The Search for the Perfect Language - Eco

1995

“We are not told in what language God spoke to Adam. Tradition has pictured it as a sort of language of interior illumination, in which God, as in other episodes of the Bible, expresses himself by thunderclaps and lightning. If we are to understand it this way, we must think of a language which, although not translatable into any known idiom, is still, through a special grace or dispensation, comprehensible to its hearer.” (P.7)

“The story of the search for the perfect language is the story of a dream and of a series of failures. Yet that is not to say that a story of failures must itself be a failure. Though our story be nothing but the tale of the obstinate pursuit of an impossible dream, it is still of some interest to know how this dream originated, as well as uncovering the hopes that sustained the pursuers throughout their secular course.” (P.19)

“Computer languages, like BASIC or Pascal, are, in fact, a priori languages. They are not full languages because their syntax, though rigorous, is simplified and limited, and they remain parasitic on the natural languages which attach meanings to their empty symbols, which, for the most part, serve as logical connectors of the type if . .. then. None the less, they are universal systems; they are comprehensible to speakers of differing natural languages and are perfect in the sense that they permit neither error nor ambiguity.” (P.311)

Eco, Umberto. Page 7-10, Page 311, The Search for the Perfect Language, 1995, Translated into English by James Fentress, Blackwell Oxford UK & Cambridge USA, 1995.