Bibliofreakblog

The Search for the Perfect Language by Umberto Eco

This book is many-faceted, and I doubt I’ll be able to cover it all in this post.  But first let me say, that it’s by Umberto Eco, with whom you really can’t go wrong.

Eco narrows the subject down to European languages, and those from surrounding regions with immediate influence.  Still, it’s a pretty grand scope.  Perhaps what I’ve said is misleading though.  This is really a book about the searchers for the perfect language; Eco himself is not searching for such a thing (besides, I think he’s smarter than that).

In the introduction, he spells out the scheme of the book, what he will and will not discuss, except for cases when what he doesn’t care about (Universal Grammar) bears importance.  

My God, does this review sound dry?  I feel like I’m writing some soul-sucking book report.  So I’m just going to stop trying to explain what this book is about, and highlight some things I like.  I’ll probably leave out a lot of stuff, and I’m sure that you won’t be clear on what this book is about exactly, but that’s O.K.  Like I said, you can’t really go wrong with Eco.

The first two chapters are devoted to Old Testament Bible…stuff.  Chapter one discusses Bible stories, and chapter two gets into Kabbalah and Gematria.  People interested in Gematria and it’s mathematico-linguistic mysteries should not miss this.  I think I just “mathematico” up…but don’t you always us “o” and not “al” in the first word in a double adjective hyphen?  Sadly, Eco does not answer this.  Chapter six will pick up on Kabbalha again.

Then he gets into Dante, and the Vulgar tongues versus Latin.  I smile approvingly every time I read this chapter, which is titled “The Perfect Language of Dante”. 

Eco is King of Semiotics, so no book of his would be complete without some dedication to symbolism.  The seventh chapter is called “The Perfect Language of Symbols”, where we get Eco at his best.

And then it gets weird.  Magic languages.  Computer codes.  Francis Bacon.  Animals.  And eventually a bit about the weirdest language system of all, Esperanto.  You know, all that you would expect, right?  

Yeah, good on me for not trying to sum this up.  It wouldn’t have worked.  All of these things might seem rather disparate, but they aren’t…totally.

But it’s still very good!  It’s just that now you can probably see why I put off reviewing it, until #Litchat’s linguistic topic provoked me into it.
Buy The Search for the Perfect Language on Amazon

If you like this book/author, you might like:

(my reviews in blue)

The Stories of English by David Crystal 
The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher
The First Word by Christine Keneally
Words to the Wise by Michael J. Sheehan 
Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English by John McWhorter
The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language by John McWhorter
Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler
Do You Speak American? by Robert MacNeil
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynn Truss
The Story of English by Robert McCrum
The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester
Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace
Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Kabbalah by Gershom Scholem
Borges: Selected Non-Fictions Jorge Luis Borges

Other works by Umberto Eco:

The Name of the Rose
How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays 
Apocalypse Postponed 
Interpretation and Overinterpretation 
Six Walks in the Fictional Woods
A Theory of Semiotics 
The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas 
The Island of the Day Before
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana 
The Bomb and the General 
The Three Astronauts 
The Limits of Interpretation 
Misreadings 
Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages
The Open Work 
The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce 
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language 
Baudolino 
Serendipities: Language and Lunacy
Experiences in Translation 
Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition
On Literature 
On Beauty
Mouse or Rat: Translation as Negotiation
On Ugliness
Five Moral Pieces 
Travels in Hyperreality 
The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts 

With Cardinal Martini:

Belief or Nonbelief? : A Dialogue

Related posts:

1. Myths to Live By by Joseph Campbell Oh Joseph Campbell, how I love you.  If you weren’t dead, I would find you and stalk you until you married me.  I want to...