By Umberto Eco
Best-selling writer Umberto Eco's most modern paintings unlocks the riddles of historical past in an exploration of the "linguistics of the lunatic," tales instructed by way of students, scientists, poets, fans, and usual humans so that it will make experience of the area. Exploring the "Force of the False," Eco uncovers layers of blunders that experience formed human historical past, resembling Columbus's assumption that the area used to be a lot smaller than it's, major him to find a short path to the East through the West and hence luckily "discovering" the US. The fictions that grew up round the cults of the Rosicrucians and Knights Templar have been the results of a letter from a mysterious "Prester John"―undoubtedly a hoax―that supplied fertile flooring for a sequence of delusions and conspiracy theories in keeping with non secular, ethnic, and racial prejudices. whereas a few fake stories produce new wisdom (like Columbus's discovery of the USA) and others create not anything yet horror and disgrace (the Rosicrucian tale wound up fueling ecu anti-Semitism) they're all powerfully persuasive.
In a cautious unraveling of the remarkable and the fake, Eco exhibits us how serendipities―unanticipated truths―often spring from wrong principles. From Leibniz's trust that the I Ching illustrated the foundations of calculus to Marco Polo's mistaking a rhinoceros for a unicorn, Eco excursions the labyrinth of highbrow historical past, illuminating the ways that we venture the favourite onto the strange.
Eco uncovers a wealthy historical past of linguistic endeavor―much of it ill-conceived―that sought to "heal the wound of Babel." during the center a while and the Renaissance, Greek, Hebrew, chinese language, and Egyptian have been alternately proclaimed because the first language that God gave to Adam, while―in preserving with the colonial weather of the time―the complicated language of the Amerindians in Mexico was once considered as crude and diabolical. In remaining, Eco considers the faulty idea of linguistic perfection and shrewdly observes that the hazards we are facing lie no longer within the principles we use to interpret different cultures yet in our insistence on making those ideas absolute.
With the startling mix of erudition and wit, bewildering anecdotes and scholarly rigor which are Eco's hallmarks, Serendipities is bound to entertain and enlighten any reader with a fondness for the curious background of languages and ideas.
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Additional resources for Serendipities : language & lunacy
Example text
It was thus the Hebrew tongue that was constructed by the first being endowed with speech. (italics mine) In this way, the forma locutionis was neither the Hebrew language nor the general faculty of language but a particular gift from God to Adam that was lost after Babel. It is the lost gift that Dante sought to recover through his theory of an illustrious vernacular. One solution to the problem has been proposed by Maria Corti: 2 It is, by now, generally accepted that we cannot regard 38 139 Dante as simply an orthodox follower of the thought of St.
It guaranteed a continuity of power after the fall of the empire, it perpetuated an idea of Latinity, it indicated a guide, a reference point amid the flames of the massacres perpetrated by the many suitors disputing the nuptial bed of Europa. Why refuse the story of Cosmas? In other respects he had been an alert traveler, a diligent collector of geographical and historical curiosities, and furthermore his flat-earth theory-at least from a narrative point of view-displayed some verisimilitude: the earth was a great rectangle bounded by four immense walls that supported two layers of heavenly vault; on the first the stars shone and, in the cavity between the two, the inner ceiling, lived the Blest; astronomical phenomena were explained by the presence of a very high mountain to the north that, hiding the sun, created night and, coming between sun and light, produced eclipses.
For someone of Dante's temperament, a conviction that the Hebrew of Adam was the one truly perfect language could only have resulted in his learning Hebrew and composing his poem in that idiom. That Dante did not decide to learn Hebrew shows that he was convinced that the vernacular he intended to invent would correspond to the principles of the universal, God-given form better even than the Hebrew spoken by Adam himself. Thus Dante puts forth his own candidacy as a new (and more perfect) Adam.