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

The same was true of thinkers in what is now called the humanities. Erasmus (1466–1536), the author of In Praise of Folly and one of the greatest Humanists, played a major role in Europe’s shift from a religious world to a secular one. He was born in the Netherlands but lived, studied, and taught all over Europe — Paris, Leuven, Cambridge, Venice, Turin, Freiburg, and Basel. He exchanged an astonishing volume of correspondence in Latin with politicians and philosophers throughout Europe, becoming friends with Thomas More (1478–1535) while disagreeing with Martin Luther (1483–1546). Not only Erasmus — and More and Luther — but many others wrote their major works in Latin: Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), who was born in England; Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), a descendant of Sephardic Portuguese Jews who was born in the Netherlands; Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), who was born in what is now Germany.

These men were all great seekers of knowledge whose names are familiar throughout the world. Yet rarely do we note that they all wrote in Latin. Scholarly writings generally have value independent of the language in which they are written. Moreover, because these men wrote in Latin, we often have only a vague idea of what country they were from or what their mother tongue was.

All this leads us to a simple conclusion: pursuing knowledge in disparate languages is uneconomical; a universal language is more efficient by far. Nonetheless, as we are all too aware, human society comprises many disparate languages; to quote Benedict Anderson again, we live with “the fatality of human linguistic diversity.” And uneconomical though it may be to pursue knowledge in disparate languages, we humans started doing just that at a certain point in our history — that is, since the birth of national languages and nation-states. Before we ask how it was possible for people to pursue knowledge in disparate languages, we must first have a better understanding of what a national language is. And before we do so, we must first have a better understanding of what a local language is. The roles of these three kinds of languages can be grasped only in relation to one another.

Both theoretically and historically, a local language is a concept that forms a binary with, and is juxtaposed against, a universal language . People may live in a society where a cadre of bilinguals read, write, and sometimes even speak a universal language, but even those bilinguals use their mother tongue at home and on the streets like everyone else. That is their local language. Whether the local language has a writing system is irrelevant. What is relevant is that when two languages, the universal and the local, circulate simultaneously in a given society, there inevitably emerges a division of labor between them. The universal, which society places above the local, is assigned the heavy responsibility of aspiring to the highest excellence, not only aesthetically but also intellectually and ethically. In contrast, even if it has a writing system, the lower-ranking local language is primarily intended for only uneducated men and women. Plays, which must be understood by the listening audience, are usually written in local language, as are poems, which are often sung, but serious prose written in local language is extremely rare. A local language may at times be given the task of aspiring to aesthetic or even ethical excellence, but seldom if ever to intellectual excellence.

What, then, is a national language? I would say that it is an elevated form of a local language. And what has elevated local languages, thereby providing the key to the birth of a national language? The perhaps surprising answer I would propose is the act of translation .The role of translation has been under valued or, worse, ignored in our understanding of the history of human languages, especially in modernity, when emphasis is placed on the author as the original subject of meaning. Yet it was through the very act of translation that what had once merely been a local language came to function on the same level as a universal language; that is, it came to be burdened with the task of aspiring to the highest excellence not only aesthetically and ethically but also intellectually. Hence the birth of a national language. While the birth of nation-states was a historical prerequisite for the emergence of national languages, this rather formalistic understanding of how national languages are born helps to better explain their nature.

Because we are deeply immersed in what might be called the “ideology of national language”—because we have so deeply internalized the premise that writing is a representation of speech — we have come to assume that writing means writing in one ’ s own language . And because of that assumption, we have come to forget the critical role that the act of translation originally played in the development of national language. Historically, translation was necessarily an asymmetrical endeavor (as it still is, in its essence). It assumed the existence of a clear hierarchy between two languages. It was not about translating English into French or German, say, but about translating Latin (the universal language) into various vernacular languages of Europe. For the essence of translation lies first and foremost in the transference of accumulated knowledge otherwise inaccessible — and by extension, ways of thinking otherwise impossible — from a universal language into a lower one, the local language. Through repeated transference, a local language gradually and eventually developed a written language capable of functioning on the same level as the universal language. And so, along with the nation-state, national languages were born.

A caveat. As a novelist, I myself find it unsettling to define the act of translation in such terms. Translating literature is an artistic task that cannot possibly be reduced to the mere transference of knowledge or ways of thinking; indeed, translation can even result in a text of a higher level of excellence than the original. Yet if we take a step back and reflect on the history of human writing, it is difficult to deny that such was its principal function.

With this in mind, let us return to western Europe, where nation-states first emerged, and see how, at the same time, national languages emerged from Latin. Our picture looks quite different from the one Anderson depicts in Imagined Communities . Because Anderson tries to understand the process in terms of market mechanisms, he basically sees the relationship between Latin and the “vernacular” in terms of numbers: after the small Latin market came the large vernacular market for the “monoglot masses.” This description, though certainly not untrue, ignores the critical role played by the act of translation. It makes it seem as if some members of the monoglot masses just went on to write books in their own language to fill the ever-expanding market, when it was translations from Latin that first appeared — a fact he glosses over. Soon books written in vernaculars began to appear, and they themselves were then translated into Latin so that they could be read by bilinguals with a different mother tongue. Through this vibrant two-way process, local languages transformed into national languages in the course of a few hundred years.

Just as the role of translators has been undervalued or ignored in the history of written language, so has the role of bilinguals. If the act of translation was key to the transformation of local languages into national languages, the work of these bilinguals was no less so. Bilinguals were not necessarily translators in a literal sense. Often they were writers who wrote in both universal and local languages. And if national language owed its birth to universal language, it is perhaps no wonder that so many of those who are considered the father of a national language were themselves true bilinguals (or trilinguals even, especially if we include classical Greek).