If you believe the story of Babel, then at some point in the distant past all people spoke a single universal language. Genesis 11 is one of the really wonderful Biblical stories, and one that very likely predates the concept of monotheism altogether. In it, God (or, God and the host; or, for those more iconoclastic, the gods) sees the tower: ' "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other." So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel [a homonym in Hebrew for the word confused] — because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.'
I love this story. To me, it expresses a primal intuition of the possibility of human intelligence and effort, and the common strength that language provides. I thought of this when I came across Zak Bos' post at the Boston Translation blog, discussing the recent article by John McWhorter on the predominance of English and the extinction of languages. McWhorter writes, 'According to one estimate, a hundred years from now the 6,000 languages in use today will likely dwindle to 600. The question, though, is whether this is a problem.'
Zak Bos responds, 'On behalf of the editors of Pusteblume, with whom I've long discussed this issue, I can answer McWhorter's question affirmatively: the loss of languages is a problem. Whether this loss amounts to a problem depends upon the values of the person considering the loss. Some are untroubled by the destruction of texts, the attrition of cultural practices, and the homogenization that accompanies globalization. [. . . ] If we want to live in a world of diverse traditions and experiences, where human rights are respected, we have to accept the responsibility to support the exercise of those rights. With regard to language, our responsibility is to show value for and provide support to the living use of endangered languages. In other words — conversation, cultural engagement, classroom use and academic study, publication and translation. Every word in a language, and every grammatical tricks employed by that language to use that word, represents the solution to some problem of expression.'
I'm not sure — in fact, I probably disagree — that the right to a language is an inalienable right, one which necessitates enforcement. I'd argue instead that it's a freedom: a right to be free from purposeful eradication and oppression; free to speak and be allowed to thrive — or, as well, to fail. It isn't necessarily a malicious force or the fault of nations or people, this eradication, nor however is it an inevitable or natural progression.
My feelings on this are twinned. On one hand, as a writer and translator (of a near-dead language, no less, in Irish), I sympathize with Zak and those who he quotes in regards to the multiplicity of expression that is being lost: the particular inimitable way of expressing some nuance that exists in no other language; the unique music of its sounds. On the other hand, though, there is this enormous possibility of unprecedented unity in a 'cosmopolitan tongue', as McWhorter puts it; as in the Babel story.
To speak is the desire to be understood. To be universally understood is a feat of holy men and gods: it is an intuitive goal, and ancient one, and this seemingly unattainable quality has always been just out of reach, possible only for more perfect beings. Yet, the idea that we can attain a better world for a common language is just an ideal, an elaboration of this imagined desire — without prescience we simply can't be sure whether this drying up of languages is a famine or a cure.
3 comments:
BosThe most attractive cosmopolitan model to me is one in which a lingua franca, or many, allows mutual understanding while personal multilingualism allows individuals access to as much of the inimitable content of other languages as possible. Christopher Ricks' comments at yesterday's Future of the Book conference (soon to be available as a recording online) touched on this question of unity vs. diversity. He made a distinction, with regard to institutions of higher learning, of schools which are identical and internally diverse, and schools which are dissimilar but diverse among themselves. Do you think it is useful to carry over this kind of distinction to languages? Communities with distinctive language traditions, in which distinction literature can evolve divergently, as against communities with indistinguishable polyglot profiles. I don't know which scenario is likely to more effectively preserve a richer catalog of meanings, but I can see easily that there is likely to be great differences in the numbers and kinds of literary tropes and meanings preserved by these respective systems.
I stated that the loss of languages is a problem. So is the mutual unintelligibility which occurs when peoples don't take the trouble to learn a common speech. My intuition is that the solutions to these are not mutually exclusive.
I like your phrasing: "to be universally understood." As against, "being able to understand universally?" The difference between the two is whether we eliminate languages or each take the trouble to learn them all.... Read More... Read More
My feelings on this are at least treble (and continuing dividing further the more I think about it).
When we exchanged messages about this on Facebook (or was it Facespace? MyBook?), you'd written: "I'm not as concerned with the ideal value-in-itself of languages (the "inimitable content" being lost), I think. It's almost certainly better not to lose them, and wrong to eradicate them. But for me, it's more a question of what benefits people's lives the most, and on that level I'm just not sure. Loss and unintelligibility aren't by nature ... Read Moremutually exclusive, but I think we're unlikely to have a true plurality of languages as well as a true lingua franca. We're too limited on an individual level. We're probably more likely to experience a world-catastrophic event that fragments languages once again than either of those outcomes. Mmm. Depressing. We speak primarily to be understood, not primarily to understand others — but, there is a great usefulness to understanding others, so we do that as well." In response, I want to agree that yes, we speak for such reasons. But but we read to understand, not to be understood.
What I propose is that the most efficient way to maintain access to that understanding which is kept in books, and passed along through an oral culture, is the preservation of a speaking community. This most efficient means is obviously not a cheap or easy means, however.
"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." The Tractatus 5.6
"In this Hopi view, time disappears and space is altered so that it is no longer the homogeneous and instantaneous timeless space of our supposed intuition or of classical Newtonian mechanics. At the same time, new concepts and abstractions flow into the picture, taking up the task of describing the universe without reference to such time or space--abstractions for which our language lacks adequate terms." Benjamin Whorf
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