Dear Umberto

I am slogging happily through Eco's Essay on Language and Cognition. Even my dictionary doesn't make reading much easier since so much is in Latin. He's a bloody genius and so interesting - too bad I can't understand everything. The first several chapters deal with being. Can being be defined by language. Can it be thought of in negative terms? What are the limits of being? How does the essence of something change when defined in another language? Is language discreet or continuous? Well, it certainly is food for thought though I leave each page hungry for more.