Bridge of Words

Babel yearned for God's own language, for words empowered to speak the universe into being. Others imagined secret, esoteric languages that were the preserve of initiates: kabbalistic acrostics, numerology, and anagrams; the gnostic "magic languages" of Paracelsus and the Rosicrucians; the divine "signatures" perceived in nature by the seventeenth-century German mystic Jacob Boehme. Still others invented devices, symbols, and meta-languages designed to mediate between human beings and the words they failed to grasp. Umberto Eco's The Search for the Perfect Language surveys a millennium of such inventions, among them that of Ramon Llull (ca. 1230-1315), a Franciscan who asked himself what language might best propound the truth of Scripture to infidels.¹ Starting with logical propositions rather than glyphs and words, Llull selected nine letters and four figures, combined them into questions, compounded questions into subjects, and multiplied subjects into propositions. Using only these elements and the engine of combination, Llull's Ars Magna purported to generate 1,680 logical propositions, a repertoire from which one might choose a few key points to which an infidel would, without translation, necessarily consent. Such propositions would have a kind of liquidity from culture to culture, on which the truth could skip like a stone. By "truth," of course, Llull meant his truth, not the infidel's. That Llull died at the hands of the Saracens may suggest that something more than revelation was lost in translation.

In the early modern period, language needed to do more than propound truths; it needed to translate a host of others to European interlopers in Asia, Africa, and the Americas—merchants and governors as well as missionaries. Llull's Saracen "infidel" was displaced by the Chinese, Hindus, Native Americans, and Africans. Polyglot Bibles became the model for massive polyglot dictionaries called polygraphies. The frontispiece of Cave Beck's Universal Character of 1657 features a table around which three men in various national costumes are seated: a Dutch burgher, a mustachioed and turbaned Indian, and an African in a toga. On the right stands a native of the New World in a grass skirt and a Carmen Miranda- esque headpiece, who salutes in the universal sign for "Hey, no problem!" His long spear, its tip resting idly on the floor, is conspicuously flaccid, to assure us that he's checked his aggression at the door.

Meanwhile, the printing press, less than a century after its invention, scattered projects and programs for language reform all over Europe, many of which had germinated in newly emerging scientific societies. After the restoration of the British monarchy in 1660, several members of the new "Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge" were spurred to invention by the legacy of Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Bacon's profound intuition, as he put it in The Advancement and Proficience of Learning (1605), was that "words are the footsteps of reason"—written, not spoken, words. Bacon held that written words could do more than simply refer to speech; they could refer directly to thought itself. Though Zamenhof was an autodidact when it came to philosophy and linguistics, his invention of roots that referred to ideas rather than words is remarkably consonant with Bacon's call for the invention of "real characters."

Thus with Bacon, philosophical rather than divine truth became the desideratum of language projects. Invoking Chinese ideograms, arbitrary signs that "expresse neither Letters, nor Words, but Things, and Notions," Bacon imagined characters that would represent thoughts with a philosophical rigor exceeding that of words. Moreover, Bacon believed Chinese characters to be universally legible among the peoples of Asia. Not only would "real characters" mean the same thing to one Briton and her neighbor; they would also be legible to people speaking different tongues—in fact, to all peoples and nations. The use of "real characters," in short, would grant Europe what Bacon believed Asia already had: a way of communicating without resort to translation, with characters that could be entrusted to convey thought itself. What Bacon didn't realize was that legibility across cultures did not imply that characters were understood identically among cultures. As soon as characters were interpreted as words, their philosophical purity was

compromised.