Re: THEORY: The search for the perfect language (was: RE: THEORY: French Linguistic Thinking.)

FFlores wrote:
>
> Ed Heil wrote:
> >
> >  Really! I hadn't read his "search for the perfect language" book yet.
> >   Is that where it all ends?  Esperanto?
> >
>
> Who has read it? I'd like to know -- I'm going to buy
> it this week (so far). Is it technical, poetic, dense,
> speculative, what?
I own it, it is not that expensive, and it is all those things.
Eco says in his introduction that he cannot hope to address all
the things that interest him, and that includes imaginative
invented languages, like Tolkien's languages, and the _fous
de langages_ (mad inventors of "glottomania"--so in a sense he is
echoing Yaguello who must be speaking from some kind of tradition
of condescension directed at glossopoeia).  Eco is a much better
scholar than Yaguello, though (no comparison actually), and he
really goes to town on language invention in Kabbalism, on
Dante and the notion of the Perfect Language, on the Ars Magna
of Raymond Lull, on the myth of Hebrew as first language, on Horapollo's
Hieroglyphica, on John Dee's magic language, a whole chapter
on John Wilkins, on his contemporaries, on philosophic languages,
and the International Auxiliary languages.

It's an interesting read, from which I drew excerpts for my
class on language last fall.

Sally Caves
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/recipes.html