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

One seminal bilingual was Dante Alighieri (ca. 1265–1321), who wrote the Divine Comedy in the early fourteenth century. As is well known, the Tuscan dialect he used in the work later became the normative written language for Italian, making him the father of the Italian language. He did not write only in Italian, however. He had recourse to Latin when writing prose. In fact, his very defense of the vernacular language, De Vulgari Eloquentia (On eloquence in the vernacular), was written in Latin. Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374) and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), born half a century later, also are regarded as fathers of the Italian language, and they too wrote Latin prose. Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1325), their contemporary across the channel, is often considered the father of English literature, yet even he was versed in Latin and translated the Latin philosopher Boethius. Consider also Luther: his early-sixteenth-century German translation of the Bible — the New Testament was from the original Greek — became the model for today’s German language, while at the same time, having been trained as a monk, he naturally read and wrote Latin on a regular basis, leaving his will in Latin as a matter of course. The Frenchman Joachim du Bellay (ca. 1522–1560), born nearly half a century after Luther, fought for the French language; a member of a group of French Renaissance poets, the Pléiade, he wrote a famous manifesto entitled “The Defense and Illustration of the French Language” that advocated the elevation of the French language to the excellence of classical Greek and Latin. Well versed in Latin, du Bellay not only borrowed expressions from classical literature in his French poems but also wrote poems in Latin. Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), who came a little later, grew up in a home where everyone, including well-chosen servants, spoke Latin just so that he would prattle in that august language from his infancy. And it was the Latin-prattling Montaigne who wrote the essays that laid the foundation for French prose. This bilingualism persisted into the next century. René Descartes’s famous phrase, “I think, therefore I am,” is equally well known in Latin ( Cogito ergo sum ) and in French ( Je pense, donc je suis ), precisely because Descartes (1596–1650) wrote in both languages. These and many more bilingual men were all translators in a broad sense, and it is from their writings that national languages grew into what they are today.

Let us examine this development using the concept of the library. Before the Renaissance, there was only the Latin, or universal, library. And then, with the Renaissance, came the rediscovered Greek library, another universal library. At the same time, the number of books in local languages grew, starting with books in translation, until there eventually came to be many libraries, each in a different European language. A clear hierarchical relationship initially existed between the two universal libraries and the many local libraries, not only because the former enjoyed a higher social status but also because they had accumulated vaster knowledge and hence more texts demanding to be read. Both in quantity and in quality, their collections were far superior. Local languages transformed into national languages as, through translations from the universal to local languages, the accumulated knowledge in the universal libraries was steadily transferred to local libraries. The latter gradually caught up in quantity and quality and eventually surpassed the former — at least insofar as the accumulation of universally applicable knowledge is concerned. Seekers of knowledge who previously haunted the universal libraries now turned increasingly to the libraries of national languages. Indeed, by the late twentieth century, five centuries on, classical education in Latin and Greek had largely disappeared from the school curriculum. The once glorious, flourishing libraries of those universal languages were reduced to cobwebby book deposits frequented only by specialists.

THE EUROPEAN EXCEPTION

Now we are ready to ask the questions: How was it possible to pursue knowledge in disparate languages? Wouldn’t the attempt be self-defeating? What does it mean to pursue scholarship in various national languages?

These questions necessarily lead us to take a look at the Enlightenment, the first intellectual movement to sweep through Europe in different national languages. The movement began to blossom in the late seventeenth century. John Locke (1632–1704) first wrote in Latin but switched to English in midlife. David Hume (1711–1776) and Adam Smith (1723–1790) wrote in English from the beginning. Across the English Channel, Montesquieu (1689–1755), Voltaire (1694–1778), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) all wrote in French. Across the Rhine, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) wrote entirely in German except for the academic papers he needed to obtain his university position. The Age of Enlightenment was when many of the fundamental concepts that define the society we live in first came into being: “human rights,” “natural law,” “separation of powers.” And the thinkers who gave birth to these concepts all wrote in their own language. This being the case, the answer to the question of whether it is really possible to pursue knowledge in various national languages would appear to be a resounding yes. Evidently, it is indeed possible to write exclusively in one’s own language and still enrich all humanity in a critical way.

But our “yes” has an important qualification: the pursuit of knowledge was conducted in diverse languages during the Enlightenment, but they were all European languages .The countries of Europe do not simply share a history, culture, and religion. They also share a language in the sense that nearly all European languages derive from the same origin and then were heavily influenced by Greek and Latin as they matured, allowing them to share abstract concepts. As a result, European intellectuals were able to read more than one foreign language in addition to Latin and Greek as a matter of course. It was only because of this unique linguistic condition, confined geographically to Europe, that they were able to pursue knowledge efficiently even when national languages replaced Latin as a tool for learning.

If we look at the Age of Enlightenment solely from the perspective of the marketplace, as Anderson might do, we see that while sales of books in Latin diminished, sales of books in national languages steadily increased. This might suggest that as European intellectuals turned away from Latin, they began to read only what was written in their own languages. If, however, we look at the same historical period through the concept of the library rather than the market, we see a very different picture. For even as European intellectuals entered the age of national languages and read less Latin, they did not frequent only the library of their own language. They slipped into and out of other libraries as well. The Enlightenment thinkers I mentioned earlier could read one another’s work in the original and had personal interactions across the channel or the Rhine.

Moreover, three principal languages that became the de facto universal languages of Europe compensated for the lack of a universal language: French, English, and a newcomer, German. (Though widely used under the reign of the Hapsburgs, German became a national language only in the eighteenth century, when hundreds of small nations were consolidated into the Kingdom of Prussia.) Other key languages — Danish, for instance — also came to bear double duty as national and universal languages in their own regions, but eventually, to reduce the time and effort spent on language study, European intellectuals settled on a tripolar system with French, English, and German as the main means of exchange. Once translated into one of these three languages, books originally written in less major languages became available to a wide readership. (Naturally, when Europe expanded its colonies, intellectuals worldwide set out to learn the three languages — with heroic, heartbreaking effort.)