Abracadabra: Language, Memory, Representation

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Today's Reading: Umberto Eco The Search for a Perfect Language, Introduction, Chs. one and two.

The study of language from the early greek period to the 18th century.

• The search for origins vs. the study of perfection in a language
• mother tongues (what did Adam speak?)
• after babel (anxiety of decline)
• logical languages (promise of progress)
• The perfection of a language as a mystical reality vs. perfection of a language by humans
• A universally spoken language vs. a perfect one
• unviversal and perfect
• universal and imperfect
• non-universal and perfect
• non-universal and imperfect
• Magic Languages
• Kabbalah, Hermeticism, ritual language
• cryptography
• shamanism
• software?

The Study of Languages in the 19th, 20th, 21st century

• Linguistics (natural grammars)
• historical and comparative
• etymology, philology, phonology
• laboratory study
• The Indo-European Model
• "scientific"
• universal grammar, biologism
• formal languages, turing machines
• experimental study of
• Semiotics (sign systems generally, semantics)
• - all things used as media of communication, from natural language to film, to advertising, to smell.
• -Eco's system (borrowed from Hjelmslev): Expression and Content planes.
• History of ideas, pragmatics and social context
• Anthropology 375
• Where do Mathematics, Logic and Memory fit?
• • must languages or sign systems be logical?
  • is a logical system perfect and/or universal?

Adam and the Confusio Linguarum

• - Three appearances in Genesis of Language
• Chap 2: God speaks to Adam, Adam names the animals
• Chap 11: The tower of Babel (by Breugel)
• Chap 10: Confusion of tongues preceding Babel?