![Natural and artificial language](/images/per_testi/ling%20nat%20e%20art.jpg "Illustration by S. Dalí, from the exhibition "Dante Illustrated Through the Centuries" – Gallerie Estensi (Modena), September 2021–January 2022.")
Italo Calvino wrote in Mondo scritto e mondo non scritto (1983): «The moment my attention shifts from the regular order of written lines to follow the shifting complexity that no sentence can contain or exhaust, I feel close to understanding that on the other side of words lies something trying to break free from silence, to find meaning through language — like someone knocking on a prison wall.»
In the article Una lingua senza corpo (A Disembodied Language), published on “Il Sole 24 Ore”'s blog Incontri di confine, psychiatrist and psychotherapist Giuliano Castigliego compares aspects of human verbal language with the verbal language currently characteristic of artificial intelligence, highlighting fundamental differences: «Before Dante, the Divine Comedy was not a foreseeable possibility contained within earlier literature. [...] Dante does not merely create a work; he creates a language. He does not limit himself to using Italian; he helps create it in order to express things that the language had never said before. Thus, Dante constantly pushes language beyond its limits—coining words, blending registers, and introducing Latinisms, neologisms, technical terms, and colloquialisms. While LLMs statistically gravitate toward the center, Dante moves toward the edges and transcends them. LLMs seek the probable word; Dante seeks the word that does not yet exist.» Might we then say that Dante was searching for words for that which was knocking "on a prison wall"— something that, conversely, is now being solidified by the conservative tendency characterizing the verbal language of artificial intelligence?
G. Castigliego’s article also refers to contemporary neuroscientific studies on the relationship between language and the body.
