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

Something critical happens when the cadre of bilinguals learns to read imported scrolls: they gain entry into a library . I use the word “library” to refer not to a physical building but, more broadly, to the collectivity of accumulated writings. Despite the historical vicissitudes of wars, fires, floods, and even book burnings, humans possess an ever-increasing store of writings, the totality of which is what I call the library .The transformation of an oral culture into a written one means, first and foremost, the potential entry of bilinguals into a library.

The importance of access to a library cannot be overemphasized. For if, after being introduced to writing, Homo sapiens became “wise men” on a totally different level, this change certainly did not come about because people were able to memorize all they read. The memory of an elderly sage in an oral culture would surely trump that of any bilingual in a written culture. No, what transformed Homo sapiens into those with knowledge on a higher level was people’s newfound ability to enter, through the act of reading, the library of accumulated human knowledge. And doing so usually meant reading a universal language, necessitating that the reader be bilingual.

Some may object to this statement, pointing out, for instance, that the ancient Romans read and wrote the same Latin that they spoke. Such an objection is founded on the familiar, false premise that written language is a mere representation of spoken language. It ignores the fact that before those Romans began to read and write in Latin, they read and wrote in Koine Greek — a language that combined different dialects with Attic Greek, the Athenian dialect — which was then the universal language of the area around the eastern Mediterranean Sea. If Cato the Elder (234–149 B.C.E.) had not begun writing Latin prose, the Romans might well have continued to write in Greek. Educated Romans naturally remained bilingual even in the golden age of Latin literature. Any description of the prose of Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.) or Seneca (ca. 4 B.C.E.–65 C.E.) as “literary” is also founded on the premise that written language is a direct representation of spoken language — a premise that until modern times no one entertained even with their own language.

Needless to say, there was not just one library but various libraries in different regions, according to the reigning universal language. And all these various libraries initially centered on the most important written words of each region, the sacred texts — records of words uttered or written by those believed to have attained the kind of knowledge impossible for ordinary human beings to attain: Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, Christ, and Mohammad among them. For those who sought higher knowledge, the sacred texts were the “texts to read.”

Now a question emerges: What kind of people want to read a universal language, a language that is often quite dissimilar to the one they speak? To put it another way, what kind of people go to the considerable trouble of becoming bilingual to gain entry to the library of an “external language”? In fact, all human beings seek knowledge from the time of birth. In all corners of the world, children start school with eager eyes. Yet those for whom becoming bilingual is essential, the ones I call “seekers of knowledge,” are a breed apart.

Seekers of knowledge do not necessarily have noble minds; they are not necessarily courageous or fair or kind. They are simply driven by a stronger desire than others to know more. Historically, becoming bilingual required a high level of education. Those who could afford such an education were men of the privileged class. Even in that limited strata, those for whom becoming bilingual was essential were extremely few. Nonetheless, those few have existed in every stage of history, in every region of the world. And the “texts to read” accumulate further as some of those bilinguals begin not only to read but also to write .

For bilinguals, in the beginning, sacred texts were not only the texts they ought to read — or, more probably, to chant or recite. They were also something to reverently copy by hand. Yet as the seekers of knowledge read and copied the sacred texts, they were bound to take up writing themselves. Some would inevitably be tempted to write down their interpretations as addenda. Others would then be tempted to add their own interpretations as further addenda. And as such notes grew in volume, they would be compiled as hermeneutic texts. Soon there would be many hermeneutic texts, and later seekers of knowledge would try to discern which among them were superior; they would eventually turn those into new sacred texts and objects of interpretation, and start creating new hermeneutic texts about them. Later seekers of knowledge would do the same ad infinitum, creating a longer and longer chain of texts to be read. The act of writing that led to this accumulation of sacred texts was derivative of the act of reading, but the process was inevitable.

Universal language was the perfect medium for such a process to unfold. Though universal language is often used in trade for the sake of convenience, or in diplomacy to follow the dictates of custom or international law, its essence comes to light when it is used in the pursuit of knowledge. The validity of the knowledge one has acquired becomes apparent only through attaining the assessment of as many fellow seekers of knowledge as possible, a purpose best served by universal language. Before modernity, much of learning was confined to exegesis of sacred texts — in a word, theology. And theology, as the pursuit of knowledge, was carried out in various universal languages in various regions of the world.

THE ROLE OF LATIN AND THE BIRTH OF NATIONAL LANGUAGES IN EUROPE

When we examine western Europe and the role Latin played there as the language used in the pursuit of knowledge, a very different picture emerges from the one portrayed in Imagined Communities .The period that interests us starts just before the Renaissance, when Europeans were being reexposed — often through Holy Wars — via Arabic translation to Greek philosophy, which had lapsed into oblivion in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire and was preserved only in Islamic territories. Arabic translations were then translated into Latin. Through the writings of great scholars like Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), Latin became a highly speculative language, one that could easily step beyond the boundaries of theology. Then with the waning of the power of the Church came the Renaissance. No longer confined to the sphere of Christian theology, Latin began functioning as the language of learning in totally different dimensions, playing a crucial role in Europe’s bid to become the world’s dominant power.

One such dimension was the natural sciences. As is evident from the phrase “Copernican Revolution,” Nicolaus Copernicus made one of the truly great discoveries in the history of the human race: he found the contradictions in Scholastic geocentrism and advocated heliocentrism. He was born in 1473 in what is now Poland. Later, in 1609, sixty-six years after Copernicus’s death, Galileo Galilei proved the veracity of heliocentrism using the telescope. Galileo was born in what is now Italy, more than 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) from Copernicus’s Polish home. 3Then came Johannes Kepler, Galileo’s contemporary who defended his theory. Kepler was born in what is now Germany. Finally, in 1687, Isaac Newton provided mathematical proofs for the findings of both Galileo and Kepler. Newton was born across the channel, in England. The most important route traveled by modern science — from Copernicus to Newton — was a long journey that crisscrossed Europe, starting in Poland, moving through Italy and Germany, and reaching England nearly two centuries later. And this journey was made possible solely thanks to Latin: all these men published their major works in that universal language.