What if the book in the Library of Babel1 contained all answers that a person needs, the perfect formula in a 410 page book?
An important detail is that it would necessarily be written in a language that only that person can understand. In this perfect personal language, each word corresponds to the most personal ideas, or the most dense combinations of ideas that this person’s mind can bear. Then, the grammar rules and what they allow, with their prepositions, declinations, articles, conjunctions, etc., are designed in such a way that words can be combined and set in relation to one another in just the perfect way for this Reader to digest the message as quickly and efficiently as possible. Additionally, where the aim not be to digest information, it is also capable of describing reality or imagination either perfectly accurately as the Reader experiences it or in the most evocative, emotionally gripping way that would be positive for her.
This is Perfectiolect. It is with this Perfect Language, (almost solipsistically perfect) that this book weaves together the perfect formula for this Reader to obtain the maximum that one can obtain out of language from 410 pages.
Of course, this leads us to think what really is the use of such a book, if only to serve as the ultimate expression of language’s potential to encapsulate and communicate thought. But this utility is only for one person. How many people can learn such a language and still get the same benefit from it? Since it was tailored for only this one Reader, spawning from their entire subjectivity and individual experiences, it’s perfectly possible that others will need years of apprenticeship, to acquire the necessary knowledge to understand each word, symbol and grammatical rule. The reason is that such a language makes no compromise in placing itself in that cognitive common ground where minds overlap. Whereas it is perfection for one person, when it spreads out to more people as a tool for interpersonal communication, it significantly loses its effectiveness. In fact, it almost is solely a mind-enhancing tool for the Reader, who becomes the only appropriate interpreter capable of translating its ideas to common languages.
Nonetheless, the extremely refined quality of each of Perfectiolect’s components would require pages and pages of words in more generally usable languages such as English only to translate one sentence. The key problem that the Reader/Interpreter would face is that there would be no direct equivalents in English for each component of the language. As a result she would need to extend phrases with sentences full of specifications and caveats, and remove as many ambiguities as possible through the use of even more words in order to explain what she effortlessly understands by reading in her own Perfectiolect.
Now, this Reader, who is one of the Library’s inhabitants, knows several languages aside from Perfectiolect. She knows Dozenese, a language that is only spoken by twelve people: herself and eleven Peers that she knows very well, having spent most of her life around them. Dozenese is not as perfect as Perfectiolect in what the latter does best, in fact switching to it always feels slightly cumbersome, as if her thoughts had to traverse a winding, rugged terrain to get to their destination. However, Dozenese allows for an exceptionally fluid exchange of ideas and thoughts between her and the Peers. While it would still take her a couple of pages to translate one sentence from Perfectiolect to Dozenese, it is much less than in English and an easier process.
One of Dozenese’s advantages which she deeply appreciates is that most of the words don’t belong to her. Some of them do not seem perfectly suited for her subjectivity, or perfectly representing her experience of the world and her imagination. Instead, they carry the delightful surprise that is the product of the peers’ minds. She might not grasp some of these extrinsic words with as much precision as the peer where it originated from (after all, how could she), but she fills those gaps with her own attempts at interpreting the words, as they are strung together in sentences and then paragraphs. Some combinations that their peers come up with arrive as completely unexpected to her, and then she realises that she learned something new. Even so, the moments that she cherishes the most are those where she realises that some words do not solely belong to her nor to her peers, but that they are the product of an amalgam of pieces coming from each one of their minds. In fact, she is convinced that these words and phrases couldn’t possibly have taken shape in any of their individual minds.
Another language that she is proficient in is Communiglot, which is spoken by about three hundred people. She doesn’t know many of the speakers very well, but none of them live too far from one another. They all share a common history, common laws and trade agreements within the Library of Babel.
When using Communiglot, she sometimes misses the efficiency of Perfectiolect in expressing exactly what she has in mind, is imagining or feeling. She also misses the close-knit intimacy of Dozenese. But she’s not one to dwell on the negative. She recognises that with Communiglot she can be in friendly terms with many others in the neighbouring communities, and it is good enough. Certainly, she is never sure whether her interlocutors really understood exactly what she wanted to say, but . It also saddens her that the definition of each word is torn up by the particular details of everyone’s experience, and they end up only being capable of addressing what she sees as the most superficial aspects of things. For example, when she points at a book cover and mentions it to another Communiglot speaker, according to this langues, it is just a book cover in its most banal physical nature and face-value utility: a protective covering that binds the book together, normally of a material harder than the pages, and that contains the title and some other information about the book’s contents. But in her language she has at least 15 words for ‘book cover’, and none of them is more basic than the other. What about the book cover that evokes a vague sense of loss as its leather texture feels exactly like the one from her brother’s messenger bag sstrap, and that with this tactile link to the past it resets her mood into one of observing her environment only in terms of the history that hides behind each object’s physical features?
Not even so many words succeed in encapsulating what she means with her third word for “book cover”, and in her language it is only three letters and a suffix that can express this and instantly evoke it in her mind.
But again, she is not one to dwell in flaws. She is well aware that no one cares as much as her about what that quality that her third word for book covere conveys. Even though they might never have experienced it, they surely wouldn’t have given it as much importance so as to waste the few three letter combinations available in the alphabet to crystallise it in a word. In fact, as she sees it Communiglot teaches her good lessons about what the community cares the most about on average, what the community thinks about or what it experiences the most often on average. She is especially intrigued by those words and phrases that keep everyone successfully cooperating with each other so that no one gets in anyone’s way and a reasonable sense of order and exchange is preserved.
With time, the Reader would go back to her perfect book and find that she could update Perfectiolect with words from Dozenese and Communiglot. Even though these are not words arisen purely from her own experience, she thinks that she understands them effortlessly enough so that they can be integrated into her language. Sometimes beautiful ideas and new words are born from the interaction of these foreign words and her own.
During long and quiet days, the Reader wonders what other languages are out there. She knows about Metrolingua, the language of thousands, some that inhabit relatively close and others far away from her community. She also has wondered with her peers in Dozenese about languages that would go even further, were there really millions other people in the Library. If they could talk to each other despite the distances, what language would they share? What would be the perfect language for so many?
She has mused about these possibilities here and there, yet her temperament always guides her back towards solitude, towards her perfect book and her Perfect Language. It is there where her dreams can go the furthest, where her mind knows no limits and she feels the closest to the order of things and the possibilities beyond the Library. She has even considered the possibility that somewhere there might be another speaker of Perfectiolect, but she is afraid that she might be the only one blessed with such a gift.
- The Library of Babel (La Biblioteca de Babel in its original title) is a short story by Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, written in 1941. In this story, he imagines an immeasurable large library that contains all possible 410 pages books that all possible letter combinations that fit within this page-limit can create. Read here. ↩︎
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