Language and the world

According to Claude Duret (writing in 1613), Hebrew alone among the languages preserves the original meanings of language, naming the proper essence of things: “Thus the stork, so greatly lauded for it charity towards it father and its mother, is called in Hebrew Chasida, which is to say, meek, charitable, endowed with pity . . . The horse is named Sus, thought to be from the verb Hasas, unless that verb is rather derived from the noun, and it signifies to rise up, for among all four-footed animals the horse is most proud and brave, as Job depicts it in chapter 39.”

Duret also explains that different alphabetic systems match different aspects of the world. In Foucault’s summary, “Duret points out that the Hebrews, the Canaans, the Samaritans, the Chaldeans, the Syrians, the Egyptians, the Carthaginians, the Phoenicians, the Arabs, the Saracens, the Turks, the Moors, the Persians and the Tartars all write from right to left, following ‘the course and daily movement of the first heaven, which is most perfect, according to the opinion of the great Aristotle, tending towards unity’; the Greeks, the Georgians, the Maronites, the Serbians, the Jacobites, the Copts, the Poznanians, and of course the Romans and all Europeans write from left to right, following ‘the course and movement of the second heaven, home of the seven planets’; the Indians, Cathayans, Chinese, and Japanese write from top to bottom, in conformity with ‘the order fo nature, which has given men heads at the tops of their bodies and feet at the bottom’; ‘in opposition to the aforementioned,’ the Mexicans write either from bottom to top or else in ‘spiral lines, such as those made by the sun in its annual journey through the Zodiac.’ And thus ‘by these five diverse sorts of writing the secrets and mysteries of the world’s frame and the form of the cross, the unity of the heaven’s rotundity and that of the earth, are properly denoted and expressed.’”