Umberto Eco was born in Alessandria in 1932 and has been Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna since 1975 and President of the International Centre for Semiotic and Cognitive Studies since 1988. His books include The Name of the Rose (1980) and Foucault's Pendulum (1988). His most recent works include Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984), The Limits of Interpretation (1990), Apocalyspe Postponed (1994) and The Island of the Day Before (1995).
"This is as much a history of the study of language and its origins as it is a" tour de force" pursuit using scholarly detection and cultural interpretation, thus providing a series of original perspectives on two thousand years of European history." " The Medieval Review"
The myth of primordial language in which the word corresponds to being, or the dream of a universal language, has long fascinated thinkers. In this provocative history of ideas, noted Italian linguist and semiologist Eco (The Island of the Day Before, LJ 7/95) traces the quest for a perfect language. For Eco, this quest informs the myth of Adam, Cabalism, Enlightenment theories of classification and the encyclopedias, the search for Indo-European universal grammars, as well as the development of International Auxiliary Languages. He also includes illuminating chapters on Dante, Raymond Lull, Francis Lodwick, and others. Eco's complex yet lucid account of the nature of language is the most stimulating since George Steiner's After Babel (Oxford Univ. Pr., 1975). For academic libraries.-T.L. Cooksey, Armstrong State Coll., Savannah, Ga.
"This is as much a history of the study of language and its origins as it is a" tour de force" pursuit using scholarly detection and cultural interpretation, thus providing a series of original perspectives on two thousand years of European history." " The Medieval Review"
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