997: 330.
21 Acts 2:1–13 (Jones 1966: 202-204).
22 Eco 1997: 351.
23 Ibid.
24 Eco 1997: 20-21.
25 Eco 1994; Morris 1938.
26 Eco 1997: 22, emphasis added.
27 Bacon 1978: 131. Professor Thomas Maloney generously shared his forthcoming translation of this text which I have revised slightly. On Bacon’s general theory of signs, see Maloney 1983: 120-154.
28 Murphy 1983.
29 Bursill-Hall 1971.
30 Mazzocco 1993: 39 ff.
31 Dante Alighieri 1989: 4-15.
32 Minnis and Johnson 2005: 380-381; Mazzocco 1993.
33 Quinones 1979: 60-88. Dante Alighieri 1996.
34 Thomas Aquinas 1914-1942: II, Question 2, Articles 4, 10.
35 Mazzocco (1993: 165 ff.) discusses why Dante “at the time of the De vulgari eloquentia argu[ed], relying on patristic exegesis, that the Adamic language was of divine formation and therefore unchangeable, whereas at the writing of Paradiso XXVI he maintain[ed], following scholastic theories, that it was manmade and therefore changeable.”
36 Eco 1997: 42-43.
37 Dante Alighieri 1996: 13.
38 Corti 1981.
39 Minnis and Scott 1988: 394 ff. For discussion of the literal or historical sense in Dante, see Freccero 2007. For the relation of political power to a logic founded on truth, see Mazzotta 1993.
40 Eco 1997: 45. Eco (1994: 220) tells the story differently: “According to my revised version of the myth, Adam did not see tigers as mere individual specimens of a natural kind. He saw certain animals, endowed with certain morphological properties, insofar as they were involved in certain types of action, interacting with other animals and with their natural environment. Then he stated that the subject x, usually acting against certain countersubjects in order to achieve certain goals, usually showing up in the circumstances so and so, was only part of story p—the story being inseparable from the subject and the subject being an indispensable part of the story. Only at this stage of world knowledge could this subject x-in-action be named tiger.” It is not clear how the two accounts of Adam’s role as language inventor—that is, Adam as generative grammarian and as behavioral anthropologist—are compatible.
41 Eco 1997: 52, emphasis added.
42 Eco’s positive assessment of speculative grammar is not surprising since Semiotics of which he is the leading exponent was founded by C.S. Peirce after studying the speculative grammars of the Middle Ages. Because Thomas of Erfurt’s Grammatica Speculativa was included in a collection of Scotus’s works edited by Luke Wadding in 1639, the first modern semiotician C.S. Peirce mistakenly attributed the work to Scotus. See Bursill-Hall 1971: 34, n. 79. At the time he was developing semiotics Peirce also studied the logical writings of Paul of Venice whose theories of logic and language rivaled those of the speculative grammarians (Perreiah 1989).
43 Ashworth 1974: 2; Johnston 1987: 1.
44 Eco 1997: 117 ff.
45 Popkin 1987: 69 ff.
46 Eco 1997: 89.
47 Popkin 1987: Ch. 3.
48 Eco 1997: 194-208.
49 Eco 1997: 142.
50 Eco 1997: 317 ff.
51 Viète 2006.
52 Descartes 1981: 19 ff. John Wallis, a British mathematician, was the first to use the expression ‘mathesis universalis’ in the title of his work on algebra, arithmetic and geometry where he introduced the modern symbol for infinity. On Wallis, see Scott 1981. On the history of mathesis universalis, see Crapulli 1969.
53 Eco 1997: 220. See also Rossi 2000: 145 ff.
54 Eco 1997: Ch. 10.
55 Eco 1997: 252.
56 Eco 1997: 250, 255.
57 Mates 1986. Bocheński 1961: 274276.
58 Davies 1993.
59 Nauta 2009: 277 and n. 25.
60 Marsh 1979: 92-93.
61 Moss 2003: 36.
62 Quintilian 1921-1996: I, 5, 72 ff.
63 Quintilian 1921-1996: I, 5, 72.2.
64 Quintilian I 1921-1996: 5, 72.3; I, 6: 43 ff.
65 Nauta 2009: 217.
66 Moss 2003: 36-37, emphasis added.
67 Rizzo 2002: 106, quoting Cesarini Martinelli 1980: n. 62; my translation with emphasis added.
68 Nauta 2007: 197. Nauta (2009: 55-57) comments on Valla’s allusions to the language of Adam. Waswo’s claims notwithstanding, Valla maintained a conventionalist view of the origin of language.
69 Vives De tradendis disciplinis (tr. Del Nero) in Fantazzi 2008: 206.
70 Clagett 1961: 199 ff.; Ashworth and Spade 1984; Grant 1974.
71 Clagett 1961: 252.
72 Courtenay in Maierù 1982: 13 ff.
73 Paul of Venice 1984, 2002.
74 Nuchelmans 1973: 123-125 gives the background of the distinction between signifying and co-signifying terms in Aristotle, Boethius and Priscian. See Ashworth (1988: 155-159) for background on signification theory.
75 This is Ockham’s view; John Buridan disagreed. See King 2001: 117 ff.
76 Kneale and Kneale 1962: 274-297; Bird 1960, 1961, 1962.
77 Moss 2003: 5 ff.
78 Pico della Mirandola 1968: 15-25. For extensive bibliography on Pico’s Letter to Ermolao Barbaro and the latter’s response, see Kraye 2008: 13-36. For a translation of Franz Bruchard’s (1534) Reply to Pico, see Breen 1968: 15-25. Rummel (1992) proved that this tract, incorrectly ascribed to Melanchthon, was written by Melanchthon’s student Franz Bruchard.
79 Eco 1997: 73-74.
80 Valla, cited in Nauta 2009: 277.
81 McEvedy 1970: 8.
82 See above ns. 6, 29, 32.000.
83 Regoliosi 1993: 95.
84 Jensen 1990: 54 ff.
85 Percival 2004: III, 75.
86 On consequentiae, see Ashworth 1974: 120 ff.; Buridan tr. King 1985: 177 ff.; Boh 1982.
87 Eco 1997: 345.
88 Eco 1997: 346.
89 Eco 1997: 349.