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

Needless to say, all information will be interlinked. With the swipe of a finger, you will be able to link to everything ever written about “petabytes,” and then with another click, link to everything written on everything you encountered in the course of learning about petabytes. (The Internet informs me that a gigabyte is 2 30, a terabyte is 2 40, and a petabyte is 2 50.) Thus the chain of information expands infinitely — an idea already familiar to us.

Meanwhile, new technologies that make the Internet even more useful and interesting pop up almost daily; the Internet is now almost like a part of our natural environment. The same is true with the notion of the Library. It now seems only too logical that such a Library should exist. Yet there is one consequence of these developments that Kelly does not properly examine: how people’s way of accessing the Library will further affect our use of language. I will not discuss the controversial issue of intellectual property that he raises. Nor will I discuss how easy it has proved to be for some governments to abuse the power of the Internet by boldly blocking certain information or secretly invading people’s privacy. What I want to do is to refocus our attention on the question of written language.

Kelly is full of enthusiasm as he discusses the revolutionary nature of what he calls the universal library. Until now, those with easy access to a library of any scale have been privileged, often the residents of college towns or big cities. But no more: “[U]nlike the libraries of old, which were restricted to the elite, this library would be truly democratic, offering every book to every person.” Once the universal library is realized, those who benefit the most will be the underprivileged — Kelly calls them the “underbooked”—billions around the world who do not have access to books in their physical form. “It is these underbooked — students in Mali, scientists in Kazakhstan, elderly people in Peru — whose lives will be transformed when even the simplest unadorned version of the universal library is placed in their hands.” All this sounds quite wonderful. Yet a critical question has not been asked.

In what language, really, will these people, “students in Mali, scientists in Kazakhstan, elderly people in Peru,” access this universal library? In Kelly’s long article, there are only two places that touch on the question of language. And both of them simply mention that the universal library will contain “all languages.” Kelly’s goodwill toward the underbooked is admirable, but here again, I am astounded by the naïveté of someone highly intelligent whose mother tongue is English — someone who is not condemned to reflect on language.

To be sure, one day the Library will come to contain “the entire works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages, available to all people, all the time.” Yet when Kelly wrote these words, it is unlikely that he meant literally that we will all be able to access the “entire works of humankind” by reading “all languages.” More likely, he just assumed that the universal library would include all the languages that people, including the underbooked, could read, and stopped there.

Yes, no matter what your native tongue is, the Library/Internet allows you to see human pictorial, sculptural, and architectural accomplishments around the world: cave paintings in Altamira, statues in Angkor Wat, a mosque in the Alhambra. It also allows you to listen to musical accomplishments from Gregorian chant to the gamelan to Gershwin. People can all appreciate, to varying degrees, whatever appeals to their own visual and auditory senses. Language, however, is a different matter. Unless people can read it, written language is meaningless — a mere collection of dots and squiggles. Even if the universal library were to materialize tomorrow, people could use it to enter only the library of the particular language they can read. The Library will hold a great number of isolated libraries walled off by tall barriers of language. The towering exception will be the library in the English language — a library accessible not only to native speakers but also to a growing number of bilinguals for whom English is an “external language.” It is inevitable that the English library will function on a different level from all the rest.

The virtually unfathomable naïveté of those whose mother tongue is English is further revealed in Kelly’s reference to a similar project that is concurrently taking place in China. From the way Kelly describes the Chinese project, it seems as if the two great powers of the twenty-first century are engaged in a similar adventure. Yet their situations are quite different if you think twice about it. According to Kelly, a Chinese company called Superstar has already scanned all the books from two hundred libraries in China; this includes “1.3 million unique titles in China, which [Superstar] estimates is about half of all the books published in the Chinese language since 1949.” Chinese libraries may have quickly accumulated an impressive number of books from abroad in recent years, but given the country’s history, one could hardly expect these libraries to be comparable to those that participated in the Google Library Project from the outset: the libraries of Stanford, Harvard, Michigan, and Oxford, as well as the New York Public Library. Moreover, a preponderance of the books will be in Mandarin — the language with the greatest number of speakers, but not a universal language. As for “1.3 million unique titles” published in Mandarin since 1949 —that is, since the establishment of Communist rule — what can we say? The Google Library Project will likely result in a library accessed by bilinguals from all over the world, including China. In contrast, it is all too evident that Superstar will become a library used by hardly anyone other than the Chinese — or scholars who specialize in China.

Moreover, in the age of the Internet, when it comes to making a library useful for those who seek knowledge, content is only half the story. The English-language library, which may already be the world’s richest, will grow still richer as an increasing number of nonnative speakers begin to write in English. But this utopia will also be a nightmare of flooding information. Science may one day extend the average human life expectancy to 120 years, but even so, human life is ephemeral. Given our limited time, we need to know what books are more worth reading than others. For seekers of knowledge, the question is urgent. The Library will therefore have to excel in its rating system, its ability to inform users which are the “texts to read.”

Unlike Latin, English has the double function of being at once a universal and a national language. As in libraries of other national languages, most items that enter the English-language library via the Internet probably will be no more than “chats.” Yet the English library, as the library of a universal language, will be accessed by seekers of knowledge from all over the world. Hence the imperative for it to come up with a rating system of the highest rigor, one of a completely different order from a mere popularity contest. Such a ranking system will have to renew itself continually; a ranking system of ranking systems will thus also have to emerge. English-language readers, whether bilinguals or English-only monoglots, will then be able to enjoy an unparalleled feast.

Wait, an idealist might say. Just because someone is a non-English-reading monoglot, that is no reason for him or her to be deprived of access to the English library with all its advantages; in fact, we can make the Internet truly open to the world: we can make it possible for all people to read all languages . The logical solution, our idealist will say, is machine translation of natural languages. The task has proved to be far more difficult than originally envisioned, but people’s efforts are slowly bearing fruit. Computer translation will no doubt become increasingly useful in the future, especially for translations between related languages. To think, however, that it will someday replace human translators is just as unrealistic as to think that the spread of audiovisual technology will someday make live musical performances passé.