Minae Mizumura - The Fall of Language in the Age of English

On a theoretical level, we can trace Anderson’s blindness to his (mis)understanding of what he calls “sacred languages.” In his terminology, sacred languages are what we have been calling “external languages”—the languages of old, great civilizations that exerted influence on their neighbors. They are the universal languages of the past. In Anderson’s words, long before the birth of nation-states, much of humanity belonged to “religiously imagined communities”: Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism (though Confucianism is not a religion). And it was sacred languages that made membership in such communities possible: Latin of the Christian Bible, Arabic of the Qur’an, Pali and Sanskrit of Buddhist scriptures, and Chinese of both Buddhist scriptures and texts like the Analects of Confucius. The Hellenistic Greek of the Greek philosophers, as well as other influential languages, may also be included among them.

What was the distinctive character of these sacred languages? For Anderson, a sacred language like Latin was not only “a language of bilinguals” but, more important, a language used by a minority: “Relatively few were born to speak [Latin] and even fewer, one imagines, dreamed in it.” His understanding that a sacred language was used by bilinguals leads him directly and inescapably to the understanding that it was used by only a small number of people, a minority he refers to as the “elite” or “high intelligentsia.”

In fact, “arcane” is Anderson’s word of choice in describing Latin, the sacred language of Europe. He repeatedly uses the word to emphasize his understanding of a sacred language as one that is comprehensible to only a few. The word itself derives from the Latin arcanus , which means “closed” or “hidden”; arcanus in turn derives from arca , meaning “a chest.” Thus if the sacred language is “arcane,” texts written in it are, for the vast majority of people, hidden in “a chest”—or, to use the expression of the Internet age, something people cannot access. Because of this “arcane” nature, the sacred language inevitably came to be abused by the literate minority, who constituted “adepts, strategic strata in a cosmological hierarchy of which the apex was divine.” To hold on to their power, these people kept the acts of reading and writing “arcane.” Indeed, for a thousand years, translating the Latin Bible into other languages was forbidden. Anderson points out that even at the dawn of the Reformation, the Roman papacy, struggling to protect its Latin fortress, compiled the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of prohibited books) to prevent the spread of vernacular publications. In Imagined Communities , sacred languages thus end up as a villainous tool through which past oppressors tried to entrap the masses in ignorance.

Here, I think, is where Anderson stops too short. Even if a sacred language such as Latin came to function as an instrument of oppression by the few, that is not where its essence lay. Anderson, blessed with having a universal language as his mother tongue, could afford not to see any further. In fact, a sacred language is open, quite the opposite of arcane, and this openness indeed is the defining trait of a universal language . For though comprehensible to only a limited number of bilinguals, sacred language made it possible for bilinguals speaking diverse languages and living in diverse places during the millennium of Latin’s ascendancy to communicate with one another in writing. Sacred language was the sole common language, the sole means of understanding one another, in a world of countless vernaculars. Far from being “hidden in a chest,” a sacred language was actually a language open to the world.

WHAT IS A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE?

Let me depart from Imagined Communities here and return to my initial question: What is a universal language? I consider it to be the language that most clearly defines the difference between written language and spoken language. A spoken word disappears into thin air the moment it is uttered. In contrast, a written word remains and can be copied. Not only can it be copied, but it also can be spread. The Rosetta Stone, onto which three ancient writings are carved, weighs approximately 760 kilograms (1,675 pounds) and cannot be moved by the mightiest of men. If successive generations always had to travel across oceans and mountains to Egypt to read what was carved on it, the Rosetta Stone would have made hardly any impact on humanity. The advent of parchment and paper made the written word something that could be copied again and again and spread afar, reaching speakers of different languages in distant lands, some of whom would learn to read and then to write that “external language”—the universal language. It is thanks to these characteristics specific to written words that humans have had the means to accumulate a wealth of knowledge over the centuries.

Homo sapiens means “wise man.” And we humans are wise not only because we are more intelligent than other animals, but also because we seek knowledge and can hand down the knowledge we attain to following generations, through words. The invention of written language did not make us any more intelligent, but it allowed us to accumulate knowledge exponentially — which brings us to this conclusion: if all people in the world read and wrote a single written language, regardless of their spoken language, our pool of knowledge would expand most efficiently. I’m not here referring to all sorts of knowledge, but to knowledge with more or less universal applicability. In fact, the more universally applicable knowledge is, the more efficient it would be to expand it in a single written language. Our pursuit of knowledge in mathematics, the purest of the sciences, is conducted in a single common written language, the language of mathematics. This written language is comprehensible everywhere in the world, no matter what language a person speaks. Mathematical language, which isn’t anyone’s mother tongue, is the purest form of universal language.

No one knows for certain the origin of written language. It may have been invented to record trade, or it may have its roots in magical rituals. Yet one thing is clear: the birth of a writing system is extremely rare. Most of the writing systems that exist today are derived from some script that became a template for future variations. For the overwhelming majority of humans, written language was not something that they invented on their own but rather something that came to them from their neighbors.

Every culture begins as an oral culture, and at some point, some of them have a transformative first encounter with a writing system. Yet the transformation from oral culture to written does not take place just because a writing system arrives one day from next door. People do not immediately say, “My, my, here we have this wonderful thing, now let’s try using it to write our own language,” and suddenly create a written culture. Possession of a spade and a hoe does not turn people into farmers overnight; becoming a farmer requires an understanding of the meaning of farming. The principle is even truer when it comes to something as complicated as writing. Besides, what initially arrives from a neighboring community is not writing as an abstract entity but concrete items such as scrolls with writing on them. And the transformation of a culture from oral to written requires that a small number of people learn to read those scrolls, written in the “external language.” It requires the emergence of a cadre of bilinguals.

Those scrolls may come in different ways: from enemies in war, from partners in trade, or from refugees arriving in waves. They may be brought as gifts from an emperor, carried preciously above the messenger’s head; or by monks as part of their missionary enterprise; or yet again as words of heresy hidden deep in the pockets of exiles. Yet scrolls, even if they are placed in a golden box, differ from other treasures in a critical way. They surely need to exist as physical objects, but without the act of reading, they are nothing more than sheets of parchment or paper decorated with dots and squiggles. The essence of the written word lies not in the written word itself but in the act of reading .