Nor should what we say appear any more strange than to see a young person grown up, whom we do not see grow up: for what moves gradually is not at all recognized by us, and the longer something needs for its change to be recognized the more stable we think it is. So we are not surprised if the opinion of men, who are little distant from brutes, is that a given city has existed always with the same language, since the change in language in a city happens gradually only over a very long succession of time, and the life of men is also, by its very nature, very short. Therefore if over one people the language changes, as has been said, successively over time, and can in no way stand still, it is necessary that it should vary in various ways quite separately from what remains constant, just as customs and dress vary in various ways, which are confirmed neither by nature or society, but arise at human pleasure and to local taste. This was the motive of the inventors of the faculty of grammatica: for grammatica is nothing but the identity of speech unalterable for diverse times and places.8
Besides this work in Latin, Dante wrote another one, the Convivio or ‘Banquet’, in Italian—not a poem, but a prose work aimed at explaining some of his earlier poems, but at the same time educating people who could not read Latin: ‘I was motivated by the fear of infamy, and I was motivated by the desire to give teaching such as others truly cannot.’9
This was the beginning of the end of Latin’s monopoly on learned information. Henceforth, there would be no field of discourse or function of speech reserved for it. Latin, the language of the grammar books, once felt to be eternal but now recognised as artificial, faced ever increasing competition from spoken languages being committed to writing. It began to die.
* The word idioma was a borrowing into Latin from Greek idíōma, ‘peculiarity’, while grammatica was of course the name of the school subject in which everyone learnt their Latin,
† It was Alcuin who instituted the systematic difference between capital and lower-case letters, which has lasted in Roman scripts (such as the English used in this book) to this day.
* For God’s love and the Christian people and our common salvation, from this day forward, insofar as God gives me knowledge and power, I shall so keep this my brother Charles both in aid and in every thing as when a man in right his brother should keep…
* Dante (De vulgari eloquentia, viii.l) distinguishes Greek from the Germanic languages, and also from the Romance. His criterion (the word for ‘yes’—jo in Germanic) would tend to split up the Romance languages into at least three groups (oc, oil, sì), but he notes that they have a large amount of basic vocabulary in common: ’quia multa per eadem vocabula nominare videntur, ut Deum, caelum, amorem, mare, terram, est, vivit, moritur, amat, alia fere omnia’; ‘because they seem to name many things with the same words: God, sky, love, sea, earth, is, lives, dies, loves, and almost everything else.’
Surprisingly, Dante sees oc as marking Spanish Romance, not the Provençal of southern France (known anyway as Langue d’oc). Perhaps he was affected by Provençal’s similarity to Catalan.
PART III: LANGUAGES BY SEA
And who, in time, knows whither we may vent
The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores
This gain of our best glory shall be sent,
To enrich unknowing nations with our stores?
What worlds in the yet unformèd Occident
May come refined with accents that are ours?
from Samuel Daniel, Musophilus (1599)
DAVID: What newes? haue you heard nothing of the coming of any ship?
ABRAHAM: I heard the thundering of Ordnance, which is a signe of ships coming.
D.: And I heard that a shippe was come from Guiserat.
A.: And what Marchandizes doth she bring?
D.: She is laden with rice, almonds and raysons, she bringeth also many cloathes of all sortes, and very much bombace.
A.: Is this so? surely this news is very much desired.
D.: I heard it so affirmed for a truth.
DAOEDT: Appa ach gabar? tieda ga-barbarou derribarang cappal?
EBRAHIM: Souda beta denga’r boenij bedil, iang itoe alamat derri cappal dagang.
D.: Lagihamba deng’ar catta iang satoe cappal derri Guiserat souda datan.
E.: Appa peruiniága debaua dia?
D.: Ini ber’isi, ken bras, ken gorma, zebibt; lagi bauadia bania káyin alus derri samoe’ aieni: lagicapas bania.
E.: Begitou? itoe gabar bania baick.
D.: Ia beta deng’ar catta sach begitoe.
Augustine Spaulding, Dialogues in the English and Malaiane Languages, 1614, pp. 1-21
9
The Second Death of Latin
The discovery by the western Europeans that their ships could cross oceans, and bring them directly to distant lands, whether for trade or outright conquest and exploitation, opens a new era in the global history of language spread. All too often, the language communities at the destinations of European shipping proved unable to mount effective military, or political, resistance to the adventuring invaders. When this happened, the victims were frequently decimated, and always forced to submit to a new elite. The spread of languages through the dominance of the new elites was far more pervasive than anything that had been seen before. The results are evident today in the presence of six colonising languages in the list of the world’s top ten languages by population.*
The Romance half of these colonising languages, as we have just seen, owed their very existence to the changes that came over the Roman empire after its western regions were dissolved by the Germanic conquests; the decline in mutual intelligibility, and the redefinition of Latin or grammatica, to be no longer just their written form but a language separate from them, had led to their development as vehicles of a different sort of community. This community was less intellectual, but often as rich culturally as the Church, which continued to rely on Latin, spoken and written.1
Yet before these languages began their accelerated progress round the world, there came an epoch-making development, which emphasised and reinforced the spread of literacy in western Europe. It widened the range of competition between Latin and the vernacular languages, including the Romance ones, and massively raised the stakes in the contest. The result was the dethronement of Latin as the lingua franca of western Christendom: in effect its death, after two millennia, as a language of any real communication and innovation.
The event was the rise of a mass market in printed books. Like the information revolution reorganising the world in our own time, it was in essence the economic effect of the spread of a new technology. Johannes Gutenberg published his edition of the Bible in Mainz in 1450. Very soon, publishing houses sprang up all over Europe, and by 1475 most of the classic works in Latin were available in print.2 By 1500, 20 million printed volumes had been produced, estimated to correspond to one book for every five people in western Europe.3
Almost at once comes the Reformation, and the rise of Protestant churches opposed to the established Christianity of the Pope in Rome. This, of course, was no coincidence, but a sign that the new book-publishing revolution had broken open the previously well-guarded access to media of communication. Martin Luther’s works, starting theatrically with his ninety-five theses nailed to the church door in Wittenberg in 1517, were printed and distributed in German translation. His translation of the whole Bible soon followed. The output of German-language publishing houses over the 1520s and 1530s was three times the total of the previous twenty years; Luther’s works accounted for 33 per cent of all German-language publications between 1517 and 1525.4
The tide of new, unfiltered, information was too much for some. In France in 1535, King François I—briefly, and without effect—declared the printing of any books at all a capital offence. The Vatican, more circumspectly, set up the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, first so named in 1559. But the flow was not stemmed. The important effect was that the channels of long-distance and high-level discourse were switching from oral diffusion at
court and university, mediated through manuscript messages, to written distribution of mass-produced texts. Latin had retained its domination as the vehicle of the old-style communications, but under the weight of sheer volume it now yielded to the new. Books might be printed in Latin as well as any other language, and those that were might be expected to enjoy a wider circulation for being written in an international language; but the economics of the book trade remaindered them, clearing its shelves for books in vernacular languages, which would sell in large quantities nearer to the point of production.5
What was happening was one facet of the growing power of the nation-state in western Europe: the replacement of an international intellectual elite, which provided a common background for different kings’ governments, by a much more vocal and influential bourgeoisie, taking control of their local monarchies and making them serve their more worldly purposes. One linguistic effect of this was to replace Latin with national vernaculars, not just for local purposes but even at the level of the latest research.
Latin remained, in theory, a superior vehicle for high-level intellectual discourse: as a language, it had the vocabulary, built up over more than a thousand years of thought and disputation; and as a community, it had the reach, since scholars from all over the west of Europe were accustomed to talking, thinking and writing in it. Each vernacular, by contrast, had to build up equivalent strengths little by little from a much smaller base.
But wherever there was a riot, or a market, the vernaculars had the force of numbers on their side; and the religious controversies and wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries showed that intellectual issues were as apt to generate sales booms, riots and civil wars as disputations or dynastic conflicts. It was not until the twentieth century that communications media could penetrate deeply enough for an international language to compete effectively with vernaculars on the street. Modern English has found in broadcasting the answer to the threat that book publishing posed for medieval Latin.
Intellectual life conducted in Latin gradually fell away. It took about a century to go. Francis Bacon, publishing his Advancement of Learning in English in 1605, wanted to have it translated into Latin ‘to ring a bell to call other wits together … and have that bell heard as far as can be’. It did not actually come out in Latin until 1623, when he remarked: ‘For these modern languages will at one time or another play the bank-rowtes [bankrupts] with books; and since I have lost much time with this age, I would be glad as God shall give me leave to recover it with posterity.’
The last major intellectual work in England to be published in Latin was Newton’s Principia in 1687. Since then, science has in general had to be conducted less conveniently, in a variety of languages. It is the price the modern world has paid to keep scientists and intellectuals more closely in touch with society at large.*
This second death was more profound than Latin’s first. It was not like the vernacular movements of five hundred years before, when Latin had just lost its use as a written disguise for Romance languages. They had moved on from Latin, and apart, in phonetics and structure; trying to access in written form through a Latin overlay was hard work, and increasingly pointless. But even as it made way for vernacular literature, Latin had retained a significant use: it was still the vehicle for the intellectual discourse that went beyond the popular themes being produced (and appreciated) in Romance. Now, Latin was ceasing to be used in any new thinking at all.
It is revealing to compare the final stages in the life of Latin with those of its fellow classic languages, Greek, Chinese and Sanskrit. Each of these languages, after all, represented the unitary linguistic ideals of an area large enough to split into a number of popular varieties. But only Latin ended up largely replaced by the set of its daughter languages.
Greek never put down deep roots in the regions to which it spread; and when these regions were conquered by others, so that Greeks ceased to be their governing elite, Greek was essentially lost in them. The result was that Greek ended up confined to a relatively small region, mostly under a single, authoritarian government. When the government was reduced in power and then ceased to exist, after the Latin and especially the Turkish conquests, the classical norms that had kept the language united were weakened; but when unitary government was returned, it proved possible, gradually, to move to a new, single, standard for the whole language.
Chinese has retained its role as the high-level focus, political and intellectual, for all the communities that speak related dialects (or daughter languages). Unlike Greek, it has lost linguistic unity, all over its south-eastern provinces; but political unity by and large has held firm. The phonetic inexplicitness of its writing system has, to an extent, allowed it to ignore emergent differences between its standard core and those dialects. This same ambiguity has enabled it, in the last century, to switch its linguistic norm from classical wényán to Beijing báihuà without losing the allegiance of the whole set of Chinese-speaking communities. The logographic writing system, then, has enabled Chinese to escape the ‘first death’, without preventing numbers of its daughter languages from diverging.
Sanskrit, like Latin, has given rise to (or been closely associated with) a number of daughter languages; this marks the major common feature of its history and Latin’s, namely the breakdown of political unity over its speech area for a long time. As such Sanskrit shared what we have called the ‘first death’ of Latin. As in the case of Latin, this led to the daughter languages establishing themselves as independent literary languages for popular themes. But it long retained its role as high-level intellectual centre, and hence in some sense linguistic ideal, for these independent languages. Despite the impact of English from overseas, eliminating its high-level secular role, it has never been replaced as the focal religious vehicle for the majority of Indians.
The next tale in this history is the phenomenal spread of Latin’s daughter languages; to this we shall very soon pass. This, after all, is the real, continuing, story of the Latin speech community. And yet, in a way, Latin as a living language did find a new disguise.
In the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, western Europe had been enlightened by a new and more direct knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin, aided by the influx of Byzantine scholars after the fall of Constantinople and its empire. Westerners began for the first time in a thousand years to have a reading knowledge of Greek, and eagerly lapped up the associated stylistic doctrines of Atticism (see Chapter 6, ‘Mid-life crisis: Attempt at a new beginning’, p. 254). Perhaps by contact, perhaps because of the nature of self-consciously classical studies, many began to develop a corresponding linguistic snobbery about their Latin, wanting to go back to the most ancient sources. Only Cicero’s work would do. Not all humanists caught this bug: in particular Erasmus, a witty Dutch classicist writing in the early sixteenth century, wrote a Dialogus Ciceronianus to satirise the aspiration, envisioning a character called Nosoponus (’labouring under a disease’) exerting himself to work out which inflected forms of each verb were actually found in Cicero’s work, and which (more importantly) were not. For such a man, even his dreams were restricted to Cicero (’Nec aliud simulachrum in somnis occurrit praeterquam Ciceronis…’); the naive witness Hypologus comments that he looks more like a ghost than a man (’Larvae similior videtur quam homini’).
When this kind of devotion to the details of expression established itself as respectable, it became possible to see the style of expression as far more important than the content, and the knowledge of what had been said as far superior to the ability to innovate and strive for progress. So just as the highest aspiration for Greek scholars in the West was to read the texts (and perhaps write a pastiche—but only in classical style), now people came to think they were preserving the value of Latin if they became experts in the language and its extant early literature, for their own sake alone. The primary uses of a language, to think and feel, to express ideas and to communicate them, became purely subordinate to this ‘class
icism’.*
It would have been better if Latinists had accepted the resigned verdict of one of their favourite poets:
Soles occidere et redire possunt:
Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux
Nox est perpetua una dormienda.
Suns can set and can come back again:
For us when once the short light has set
There is one night perpetual to be slept.
Catullus
* See Chapter 13. The six are English, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, German and French. There was a seventh, Dutch, which holds position 21 in the population league. Their imperial careers are reviewed in Chapters 10, 11 and 12.
* Contrast Alcuin, propagating his new standard for Latin in the ninth century, and working in quite the opposite direction: for the important mission then was to put the intellectual world back in touch with itself, and its own ancient traditions.
* This backward-looking spirit is still familiar to me from an education in the classical stream of an English public school in the 1960s. It is expressed in a thousand prefaces to school textbooks. Consider this from Ainger and Wintle (1890, 17th impression 1963: iii): ‘Latin verse composition … is the proof and the flower of that scholarship which loves the old writers with an unselfish love, and delights to clothe modern thoughts and modern expressions in the dress of ancient metre and rhythm.’ Or Pym and Silver (1952), who state that a chapter ‘illustrates the continuing vitality of the Latin language in England during the last two hundred years’ when all it contains is epitaphs, a couple of parliamentary speeches (in English) which allude to Latin literature, a section of a papal encyclical, a poem (admittedly witty) on the fuel crisis of 1947, and a number of jokey prize compositions from schools and the University of Oxford. The book’s very title. Alive on Men’s Lips, is a highly ironic lie, since it is simply a translation of a phrase from the epitaph of Ennius, ’vivu’ per ora virŭm’, dead in the second century BC.
Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World Page 40
