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

What comes to the fore as Europe enters the age of national languages is, first of all, a fundamental asymmetry between the act of reading and the act of writing. Reading several foreign languages was one thing, but writing in all of them would require either extraordinary virtuosity or staggering effort. Hence, in contrast to the millennium when Latin ruled, the Enlightenment was a time when intellectuals read and wrote in different languages. They became polyglot readers and monoglot writers who wrote in their mother tongue.

This development would have far-reaching consequences. Humans have made great discoveries in the course of history. I would not go so far as to suggest that the emergence of national languages is of equal importance to the discovery of fire or the invention of money or writing. Nevertheless, the spread of the notion that our writing system ought to represent the language we speak was a critical step in the evolution of human civilization.

First, this notion led to far higher rates of literacy among populations — a prerequisite for the emergence of democracy, itself a prerequisite for the formation of modern nation-states. (Even nations that are in fact totalitarian promote literacy in order to uphold the banner of “democracy.”) The acts of reading and writing were now within the reach of every citizen who spoke the language. Literacy rates climbed even higher as spoken language came to resemble written language more closely.

Moreover, together with the emergence of nation-states and nationalism, the democratic nature of national language soon gave rise to the “ideology of national language.” This ideology — best articulated, as we have seen, in Anderson’s quotation of von Herder, “Denn jedes Volk ist Volk; es hat seine National Bildung wie seine Sprache” (For every people is a People; it has its own national character expressed through its own language) — led to the idea that it was an obligation of the educated to write in their own language. By so doing, they would not only enable their compatriots to read what they wrote but simultaneously enrich their national culture. Intellectuals whose mother tongue had not yet fully matured as a written language felt this obligation even more acutely.

What happened in Russia is a case in point. Though the Russian language had a large number of speakers, it was late in establishing itself as a national language, the country being relatively less developed. As is widely known, French was the court language of the Romanov dynasty (1613–1917); it was also the language aristocrats used in everyday conversation. (Tolstoy’s War and Peace opens with a splash of aristocratic French.) Slightly down the scale, high society routinely used French and German and, more rarely, English. Educated Russians hence wrote in one of the three principal languages as a matter of course. First came Alexander Pushkin, the father of modern Russian literature. Born in 1799, he wrote in French when he was young. Yet as the “ideology of national language” spread to Russia, in the 1820s he began writing poetry in Russian, and by the 1830s he was writing prose fiction in Russian as well. Shortly thereafter, with breathtaking speed, came Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852), Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883), Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), and Anton Chekhov (1860–1904). Around the same time, thinkers such as Vissarion Belinski (1811–1848), Alexander Herzen (1812–1870), and Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) also appeared. Thus Russian, which had only a few decades earlier been a mere local language, was transformed into a national language used for the pursuit of learning.

By the mid-nineteenth century, many Europeans came to believe, almost religiously, that they ought to write in their own language even when writing learned books — and even when to do so might pose obvious disadvantages. Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), the Danish philosopher who paved the way for existentialism in the twentieth century, offers such an example. An avid reader of German literature, Kierkegaard could doubtless have written in German, a language closely resembling his mother tongue. Yet he made a point of writing his critique of Hegelian philosophy in Danish, a major language to be sure but not in the same league as German. Because he wrote in his mother tongue, his works such as Fear and Trembling ( Frygt og Bæven ) bear a highly personal flavor. Yet confining himself to Danish also meant that he had no inkling during his lifetime that his writings would be grouped with the classics, the “texts to read.” Only through posthumous German translations did the rest of Europe come to know that such an eccentric figure had lived and written in a Nordic kingdom, questioning God in a most devout way.

One point still needs to be emphasized: the relative ease of translation among European languages. Through translations into one of the three principal languages, the works of Kierkegaard did ultimately enter the chain of “texts to read,” first in Europe and then in the world. Danish is, after all, a European language. Over the centuries, European languages have become mutually translatable with minimal loss of meaning. Compared with a language like Japanese, Danish is infinitely closer to German or English — or even French.

All this might sound too crude to those who are aware of what seems like insurmountable differences among European languages. I myself cannot imagine reading Pride and Prejudice in French with the same pleasure that I find when reading it in English, or reading Le Rouge et le noir in English with the same pleasure that I find when reading it in French. In his famous essay “The Task of the Translator” (1923), the German literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin discusses how German Brot and French pain , both of which may be glossed as “bread,” do not mean the same thing. Nonetheless, the difference between Brot and pain , however critical, cannot compare with the difference between, say, English “rice” and Japanese ine —the latter having been lyricized and mythicized for well over a millennium in Japanese culture. Numerous poems with the word ine , including love poems, are compiled in Ten Thousand Leaves ( Man’yōshū ), the first Japanese poetry collection, dating back to the eighth century, and Japanese emperors still go through the ceremony of planting rice and harvesting it, a tradition said to have begun in the sixth century. A language such as Japanese is thus a world apart from those of Europe, where all the societies are culturally and linguistically kindred. To put it in terms of colors, if the Japanese language were red, then all European languages would be some shade of blue.

Thanks to this kinship among European languages and cultures, by the turn of the century and on into the twentieth century, learned books written in various languages entered the chain of “texts to read”: The Revolt of the Masses , written in Spanish in 1930 by José Ortega y Gasset; Prison Notebooks , written in Italian from 1929 to 1935 by Antonio Gramsci; Homo Ludens , written in Dutch in 1938 by Johan Huizinga, to name just a few. That all these Europeans wrote in their own languages does not contradict our basic assumption about how knowledge spreads. Looking at the long history of humanity, we see that what took place in Europe at this time was an anomaly, which helps us better understand the fundamental nature of a universal language.

Balance, once it begins to keel, swiftly collapses. Once England, and then the United States, began to possess superior national power, the world’s balance of power began to visibly shift. Universal languages have a self-sustaining capacity, so the tripolar system of English, French, and German continued for some time; but as English began to gain the upper hand, the essential connection between the pursuit of knowledge and universal language became undeniably clear.